Originally, I was going to talk about the shit going down in the Ukraine today, but I am too upset.

Sufficeth to say, I am super fucking angry at Putin and Russia right now. IMPERIALISM IS SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD.

Instead of getting all worked up about that, I will instead talk about the perils of the magnifying glass and the importance of a solid grounding in proportion and perspective.

See, all us naked beach apes have a magnifying glass in our cognitive toolkit. It is a very important tool as it lets us focus down on small details and deal with them. Without it, we would stumble around like someone trying to walk down a busy urban street while looking through two telescopes.

But as vital a tool as it is, it can also lead to our ruination because it is all too easy to focus in tightly on some small detail then forget we used the magnifying glass at all.

Thus, the small seems big, we lose all sense of perspective, and we live in fear (or awe) of things that, in reality, are smaller than an ant’s appetite.

We do this for various reasons. One of the main ones is that by focusing strongly on something we know, deep down, is not all that big a deal, we push everything else out of our vision and make our worlds smaller and more manageable, without the always stressful and perilous high level cognitive task of maintaining perspective.

The big picture, after all, contains many very scary and overwhelming things like our own mortality, the fact that we are one drop of humanity in a sea of seven billion, the basic arbitrary and unfeeling nature of the universe, and so forth.

All of those are enormous challenges with many complexities, variables, and terrifying possibilities (what if I got sick right now? Who would take care of things? What would happen to my children?) and so it is far easier and a good deal more soothing to focus on something small and manageable and let that fill your mind and become your world.

And that works great… in the short term. But in the long term, you forget that you are just pretending that the little picture is the real world, and that tiny world takes over your mind.

And what once seemed small and manageable suddenly looms as large and frightening as the real world did, with the added disadvantage that, because the small world is just a tiny section of the large, it actually fluctuates and changes wildly compared to the big world, and for reasons that you cannot comprehend from your narrow perspective.

Imagine that person walking around with telescopes tied to their eyes. The slightest motion of their heads, and what they are seeing will veer wildly over a huge arc of vision. Their only chance to make sense of their fixed perspective would be to stay as absolutely still as they possibly can.

And that is what a lot of people end up doing. They live motionless lives of stasis and immobility purely because they have those telescopes over their eyes and everything changes too fast when they move. If they could just remember that those telescopes are there, they could just reach up and take them off and go back to the real world again.

But they signed a deal with the Devil when they forgot about their self-induced visual impairment. They have lost their ability to switch perspectives to whichever one suits the moment. And most importantly, they have lost the ability to maintain a three dimensional view of the world, one informed by many points of view but fixed to none.

This people end up dominated by fears which seem enormous only because the mind has focused on them and which therefore block the rest of the frame, and rob us of the cues to the true size of what we are seeing.

Thus, the elephant is menaced by the ant, and the greatest of minds are trapped by the smallest of pitfalls.

The only cure is perspective. Look around at the wider world with open and innocent eyes. Give up all your filters. Filters lie. Try to see the world through the eyes of a child. Learn to ask yourself, “But how much does this matter, really?”

Also remember that this works in reverse as well. A flip of the telescope and very important things can be made to seem very small, and thus ease your fears. A lot of potentially very big and scary tigers can be seen as tiny frisky kittens when you throw perspective out of the window.

Thus, you get the person who plays World of Warcraft all the time and takes the game incredibly seriously, learning enormous amounts of its lore and arcana and devoting their entire lives to it, while completely forgetting about things like rent, bills, and personal hygiene.

Because really, what are the petty mundane concerns of the mortal realm compared to the power and glory of the Horde?

But like it or not, you remain in the real world with its limits and restrictions and sadness no matter how hard you work at disappearing into the world of fantasy and the imagination.

Reality always wins.

Therefore, maintain perspective. Use that excellent mind to serve your real world purposes. Take the skills you use to plan a raid, and plan your life.

Life is not a game, but it does have rules, and so treating it as a game can be just what the doctor ordered to bridge the gap between the safe world of make believe and the unsafe world of larger reality.

Especially if you play to win. That will keep you focused on the real picture and not on some picture you drew in your head and pasted it over the lens of your mind.

The real world has real problems, true. But it also has the only real solutions.

And to recap, Vlad Putin, GRR.