How to get some cosmic perspective

The Seinfeld writers' room, the Overview Effect, and receiving our portion of the infinite

An illustration from chapter two of Don’t Call It Art

“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.”
—Bertrand Russell

Hey y’all,

In Judd Apatow’s Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy, Jerry Seinfeld explains why he pinned photos from the Hubble Space Telescope up on the wall in the Seinfeld writing room.

“It would calm me when I would start to think that what I was doing was important,” Seinfeld said. “You look at some pictures from the Hubble Telescope and you snap out of it.”

When Apatow said that sounded depressing, Seinfeld replied, “People always say it makes them feel insignificant, but I don’t find being insignificant depressing. I find it uplifting.”

In the trailer for Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction, I noticed a poster of the Milky Way with the caption “YOU ARE HERE” tacked to his wall. Stanton has a conversation with director David Lynch:

DAVID LYNCH: How would you describe yourself?

HARRY DEAN STANTON: There’s nothing. There is no self.

LYNCH: How would you like to be remembered?

STANTON: It doesn’t matter.

I find it significant that Stanton says this with a smile.

An index card I briefly hung in my studio

Years ago, when I posted the story about the Seinfeld writers’ room, I got an email from the spouse of a professional astronomer who said her husband gets through some work days by reminding himself that astronomy doesn’t matter.

“He will say, for example: ‘It’s just astronomy. We’re not saving lives here. It’s okay if we finish this tomorrow instead of today.’”

I loved that.

An image of Earth from the Artemis II mission, clipped out of the NYTimes

When the Artemis II mission was going on, I saw several jokes online, like, “Jeez, who would want to come back to this Earth?” I laughed at this one in particular:

But Koch herself is one of the many astronauts who have described “The Overview Effect”:

“The overview effect is when you’re looking through the cupola and you see the Earth as it exists with the whole universe in the background. You see the thin blue line of the atmosphere, and then when you’re on the dark side of the Earth, you actually see this very thin green line that shows you where the atmosphere is. What you realize is every single person that you know is sustained and inside of that green line and everything else outside of it is completely inhospitable. You don’t see borders, you don’t see religious lines, you don’t see political boundaries. All you see is Earth and you see that we are way more alike than we are different.”

Or, in the words of NASA, “To see Earth from space is to be forever changed by the view.”

A non-astronaut who’s experienced the overview effect is William Shatner, who at the age of 90 became the oldest living person to travel into space. In an excerpt from his memoir, Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder, the Star Trek leading man describes expecting to be absolutely thrilled by his trip and “the mystery of the universe.” 

But when I looked… into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold… all I saw was death.