What Astronauts and Philosophers Know About Happiness

Watch the video.

American astronaut Gene Cernan said that his first extraterrestrial view of earth, floating in the dark void of space, was “one of the deepest, most emotional experiences I have ever had.”

NASA coined the term, “Overview Effect,” to describe what Cernan and so many other astronauts kept reporting — gaining a broader, grounded perspective on personal, political, and scientific matters when observing Earth from space, as well as emotional peace.  

Researchers compare it to “prayer, meditation, and religious rituals as well as the use of psychedelic drugs.”

But wise men and women have utilized this technique for self-improvement for millennia. From the Stoic perspective, it’s usually called, “The View From Above.”

In his journal, the emperor Marcus Aurelius paraphrases Plato and tells himself to, “look on all things earthly as though from some point far above, upon herds, armies, and agriculture, marriages and divorces, births and deaths, the clamor of law courts, deserted wastes, peoples of every kind, festivals, lamentations, and markets, this intermixture of everything and ordered combination of opposites.”

The heirs of Socrates realized that we didn’t actually have to be in space — or up on a mountain or in an airplane — to find peace. We can “zoom out” our minds to view any situation from a different angle, which settles our emotions by putting our lives in perspective and making our problems seem small.