Changing perspective
Lately, as civilisation has proceeded on its journey to hell in a handcart, I have found myself imagining a rocky coastline somewhere: a collection of giant boulders, standing impassive amid the crashing waves of a turbulent sea. I am not sure where this shore is, exactly, except that it is miles from any human habitation; I also know that it’s been there for millions of years, and will persist for countless more. There is something profoundly calming about considering the entire world from the perspective of these stones. Pandemics do not perturb them; politics certainly don’t. Along with the daily irritations and anxieties of my small life are so completely irrelevant, out of their vantage-point, as to make it briefly amusing I might ever have believed such things mattered in any way. All through every day I’ve ever spent mired in anger or anxiety or fear, these boulders have been there: immovable, indifferent, at peace with the condition of the universe.
My daydreams stand at a long tradition of using a shift in perspective as a means of attaining a higher feeling of equanimity. The message crystallised in the title of Richard Carlson’s classic self-help publication — Do not Sweat the Small Stuff… And it’s All Small Stuff — has its origins in the writings of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, who informed”adopting the whole universe on your perspective and comprehending all life threatening and imagining the swiftness of change in every specific, seeing how short is the passage from birth to dissolution.” (You can make this more vibrant than Marcus ever could by way of Google Earth, which lets you zoom in only seconds from the neighborhood outside into deep space) For that matter, human civilisation, as commonly described, has only existed for about 0.0001% of the history of Earth.
And calmness is not the only benefit of such a shift in outlook. There is reason to believe we’re also more imaginative when jolted from our regular standpoint, that solutions to our problems often emerge more easily when we could arouse the feeling the comedian George Carlin called”vuja dé”, a sense of the unfamiliar in the familiar. In 2014, the direction scholar Jennifer Mueller and her colleagues revealed that individuals rate thoughts as more creative when they’re told that they originated in some faraway place, instead of close to home. (Especially, she asked people about a new type of running shoe which used nanotechnology to adapt itself to the wearer’s foot: participants thought that sounded ingenious — but only as long as they thought it was invented quite a distance away.) A possible explanation is that if
I guess that is why, like most folks, I get my best ideas when I am travelling — because it’s simpler because setting to find some psychological distance on my job challenges and personal issues, helping me differentiate what really matters from what does not. Journalling has a related impact I have found particularly useful in recent months, even when traveling has not been simple: committing a problem to paper obliges you to embrace a thirdperson perspective on it. Occasionally, what emerges is a specific solution I had not previously considered. But more frequently, it’s just that the issue stops feeling like one. Their biggest troubles were not so much solved as outgrown. “What, on a lower level, had led to the wildest struggles and also to panicky outbursts of emotion,” he wrote, now appeared”like a storm at the valley seen from a high mountain-top. This doesn’t signify that the thunderstorm is robbed of its reality, but instead of being in it, one is now above it.”
What’s occurring in such minutes is really a relaxing of what psychologists call the”egocentricity bias”, our natural tendency to see ourselves, and our self-focused concerns, as having an outsized importance in the world. (The bias is not restricted to narcissists and megalomaniacs, by the way; actually acute shyness is often a result of assuming that others are paying you far more attention than they are.) Mired at the egocentricity prejudice, I am likely to flinch from difficult conversations, or avoid risks in my job which may end in embarrassing failure, because the wound into my ego seems intolerable. The less the bias controls me, the easier it is to think about different answers to this question of what really matters. The most extreme example of this reordering of priorities is that the so-called”overview result”, experienced by astronauts when they celebrate the earth in space — a tiny, fragile ball of existence, suspended in nothingness,”a dazzling gem in the black velvet sky,” from the words of Buzz Aldrin. From such a standpoint, national boundaries look clearly unreal, and warfare a self-evident action of self-harm.
Probably the most surprising thing about all these reminders of how little our parochial concerns truly matter, however, is that they needn’t result in passivity or nihilism. They can activate a larger sense of meaning, and a feeling of empowerment. In his book Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World, the philosopher Iddo Landau provides some clues as to why. A lot of individuals unthinkingly go throughout life, he asserts, with the premise that a human lifetime, in order to be meaningful, must count from the cosmic scheme of things: that you must”put a dent in the universe”, to quote Steve Jobs, also if you can’t, because your life-situation does not allow it, that a meaningful life isn’t an alternative for you. Virtually nobody will be a Michelangelo or a Shakespeare. And if we are talking on a really cosmic scale, they won’t have made a dent in the world.
To grasp the inevitable fact of your cosmic importance would be to realise that you’d been chasing a standard of significance you never had a hope of attaining. And as soon as you set down that hopeless burden, you’re free to consider a different standard. Imagine if it qualified as significant to create the art, or build the organisation or household, of which you’re capable, even if it merely brought wellbeing or pleasure to some of your contemporaries? That imaginary rocky coastline was there long before you got here; it’ll be there long after you’re gone. That’s a good reason not to invest your everyday worries with too much importance. But it’s also a motive to pursue your wildest ambitions, take risks, and throw yourself into life, precisely because the stakes are not that high — because you know, in the outset, at a profound and rather literal sense, that if you fail it won’t be the end of the world.