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@ElleGray Hang on, are you the pilot?

@ElleGray As Douglas Adams famously wrote with respect to the Total Perspective Vortex: "If life is going to exist in a universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion."

@ElleGray "think of the big picture" I explode from nothingness in an eruption of raw light, distorting and defining the vast fluctuating spacetime around me. Immeasurable aeons pass as the forces of my birth cool and condense into uncountable trillions of spiralling galaxies, each home to trillions of stars burning through glorious lives as the slow triumph of entropy smooths all that is into a meaningless low-infrared haze before collapsing into a final singularity. Fuck your spreadsheet.

@ElleGray "In the long term, we are all dead."

@ElleGray go for the galactic perspective and space out!

@ElleGray

(thinks of the big picture)
...
(stands up and disappears into the forest)

@ElleGray

I frequently have a somewhat similar thought.

@ElleGray Sound doesn’t travel the near vacuum of #space so you’re within your rights to walk off as if he’s not speaking.

@ElleGray "Think of the big picture"

"Like how, we're just one planet orbiting an average yellow star that's just one of several hundred billion stars in the galaxy, which, in turn, is just one of a trillion galaxies in the observable universe and how nothing that happens here, now, today, in this room, that you deem to be so important, will actually have any impact on the 'big picture' of the universe at all?"

This is just one reason why I quit the corporate world and now work freelance.

@ElleGray

"You thinking of the big picture?"

"Always have been."

@ElleGray

@ElleGray I like to think of the 1963 film "X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes", where in the end he sees the whole universe and, unable to stand it, plucks out his own eyes. THAT'S WHAT I THINK, ELLE'S BOSS.

@ElleGray

My boss: "Well let's think of the long term ramifications"
Me: "*imagines heat death"... Guess I'll go to lunch, then."

@ElleGray

Of course, that is solid leadership advice...

Jamie

@ElleGray As with many things, Calvin and Hobbes nailed it 30 years ago. https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/06/02

@iain_bancarz @ElleGray

Like someone said, in a memorable display of black humour: in the long run, we are all dead.

Human nature hasn't changed in 30 years. Or in ~2,500–hence Euripides' theatre plays remain as poignant and relevant today as they were when premiered in the theatre of Dionysus in Athens. Calvin and Hobbes have that atemporal nature, yet the cartoons are deeply framed within the decadent suburban lifestyle of the 80's and 90's in the USA, just like Euripides are framed in Classical Greece.

@ElleGray That got me to think of the "Galaxy Song" from Monty Python. ;-)

@ElleGray I have a postcard of Earth from space on my cube wall for exactly this reason. If I get too stressed or upset about work, I look at it and shrug. It helps me keep things in perspective when things are crazy busy.

@ElleGray for me it is more like "you got paid to do this, I am not here to clean up after you fucked up". Because this sentence comes up every fucking time when they fuck it up.
Also I think how cool it is that I am made of supernova going boom and I am like, yeah, sure, this is cool, but what about that project you fucked it up.

@ElleGray what?

@ElleGray
"Thank you for reminding me to broaden my perspective. We are insignificant specks, fragile and impermanent as a whisper, trapped on a mote of dust suspended in a single ray of light. Humanity's greatest accomplishments, most benevolent acts, and our deepest, darkest evil are insignificant against the backdrop of the cosmos and will be forgotten, forever lost to uncaring, unfeeling time.

I'm going to go home and take a nap."

@ElleGray I really love this.

I remember one of the early astronauts (Buzz? I have tried to find the quote numerous times but can't) saying in an interview something like "I wish I could take every politician up there, and grab them by the neck and make them look at it all. 'See, you bastards? Do you see it?'"

@ElleGray "think of the every-so-slightly just-a-tiny-bit larger but really not much different picture, elle!"

@ElleGray https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA Yeah I realize most of time will be black holes orbiting black holes in darkness as entropy breaks down the atomic forces and then I end up just going to play Skyrim or w/e.

@ElleGray

"OK. In a billion years, give or take, the sun will swell into a red giant and devour Earth. So it really doesn't matter if this project gets pushed back by a month or even a year."

"That's too big a picture, elle."

@ElleGray And then you fire the giant space laz0r at that fragile blue dot.

@ElleGray this!