Seeing the Bigger Picture

A Mindful Miscellany, #19

Mindful: Attentive, Aware, Conscious, Thoughtful, Alert.
Miscellany: A collection of various items, parts, or ingredients, especially one composed of diverse literary works.

Welcome to A Mindful Miscellany, dedicated to finding Signal in the Information Apocalypse.

Image Credit: Midjourney

I have not been to space (yet). But there is this phenomenon talked about— The Overview Effect, described in this clip:

This is William Shatner, on his experience in space:

“Last year, I had a life-changing experience at 90 years old. I went to space, after decades of playing an iconic science-fiction character who was exploring the universe.

I thought I would experience a deep connection with the immensity around us, a deep call for endless exploration.

I was absolutely wrong. The strongest feeling, that dominated everything else by far, was the deepest grief that I had ever experienced.

I understood, in the clearest possible way, that we were living on a tiny oasis of life, surrounded by an immensity of death. I didn't see infinite possibilities of worlds to explore, of adventures to have, or living creatures to connect with.

I saw the deepest darkness I could have ever imagined, contrasting so starkly with the welcoming warmth of our nurturing home planet.

This was an immensely powerful awakening for me. It filled me with sadness. I realized that we had spent decades, if not centuries, being obsessed with looking away, with looking outside.

I did my share in popularizing the idea that space was the final frontier. But I had to get to space to understand that Earth is and will stay our only home. And that we have been ravaging it, relentlessly, making it uninhabitable.”

And the Ancients knew this well. Here’s Marcus Aurelius in Meditations:

“This is a fine saying of Plato: That he who is discoursing about men should look also at earthly things as if he viewed them from some higher place; should look at them in their assemblies, armies, agricultural labours, marriages, treaties, births, deaths, noise of the courts of justice, desert places, various nations of barbarians, feasts, lamentations, markets, a mixture of all things and an orderly combination of contraries.”

Now, knowing that you should take a view from above and actually taking it are two different things. This is something that falls into the “simple, but not easy” category.

I love this object that Geoff Marlow uses to illustrate the concept. From different directions, it can be alternately viewed as a square, a triangle, and a circle. His Substack is devoted to helping people and organizations adapt to the complex world we find ourselves in today. This is how he phrases what he calls a “2D3D” mindset:

“An individual with a 2D3D mindset operates in line with a fundamental, but frequently overlooked truth about human perception, namely that none of us ever sees the whole picture in any situation.

We each come at things from our own particular angle, bringing our unique, individual, diverse, but inevitably partial perspective to situations.

It’s from these diverse perspectives that the innovation, agility, and adaptiveness characteristic of future-fit organisations emerge, enabling them to thrive in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world.

Widespread adoption of 2D3D mindsets enables sense making, decision making & action taking to become more joined-up, iterated, embedded and distributed throughout an organisation.”

So, this concept is important on several levels. One, it’s a sense-making exercise which allows us to reframe and recontextualize a given situation or event— to pull our heads out of the tactical, into the strategic. It helps us as individuals.

At the group or organizational level, it’s essential to take a wider frame, in order to meet the complexity of the world and make the right decisions. None of us are as smart as all of us, as the saying goes. This takes coming into correspondence and Attunement with one another in order to avoid Groupthink and the Abilene Paradox.

But the final and most important point is that this planet is our Home. We’re not going to be able to put our heads in the sand like these billionaires want to and wait out the Apocalypse. We’re not going to find solace in the Rapture, or the Singularity, or Colonizing Mars, or Virtual Reality, a point that Jamie Wheal makes in Recapture the Rapture.

The two primary reactions to the Metacrisis/Polycrisis tend to be either blithe confidence in our ability to innovate out of the situation— “It’ll buff out”¹, or a fatalistic resignation— “We’re screwed, we can’t do anything.” But there is a third option. We have to roll our sleeves up and get to work. We have to make the “post-tragic” turn— The transition from naive optimism, to cynical nihilism, to a mature, pragmatic optimism.²

I’m not saying go chain yourself to a tree — just get in where you fit in with your time and talents. In the triad of the Market, State, and Commons, the Commons has shrunk in recent decades— and here I mean it to be not just shared natural areas of the planet, but the collective feeling of community and involvement with one another. Human-to-human interaction that is not Market or State based. We have to rebuild it if we want to flourish in the future. That means being civic-minded— volunteer for a blood drive, do something for your church, teach and mentor where you have subject matter expertise. It won’t be perfect— it will be a muddle. But that’s ok. We just have to put our shoulders to the wheel.

1. When I use this expression, it fills my wife with incandescent rage.

2. Which also maps onto Modernism, Postmodernism, and Metamodernism respectively.