Life

Thinking Big Thoughts

Life is way too short for thinking small thoughts. Work worries are small thoughts. Episodes of HGTV are small thoughts. Being depressed about what other people think of you – that’s a small thought. If you’re ever down, get into some science. If you’re ever in a place of losing perspective altogether, get into some science. 

In a universe of awesomeness, human brains are one of the coolest things happening. As far as we know, we are the only beings capable of understanding nature at our level – knowing things about physics, manipulating the world to serve us, understanding our own origins. As Carl Sagan says, we are the universe knowing itself. We are powerful beyond measure. We’ve even made machines for millennia that are better at doing lots of things that we are…and we’ve even made machines that in some ways are smarter than we are. 

And yet, for so many people, in the most privileged country in the world, our individual lives are spent trying to figure out how we can bang more hot chicks than our frat brothers, or how we can make our living space open concept, or moping about why the cute barista won’t call, or how many episodes of “90 Day Fiance” we can binge, or how to make more sales than the competition. The problems we spend our lives solving, or ruminating on, could be anything in the vast universe. Yet instead, they are so small. We could be figuring out how to send spaceships to the center of the galaxy. Instead we’re figuring out how to whip up our white nationalist base to attack the Capitol. 

We are better than this. Individual humans can do better. As a country, we can do better. As a species, we can do better. 

There is no room for depression, addiction, and suicide in this big world. There’s too much to figure out. There’s too much to appreciate about all the crazy sh!t we’ve figured out. There are too many tall trees to marvel at, and unlikely animals, and weird inventions to be astounded by. If we are not constantly impressed, we’re focused on the wrong things. 

Anybody can be captured by the wrong things for a moment. When I catch myself (and often I’m pretty far down the road of self-pity and anxiety by the time I do), I try to bring myself back to wonderstruck appreciation and gratitude as quickly as possible. I put on a soaring song and get out under some trees. I try to sink deep into the crazy miracle of taking one perfect breath after another. I gaze into my cat’s eyes and feel the joyful weirdness of different animal species loving each other. 

What do you do to help regain perspective?

One thought on “Thinking Big Thoughts

  1. Thanks for this great piece. It often strikes me how much of my attention is spent on “small” thoughts.

    It’s especially obvious when I reflect on the passage of years and how “small” most of my daily concerns seem from today’s perspective. Things that I focused on most have amounted to very little, and conversely things that I didn’t notice loom large in my mind now. Since I don’t have much insight into what to pay attention to next, I don’t have anything useful to say about it here, though, so it’s kinda a small thought :p

    One thing I noticed reading this is how much our culture does encourage Small Thoughts in a million small ways. As some examples:
    – We place a lot of value on convenience (ironically so we can focus on the Bigger Things), but this also means we pay no attention to the thing we just made “convenient” and we cultivate impatience that gets in our way when we try to think those Big Thoughts.
    – One (huge) discipline in the attention economy is capturing attention. This happens in the short term in trying to, for example, stand out from the endless news crawl. In the longer term, this manifests as making “sticky” ideas and giving users irresistable reasons to return or reshare or repeat the content. This level of captured attention is a big obstacle to thinking any bigger thoughts and a push toward thinking many small thoughts instead.
    – The required level of concision in headlines, tweets, hashtags, and everything like that. This is just literally Small Thinking.

    All of these steer me toward very small thoughts. Since this kind of content is placed front and center, there is A LOT of pressure toward smallness. Movies like The Social Dilemma or books like The Shallows (and MANY others) do a good job showing how real and effective these tools are on me and everyone else.

    To answer you question of how I help to regain perspective, meditation has slightly helped me see how constantly I’m distracted by Small Thoughts. Also, I do fine that disconnecting from the attention economy helps, to the small degree that I do that.

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