Key takeaways
A wider perspective can help us respond to anger without letting the grievance consume everything else.
Cosmic scale doesn’t diminish human suffering. Its usefulness lies in reminding us how much exists beyond our immediate view, including the person we’re angry with.
Kindness can include disagreement, boundaries, and accountability. A pause gives us a chance to choose how we pursue them.
An opponent barrels toward me in a semifinal soccer match. I size him up, shift into position, and prepare myself for the one attempt I’ll have on the ball.
He blows right past me. He scores without effort.
This is the second time this has happened in this game, and it’ll be the last. We’ll go on to lose 3–1.
Back on the sideline—I sub myself out immediately after surrendering the goal—the team captain has some choice words. Frustrated with myself as much as with a seemingly contradictory game plan, I fire off whatever comeback I can manage between gulps for air, ending with something to the effect of, “Pick a [expletive] lane.”
Not a great moment, no, even with my heart pumping at 180 beats per minute.
I look back on this exchange with disappointment. There’s an absurdity to it, really, when one considers the stakes. Yes, it was our shot at a league championship, but it was also a Wednesday-night recreational league in the lowest competitive tier the facility offers. Ours was one of three games happening across as many fields. Outside the building, there might as well have been no games at all.
None of this is to mention what might have been happening a few blocks away, across Lake Michigan, on the International Space Station, or somewhere beyond the Kuiper Belt, where Voyager 1 is still hurtling through interstellar space.1
Perspective: it really puts things in, uh, perspective.
Anger Makes the World Small
To be clear, I wasn’t thinking about Voyager 1 on the sideline that night.
I was thinking about the goal, what I’d done wrong, what the captain had said, and how I’d disappointed my teammates. I was thinking about the game plan. I was thinking about the score. Most of all, I was thinking about myself.
Anger really has a knack for shrinking the world.
The stranger who cuts us off in traffic becomes, for the next several miles, simply the person who cut us off. The colleague who sends an inconsiderate message becomes their message. The captain trying to rescue a semifinal becomes the criticism they direct at us when we’re least prepared to hear it.
Our attention can contract around a grievance until it’s hard to notice anything else.2 Sometimes that grievance deserves our attention: anger can alert us to a crossed boundary or something valuable under threat. On the sideline, though, my embarrassment had made a recreational soccer match feel like a trial of my competence and belonging.3
Recognizing that distortion doesn’t require me to deny what I felt. It does require recovering a world larger than the offense before deciding what to do about it. That’s the possibility I’d like to explore through cosmic consciousness.
Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness and Ours
The phrase has a history, and it reaches well beyond advice to think bigger.
In his 1901 book, Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind, psychiatrist Richard Maurice Bucke described three grades of consciousness. He called awareness of the world simple consciousness, and the capacity to recognize oneself and reflect on one’s own thoughts self-consciousness. Beyond these, he proposed cosmic consciousness: awareness of what he called the “life and order of the universe.”4
For Bucke, this was a higher faculty accompanied by intellectual illumination, joy, a quickened moral sense, and even a felt consciousness of immortality. He believed it had appeared in a small number of people and would become more widespread as humanity evolved.
I’m not adopting that whole hierarchy or claiming to enter a higher state whenever I remember that Voyager 1 exists. What interests me is the connection Bucke drew between cosmic awareness and moral awakening.
For our purposes, I’d like to explore a more ordinary practice: stepping outside the enclosure of the aggrieved self, recovering some awareness of the larger world we belong to, and allowing that perspective to inform how we treat someone. Call it applied cosmic consciousness.
Knowing where Voyager 1 is won’t make anyone kinder by itself. The useful question is what that knowledge invites us to reconsider when we’re convinced our grievance is the center of existence.
The View From the Edge
Theoretical physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein offers another way to approach that change in vantage point. In The Edge of Space-Time, she explores the boundaries of our knowledge of the universe while connecting physics with history, culture, and questions about the future we’re making. Her account of cosmic wonder includes a challenge to colonial approaches to space exploration.5
That connection matters here. We can look outward and still ask what we’re doing to one another. Wonder needn’t carry us away from those questions; it can make the world in which we’re asking them harder to take for granted.
I’d like to borrow that change of vantage point for the soccer field.
From where I stood, the game was everything. From the lobby, it was one of three games behind a pane of glass. From high above Milwaukee, the facility would disappear into a grid of streets. Move outward far enough and the entire planet becomes what Carl Sagan called a “pale blue dot,” a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”6
Keep going and even that speck disappears.
There’s an absurdity in this, but not necessarily a bleak one. We’re creatures capable of contemplating the size and age of the universe, and we use that consciousness to become furious about lane changes, calendar invitations, and amateur sporting events. A mind that can imagine interstellar space can also become completely occupied by a delayed food order.
That contradiction is funny—or at least it can be, once we’re no longer trapped inside it. Humor and wonder can give us enough distance to question the urgency of the response we’re preparing. Does this need to be answered now? Does making someone understand require making them hurt?
The offense may still matter. From farther out, we have a chance to see what else matters alongside it.
Expanding the Scope of Us
A wider view can also change whom we notice within it.
In Work Like a Monk, Shoukei Matsumoto describes levels of “fellow-ness,” drawing on Professor Yuichi Tei’s concept of moral dimensions. The first four move from an isolated self, through recognizing others as points of comparison, to belonging to a collective “we,” and then to compassion that crosses the divisions between groups. Matsumoto adds a Buddhist fifth level in which our concern extends beyond humanity to nature, ancestors, and future generations.7
What interests me in this framework is how belonging changes the care we’re prepared to offer. On the sideline, my captain had become the person criticizing me. There was scarcely room in my attention for a teammate with their own adrenaline, frustration, responsibilities, and imperfect understanding of the game.
At other times, anger leaves room for an “us,” but it’s an aggrieved us defined against them: coworkers against management, our political faction against theirs, the people who understand what’s at stake against the people who must be malicious or ignorant.
These divisions can describe real conflicts. Power isn’t imaginary, and harm isn’t evenly distributed. Recognizing another person’s humanity doesn’t settle a dispute in their favor.
It should, however, affect what we’re willing to do to them. Once someone falls outside our concern, it becomes easier to dismiss their fear, assume the worst of their motives, or enjoy their humiliation. We can begin to excuse treatment we’d find indefensible if directed at someone we cared about.
The person in front of us has a history we can’t fully see and a life extending well beyond this collision. They woke up in a body they didn’t choose, among conditions they didn’t design. Whatever accountability the moment requires, they’re going to keep living after our encounter. What we contribute becomes part of that life.
That’s where I see the moral possibility in widening the view: we recover someone whom anger has reduced to an offense.
Small Does Not Mean Meaningless
I’ll cop to the fact that there’s a trap waiting inside the cosmic perspective: nihilism.
If Earth is a speck in an incomprehensibly large universe, why should anything we do matter? Why care about the argument, the relationship, the injustice, or even the kindness?
The mistake in distilling everything down to a nihilistic point of view is that it treats physical scale as a measure of significance. A child’s fear doesn’t cease to matter because a galaxy is large. Grief doesn’t become foolish when measured against geological time. Our concerns can be cosmically small and humanly enormous.
Telling someone their problems are small can be a cruel way of refusing to attend to them. Cosmic consciousness earns its usefulness only if it helps us see more of what’s happening, including the harm. Using it to look past injustice would defeat the moral purpose I’m proposing for it.
There’s a difference between “None of this matters” and “This matters, but it’s not all that matters.”
That second thought leaves room for choices that anger can obscure. We can object, set a boundary, demand accountability, organize against injustice, or leave a situation. We can hold someone accountable without trying to humiliate them. Sometimes kindness sounds like a calm and unequivocal no.
Nor does it require finding a generous explanation for every harmful act. We may never know why someone acted as they did. We can still decide what response the situation calls for without pretending we understand the whole person responsible.
The Space Between Feeling and Action
All of this is easier to say after one’s heart has stopped beating at 180 beats per minute.
Anger arrives physically: a tightening jaw, a hot face, a shallow breath, a surge of energy insisting that action is required. The universe may be vast, but the nervous system is local.
To slow things down, I’d start by giving myself a little time to respond.
Take a breath before answering. Step out of the room, put the phone down, or leave the message in drafts. Looking through a window may help. So may remembering that, while this conflict feels like the center of existence, people elsewhere are making dinner or putting children to bed.
If there’s room to pause, try widening the frame deliberately. What will this moment look like tomorrow? What else might be happening in the other person’s life? How much of the response I’m preparing would address the problem, and how much would transfer my discomfort to someone else?
None of these questions guarantees calm. They may give us a chance to feel anger without handing it the next decision.
In that interval, we might apologize for the part that belongs to us while holding our ground on the part that doesn’t. We might deliver the same criticism we were preparing to offer, with a clearer explanation and less desire to cause harm. The disagreement can remain unresolved while the encounter becomes less damaging.
I don’t expect a glimpse of the sky to make that easy every time. I do think the pause is worth practicing before the next moment in which we’ll need it.
Look Up, Then Come Back
Voyager 1 didn’t care about our semifinal. Neither did the moon, Lake Michigan, or nearly every person in Milwaukee.
But my teammates cared. The captain cared. I cared.
The exchange mattered because we were there to experience it. My words became part of the evening we were having together, however invisible that evening was to the rest of the universe.
Looking outward can’t change the score or unsay what I said. It can help me see the captain as a teammate again, recover some proportion around the criticism, and consider what I’d want to contribute to the next conversation.
That’s where cosmic consciousness becomes practical for me. Its value depends on what happens when I return my attention to the person beside me.
Look up until the building becomes a speck and the city disappears. Remember how strange it is that matter arranged itself into something capable of contemplating infinity, playing indoor soccer, and regretting what it said on the sideline.
Then come back to the field, the workplace, or the family table, where a legitimate disagreement may still be waiting. The person having it with you has a world of their own, most of which you’ll never see. Your response is one of the few things you can add to it.
Perspective puts things in perspective.
Kindness is what we choose to do once they’re there.
Tell me in the comments
When has a wider perspective changed how you responded to anger or frustration?
What helps you pause when you feel an immediate need to answer someone?
Where do you draw the line between gaining perspective and minimizing a real problem?
Philip A. Gable, Bryan D. Poole, and Eddie Harmon-Jones, Anger Perceptually and Conceptually Narrows Cognitive Scope, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 109, no. 1 (2015): 163–174.
For more on the importance of competence and belonging, see “Before Your Call Someone Resistant to Change.”
Richard Maurice Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind (1901), Part I, First Words.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie (Pantheon, 2026).
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot (1994); see NASA’s Voyager 1’s Pale Blue Dot.
Shoukei Matsumoto, Work Like a Monk: A Buddhist Guide to Embracing What Matters (Tarcher, 2026), 60.