Massimo Pigliucci

You may or may not succeed.

But that's okay because there is no guarantee in life ever.

I mean, no philosophy or no attitude can give you a guarantee of succeeding.

It's not a thing.

The important part is to regain control of your agency.

So I would say, for instance, in the particular case of climate change and political turmoil, it's good to be informed, but it's not good to be obsessively following the news or doom-scrolling and all that sort of stuff because that simply depresses you and it really doesn't do anything helpful.

So maintain a certain broad level of awareness

You know, be aware of what's going on, but spend most of your time doing things that actually make a difference rather than reading every article that comes your way or responding to every social media post that you happen to see.

Yeah, the view from above is a standard stoic technique, which is actually also useful in cognitive behavioral therapy, and there is pretty good modern evidence that it actually works.

You can do it in a number of ways, but essentially it's about training yourself to zoom out from the specifics of the moment.

One way to do it is a visual exercise, so you find a…

a quiet moment in place in your house, you close your eyes, and then you imagine yourself zooming out from that scene, looking at yourself from above and then looking at your house and then looking at your city and then going further and further out.

What is the point of these exercises?

It's to remind yourself that you're actually part of a much, much broader campus.

that there is a huge universe, both in space and time, and that therefore, whatever things happen to bother you in the moment, they're really tiny compared to the cosmic perspective.

Now, the mistake there...

is to then think, oh, so they're not important.

They are important to you at your scale.

The view from above is just a way to remind you that your scale is not the only one and that there are other meaningful scales at which problems will look very differently.

So the idea is to relax about it and then zoom back in