There are two words that come into my mind from time to time, and around wave their long lanky limbs about wildly to draw my attention to themselves. Once one or both of these words have my attention they send my thinking off in a direction I’d rather not go, but do go. Those pestering words are Micro and Macro.
You can actually take college courses on Macro or Microeconomics. I, who have never successfully balanced a checkbook, never think about Microeconomics. Me discussing Macroeconomics is like being a one legged man in a butt kicking contest; it’s just a stupid idea. My mind is actually obsessed with the words Micro and Micro. Micro means small. Micro means you look at whatever you are looking at in maddening detail, that you obsess over minutia. A single strand of DNA is way too excessively big for a Micro thinking scientists. Micro scientists can easily spend a lifetime on a tiny gene, a little sliver of that DNA strand. Macro is the big view, the long view. Macro thinking looks at the whole system. Macro thinkers refuse to be thrown off track by some tiny little anomaly, they want the big picture, the gestalt (gestalt in this context means a symbolic configuration or pattern of elements so unified as a whole that its properties cannot be derived from a simple summation of its parts).
I obsess over my life in micro and my life in macro. I fixate over micro vs. macro living. I am consumed by micro vs. macro values. I consider whatever happens to be going in my life first in all its micro implications, and then I hold those same conclusions up beside its macro counterpart so I can see how things hold up.
It is like looking at life through a telescope. I look at my life through a telescope. I look first through the big end and see everything small, where even the closest objects look tiny. I look next through the small end and see everything in the macro.
To me, and maybe my wife and son, my life has some value, some significance. If I were to die today, at least two people would be upset. But in a hundred years, my life or my death means a little less than nothing. If you think of the worst thing that could possibly happen to you today, obviously you would be devastated, crushed by that horrible event, you would be left to group for something to hold on to, you would search for some moral compass to guide you or else you would not be able to go on with your life. Take that same event and view in the macro and those crushing, shattering, earth shaking events well may be left as historically interesting events, and more likely than not, unworthy of historical reflection.
Consider the assassination of President Kennedy, and President Garfield. Which is more significant to us, at this very moment? Most would say President Kennedy. I was in the 8th grade when the principal came on the PA system and informed the school that President Kennedy had been killed. Everything shut down. There was nothing on TV for three days but coverage of this single event. Today, that event that dominated every moment of every day for days, that event that turned an unpopular president into the most popular President, that event that may well have enabled President Johnson to pass Medicare and civil rights, and the direction and values of the United States turned on our national micro reaction to that event. Today, young people read about the assassination of Kennedy as a historical event. Often these students have teachers that were around when the assassination occurred, but it is more and more common that both the students and the teachers know the Kennedy assassination as a historical event. All of us (other than a few history buffs) take the assassination of James A. Garfield in the macro sense. We didn’t know Garfield. We may be affected by the assassination of Garfield, but if we are, we don’t realize it. Here we have the sudden, tragic murder of someone who well may have been the most powerful head of state on earth, and today , a mere 128 years later, that powerful man’s death means almost nothing to almost everyone. The death of a baker in Poughkeepsie, New York in July of 1881 is a million times less significant to us that what happened to Garfield.
The point is, that when you take the long view, when you stand back far enough, after enough time has passed the details drop away, and the significance of stuff that was vital, can become very, very insignificant.
This is what I do all the time with my own life. I obsess over the tiniest events in my day. I analyze my life in a minutia obsessive fanatical manner. I can journal for 6 pages over a bowel movement, I can write a 30 line poem about stubbing my toe. I get so caught up in my life, and trying to make sense of the seconds, that I miss the whole day. Then, I will, from time to time, step back, look at my life, and realize with a sinking certainty, that it just doesn’t matter; that I just don’t matter.
This micro/macro approach to my life has been both helpful, and astonishingly unhelpful. This thinking process that I do to make sense of my life, makes my life seem senseless, and senseless is not helpful if you have a tendency to be despondent.
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