A Stoic practice
What is the Stoic view from above?
The view from above is the Stoic practice of pulling back until you see your situation at its real size — your city, then the earth, then the sweep of people who have lived and died. It works by correcting proportion. Most distress depends on a thing looking larger than it is.
Where it comes from
Marcus Aurelius returns to the move repeatedly in the Meditations, instructing himself to look down from above on the countless herds of men and their countless solemnities, and the infinitely varied voyagings in storms and calms. He is not consoling himself with insignificance; he is restoring scale.
How to do it
- 01Start where you are, with the thing that is bothering you. Do not skip this — the practice is a comparison, and it needs both terms.
- 02Widen: the building, the city, the country, the earth from a distance.
- 03Widen in time as well as space: everyone who has stood where you are, with a version of this problem, and is gone.
- 04Come back. The problem is still there and still yours. It is now the size it actually is.
How it goes wrong
Used carelessly this becomes nihilism — nothing matters, we are specks. That is not the Stoic conclusion. Scale corrects the falsely large; it does not erase the genuinely important, which stands out more clearly once the trivial has shrunk.
The idea behind it
Memento mori is Latin for “remember you will die”: the Stoic practice of keeping your own death in view so that you actually live the time you have. It is not morbid. It shrinks the trivial back to its real size and ends the postponement of the life you mean to start.
What does memento mori mean?The book on it: The Time You Have