#1 ·
I was sitting on my back porch last night, just staring up at the sky, and I had this sudden, nagging realization that I felt like I was failing at something. It sounds ridiculous, I know. I’m just a guy sitting in a lawn chair, but there was this intense sense of "Oh, I should be doing more with this."
We live in this era where every celestial event, every seasonal shift, every tiny flicker of natural beauty is treated like a mandatory cultural deadline. You scroll through your feed and suddenly everyone is an amateur astronomer, a professional photographer, or a dedicated stargazer. There’s this unspoken rule that if something "special" is happening in the atmosphere, you have to be out there, ideally with a tripod and a thermos of expensive coffee, witnessing it in its full glory. If you don't, did it even happen? Did you miss out on some fundamental human experience?
I find myself struggling with this "experience inflation." It feels like the threshold for what constitutes a "moment" has been pushed so high that we’re constantly exhausted trying to keep up. It used to be that a bright moon or a particularly colorful sunset was just... a nice thing to see while you were walking the dog or driving home. It was a quiet, private communion with the world. Now, it feels like these events are scheduled appointments. There’s a pressure to be "present," which, ironically, often makes us feel less present because we’re too busy worrying about whether we’re appreciating the moment "correctly."
I think about my grandfather. He lived in a rural part of the state, and he didn't care about the names of the lunar cycles or the specific timing of the equinoxes. He just knew when the light changed and when the air felt different. There was no performance to it. He wasn't checking a notification to see if it was time to look up; he just looked up when he felt like it. There was a certain dignity in that kind of unhurried observation.
Lately, I feel like we’ve traded that quiet observation for a kind of frantic consumption. We consume the sky. We consume the seasons. We consume the weather. We’ve turned the natural world into a series of "events" to be checked off a list. I worry that by turning everything into a spectacle, we’re actually losing our ability to just *be* in the world. We’re so focused on the "event" that we miss the actual reality of the thing itself. We’re looking for the peak moment, the most dramatic angle, the perfect lighting, rather than just existing under the same sky as everyone else.
I’ve also noticed a weird psychological component to this. There’s a certain FOMO (fear of missing out) that applies to things that shouldn't even be subject to FOMO. How can you miss out on the moon? It’s always there. But the *idea* of the moon—the specific, curated version of the moon that everyone is talking about right now—that’s what we’re afraid of missing. We’re afraid of being left out of the collective conversation.
I want to go back to a place where nature is just the background of our lives, not the main event we have to prepare for. I want to be able to see something beautiful and just say, "That's nice," and then go back to washing the dishes, without feeling like I missed a spiritual milestone or a social requirement.
Does anyone else feel this weird obligation to "witness" certain natural phenomena, or am I just overthinking a quiet night under the stars?
We live in this era where every celestial event, every seasonal shift, every tiny flicker of natural beauty is treated like a mandatory cultural deadline. You scroll through your feed and suddenly everyone is an amateur astronomer, a professional photographer, or a dedicated stargazer. There’s this unspoken rule that if something "special" is happening in the atmosphere, you have to be out there, ideally with a tripod and a thermos of expensive coffee, witnessing it in its full glory. If you don't, did it even happen? Did you miss out on some fundamental human experience?
I find myself struggling with this "experience inflation." It feels like the threshold for what constitutes a "moment" has been pushed so high that we’re constantly exhausted trying to keep up. It used to be that a bright moon or a particularly colorful sunset was just... a nice thing to see while you were walking the dog or driving home. It was a quiet, private communion with the world. Now, it feels like these events are scheduled appointments. There’s a pressure to be "present," which, ironically, often makes us feel less present because we’re too busy worrying about whether we’re appreciating the moment "correctly."
I think about my grandfather. He lived in a rural part of the state, and he didn't care about the names of the lunar cycles or the specific timing of the equinoxes. He just knew when the light changed and when the air felt different. There was no performance to it. He wasn't checking a notification to see if it was time to look up; he just looked up when he felt like it. There was a certain dignity in that kind of unhurried observation.
Lately, I feel like we’ve traded that quiet observation for a kind of frantic consumption. We consume the sky. We consume the seasons. We consume the weather. We’ve turned the natural world into a series of "events" to be checked off a list. I worry that by turning everything into a spectacle, we’re actually losing our ability to just *be* in the world. We’re so focused on the "event" that we miss the actual reality of the thing itself. We’re looking for the peak moment, the most dramatic angle, the perfect lighting, rather than just existing under the same sky as everyone else.
I’ve also noticed a weird psychological component to this. There’s a certain FOMO (fear of missing out) that applies to things that shouldn't even be subject to FOMO. How can you miss out on the moon? It’s always there. But the *idea* of the moon—the specific, curated version of the moon that everyone is talking about right now—that’s what we’re afraid of missing. We’re afraid of being left out of the collective conversation.
I want to go back to a place where nature is just the background of our lives, not the main event we have to prepare for. I want to be able to see something beautiful and just say, "That's nice," and then go back to washing the dishes, without feeling like I missed a spiritual milestone or a social requirement.
Does anyone else feel this weird obligation to "witness" certain natural phenomena, or am I just overthinking a quiet night under the stars?