How beautifully Plato put it. Whenever you want to talk about people, it’s best to take a bird’s-eye view and see everything all at once—of gatherings, armies, farms, weddings and divorces, births and deaths, noisy courtrooms or silent spaces, every foreign people, holidays, memorials, markets—all blended together and arranged in a pairing of opposites.
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 7.48
There is a beautiful dialogue called “Icaromenippus, an Aerial Expedition” by the poet Lucian in which the narrator is given the ability to fly and sees the world from above. Turning his eyes earthward, he sees how comically small even the richest people, the biggest estates, and entire empires look from above. All their battles and concerns were made petty in perspective.
In ancient times, this exercise was only theoretical—the highest anyone could get was the top of a mountain or a building a few stories tall. But as technology has progressed, humans have been able to actually take that bird’s-eye view—and greater.
Edgar Mitchell, an astronaut, was one of the first people to see the earth from outer space. As he later recounted:
“In outer space you develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.'”
Many a problem can be solved with the perspective of Plato’s view. Use it.
* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman