The wonder of smallness

Why do we get used to wars, political crises, functional illiteracy, but not to sunsets?

When I started journalism, an unwritten European rule was that there should be more “light topics” during the summer. The assumption, more instinctive than the product of any analysis with empirical findings, was that in July and August people want to read something more inspiring than news about crises, wars and political clashes. And so, instead of an analysis of the economic crisis that would hit citizens’ pockets in the fall, the recommended report was about how the invisible lines that separated nudist areas from those where tourists wore swimsuits had been chosen on Croatian beaches. Instead of the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the American financing of the mujahideen, the vacation locations of famous artists would take their place; and instead of preparations for a conference or Party Congress, the producer of the heaviest melon in the country would have a prominent place.

I remembered this unwritten rule while preparing the weekly article and already had a list of things that I had followed in various (electronic) publications and about which I had an opinion.

Should I write about wars, or rather, about how we get used to them? Here we are in Ukraine, entering the fifth year of the Russian war of aggression. The American-Israeli war against Iran has also been going on for five months. We got used to the sight of drones, ballistic missiles, destroyed schools and apartments - and of course, the transformation of the killed into statistics. We also got used to the higher energy prices.

To write about the political crisis in Kosovo, namely about how we got used to listening to analyses on television every day and night and reading on social media about how party leaders, individual MPs or people belonging to one region or another think and how they will act? How the dark minds of the other party are implementing macabre plans against the party we sympathize with?

Should I write about the strengthening of the lek in Albania and how we are accustomed to explaining it with two truths that are presented as exclusive: either Albania's economy has strengthened, or the currency is brought in by drug trafficking, creating artificial demand for the lek? Should we be accustomed to assuming that reality cannot sustain both at the same time?

To write about our entry from one technological revolution to another, from the digital revolution to that of artificial intelligence, while the vast majority of children under the age of fifteen do not understand the text they read? To write about how we have learned to hope that a technological tool will emerge - once it was the personal computer, now AI - that will suddenly eliminate collective ignorance and make us knowledgeable, each of us individually?

Or, perhaps, to stick to the unwritten rule of the time and dwell on sunrises and sunsets and our amazement at them. The sun rises and sets every day, and we have seen it so often in our lives that we cannot put a number on it. And yet, unlike all the crises and problems I have listed, we fail to get used to sunrises and sunsets. The paradox is that we get used to what we should not get used to - war, crisis, ignorance - while we cannot get used to what is repeated every day. When we see a sunrise or sunset, we experience what psychologist Jennifer Stellar of the University of Toronto calls “awe” - amazement in the face of something that exceeds our size. A study by the University of Exeter showed that sunrises and sunsets evoke this emotion significantly more than the same landscape under an ordinary clear sky.

We explain the wars in Ukraine and Iran with interests, territories, ideologies and balances of power; the crisis in Kosovo with a fundamental restructuring of political life and with specific political ambitions; the strengthening of the lek with the formal and underground economy. We find explanations for them and, by explaining them every day, we get used to them. We cannot explain the sunset, we experience it as awe. Confronting it is a confrontation, according to Dr. Stellari, with something that seems much bigger than ourselves - in size, power, time, beauty or complexity - and that goes beyond our usual way of understanding.

This emotion produces what researchers call the “small self.” Not the self that is belittled or without self-esteem, but the self that, for a moment, stops thinking that it is the measure of everything. The person feels part of a larger whole and, according to studies, becomes more open to others, more generous and more willing to cooperate.

Perhaps this is the benefit of sunset: it does not allow us to become completely accustomed to the world. It reduces us to see something greater than our interests, fears, and struggles. And perhaps this is a good beginning to the end of a day, and the appropriate end to a writing with the unwritten rules of the last century.