Take a View from Above!

Why Marcus Aurelius Might Tell You to do a Digital Detox

Take a view from above — look at the thousands of flocks and herds, the thousands of human ceremonies, every sort of voyage in storm or calm, the range of creation, combination, and extinction. Consider too the lives once lived by others long before you, the lives that will be lived after you, the lives lived now among foreign tribes; and how many have never even heard your name, how many will soon forget it, how many may praise you now but quickly turn to blame. Reflect that neither memory nor fame, nor anything else at all, has any importance worth thinking of. — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 9.28

Imagine you are looking out onto the Earth from above. Our planet — blue and brown — shrouded by clouds. No humans visible — just the Earth from afar. Perhaps at some point your mind will wander back to its inhabitants. The human comedy has been going on for thousands of years, and will likely come to an end. You are out of the picture — just as you were before your birth and just as you will be after your death.

In A Religion of One’s Own, the author Thomas Moore quotes astronaut Edgar Mitchell on his experience seeing the Earth from above on the Apollo 14 mission: “The sensation was altogether foreign. Somehow I felt tuned into something much larger than myself, something much larger than the…