Dear Reader, Love Tony Setley

Dear Reader,

I wanted to write a book that would let us be honest about something we usually try to soften: most of what we do will eventually be forgotten. That sounds like a discouraging place to begin. But I think a good deal of our discouragement comes from trying to avoid it. We keep asking what we’ll leave behind, whether we’ve made enough of a difference, and whether our lives will amount to something.

In The Relative Unimportance of It All: And Why Everything Matters Anyway, I ask whether we’ve accepted the wrong requirement. Why should a life have to leave a permanent mark before we can recognize its value?

Think about something you’ve enjoyed that had no lasting result. A conversation. A meal. An afternoon when you weren’t trying to accomplish very much. You probably didn’t need anyone to explain its value while you were experiencing it. Yet when we look back over our lives, we often leave those things out of the accounting.

I wanted to take them seriously.

I’m not offering a way to become perfectly content. I still think goals are worth pursuing, and some circumstances need changing. I’m asking whether we can do those things without treating the life we have now as insufficient.

My hope is that you finish the book feeling a little less compelled to measure yourself and a little more interested in what’s around you. There is quite a lot there, even on an unremarkable day.

The Rev. Tony Setley is a Lutheran pastor, author, chaplain, football coach, and public philosopher. His professional ministry has included congregational, military, campus, and federal law-enforcement chaplaincy. He holds degrees from Lebanon Valley College and the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg. He is currently pursuing a Doctor of Ministry degree with a focus on preparing chaplains to help those dealing with moral injury. His writing explores the intersection of philosophy, theology, and ordinary human experience. He lives in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, with his wife and son.

Tony’s latest book is The Relative Unimportance of It All: And Why Everything Matters Anyway.

Connect with him on social media at:

╰┈➤ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TonySetley

╰┈➤ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tonysetley/

The Relative Unimportance of It All: and Why Everything Matters Anyway begins with an unsettling observation: given enough time, nearly everything human beings consider important will disappear. Fame fades, accomplishments are forgotten, institutions collapse, and even the most influential people eventually become little more than names—or vanish from memory altogether. Rather than resisting that reality with promises of legacy or permanence, the book takes it seriously. It argues that the mistake of nihilism is not recognizing that everything is temporary, but assuming that something must last forever in order to have mattered while it existed.

From there, the book shifts the question of meaning away from historical importance and toward lived experience. Every human being encounters life from within a present moment, whether emperor or laborer, celebrity or stranger. That equality of experience becomes the foundation for an ethic of “attentive goodness”: taking seriously the reality of the people and circumstances directly before us. The argument is applied to ordinary life, family, work, pleasure, suffering, loss, ambition, and attention. It does not claim that every action has equal consequences or that every moral choice is equivalent; rather, it distinguishes between the equal reality of persons and the very real differences in need, responsibility, harm, and consequence.

Ultimately, the book embraces the paradox contained in its title: from the perspective of vast stretches of time, very little about our lives may be important, and yet that does not make the lives being lived now meaningless. We do not need to become historically significant before the present deserves our attention. We can love, work, create, strive, enjoy, grieve, and act with goodness precisely because these experiences are real while they occur.

The Relative Unimportance of It All: And Why Everything Matters Anyway is available at Amazon.

╰┈➤Book Details 

✦ Title: The Relative Unimportance of It All: And Why Everything Matters Anyway
✦ Author: Tony Setley
✦ Genre: Philosophy
✦ Sub-genre: Contemporary Philosophy
✦ Language: English
✦ Pages: Paperback 250, Digital 151
✦ Paperback ISBN: 979-8192127988
✦ Publisher: Independent
✦ Publication Date: August 11, 2026
✦ Price: Hardcover $19.86, Paperback $12.42, Kindle $4.99, Audiobook FREE with Membership Trial, Kindle FREE with Kindle Unlimited