the overview effect

Christmas arrives this week, which means I'm going to do something I rarely do in these pages: talk about Christianity directly.

For those who know me, or who've been reading along, you've likely noticed that I find the Christian story of history—what Christians call the Gospel—pretty remarkable. Its skeleton has become a surprisingly common archetype for many of the world’s greatest story arcs, likely more than you realize. It occasionally makes its way into Mayfly articles too, not because I want to convince or proselytize, nor because I'm sneaking vegetables into your dessert, but because I genuinely believe it speaks to the human condition in ways that remain stubbornly relevant, even for those who don’t see this kind of faith as a part of their lives. I try not to be pushy about this. I've seen enough evil, tragedy, and abuse of authority in religion to hold my own real doubts. And like many of you, I grew up around enough pushy to last several lifetimes.

But wisdom tends to announce itself better than it tolerates being announced. When it hits you, you feel it.

Christmas offers a rare opening. For one week (okay, a month, max, unless you’re Starbucks), the culture collectively agrees to nod in the direction of a Bethlehem stable, even if only on greeting cards. So I'd like to take that opening—not to convince you of anything theological, but to explore a single idea that Christians celebrate at Christmas, one that I think speaks to all of us, religious or not.

The idea is this: some things are so good that we've lost the ability to feel how good they are.

In 1971, astronaut Edgar Mitchell became the sixth person to walk on the moon. On the return trip, he looked out the window of the Apollo 14 capsule and saw Earth—the whole thing, suspended in blackness, no bigger than his thumb held at arm's length.

He knew, of course, that the Earth was significant. He'd studied it, lived on it, launched from it. Big part of his life at the time. But seeing it whole did something to him that knowing had not. He later described the experience as "an explosion of awareness," a kind of cognitive detonation. He called it the "overview effect."

Nearly every astronaut who has seen Earth from space reports some version of this. They understood the planet was precious. But the sight of it—blue and white and impossibly alone in the void—transformed understanding into feeling. They went from intellectual acknowledgment to something closer to overwhelm.

What Mitchell experienced was not new information. It was proportionate response. For the first time, his emotional reaction matched the actual magnitude of what he was seeing.

Most of us will never go to space. But we suffer from a similar problem down here on the ground: we are too close to our own lives to feel the shape of what we have. We know certain things are good. We've just lost the altitude to see how good.

It’s a "numbness to scale."

There are those who, against all odds, maintain their love for you. Not abstractly—specifically. The friend who, for reasons you've never fully understood, decided years ago that you were worth the trouble and has never revised that opinion despite accumulating evidence. The parent or child or spouse who knows the version of you that exists at 2 a.m. when the defenses are down, and has chosen to stay anyway.

These relationships are not decorative. They are load-bearing walls in the architecture of your life. Remove them and the whole structure becomes unstable. And yet we experience them the way we experience gravity—constantly, invisibly, and with almost no awareness that they are more or less the reason we are not floating off into the void.

This is the strange thing about magnitude: the bigger something is, the harder it becomes to perceive. We do not notice the atmosphere. We do not feel the spin of the Earth. And we do not reckon, on any given Tuesday, with the fact that certain people have built their lives in such a way that ours remains possible.

We say "I'm grateful" the way we say "I'm fine"—true enough, but unexamined. Gratitude, it turns out, can become rote. A checklist. A journal. A polite acknowledgment that something is present without any reckoning with its magnitude.

Joy is different. Joy is what happens when you finally feel the scale of what you have. It is gratitude that has been given an overview effect.

Christmas, for Christians, celebrates an event of ridiculous magnitude.

The claim is that the infinite entered the finite. That an external creator of everything arrived as a baby in an occupied backwater, to a teenage mother, in a borrowed barn. That this was not an accident or a detour but the whole point—God walking into the mess on purpose, not to observe but to rescue.

For those who believe this, the implications are staggering. Beyond staggering, really. It means, to use an abstraction, that the trajectory of human existence bent from hopelessness toward hope. It celebrates a rescue that already happened, leaving us to live in reckoning with the after. It means the penultimate event in history occurred not in a palace or on a battlefield but in a feeding trough, attended by livestock and exhausted parents and a handful of night-shift shepherds who had not been told to expect anything. The shepherds, by the way, were not selected for their piety. They were selected, presumably, because they were awake—working the night shift in a profession that smelled exactly like you'd expect. If God was making a point about accessibility, He was making it aggressively.

And yet most Christians I know—including myself—meet Christmas with roughly the same emotional register as a pleasant tradition. We acknowledge the event. We sing about it. We set up small ceramic recreations of it on our mantels. (Yes, I know you have one. The shepherd who is missing his head. The donkey who has been glued back together twice. Every year you set it up and think, this is it, this is the year I'll really feel the magnitude of incarnation, and every year you instead feel mostly concerned about whether the wise men are properly spaced.)

But we do not feel it. Not proportionately. Not in a way that matches what we say we believe.

And frankly, the sermon Christians hear from the pulpit, year after year, often addresses this laxity.

But it’s true. It is not a failure of faith. It is perhaps a failure of altitude. We are too close to the story to see its shape.

Here is what I want you to hear, whether you share the faith or not, as this problem is not limited to Christians and Christmas:

Gratitude is to know, whereas joy is to experience.

We are all, every one of us, surrounded by those manifestations of good whose gravity we chronically underestimate. The child who will carry your voice into rooms you will never enter. The fact that spring has, so far, always followed winter. The friend who stayed. The wound that healed. The truth that you woke up this morning with the capacity to hope at all—that you are built for it, wired for it, that hope is not an illusion you've conjured but apparently a feature of your design.

These are not small things. These are the things that make a life feel like a life rather than an endurance test. And most days we walk past them like they're furniture, aware but unfeeling.

I am not asking you to be more thankful this year; ugh, gross. You’ve heard that sermon. We all have. It lands with the same dull thud every November, right between the turkey and the shopping ads, and it produces approximately nothing—because it mistakes the problem.

The problem is not insufficient gratitude. It is gratitude without altitude. We count our blessings the way we count ceiling tiles: accurately, perhaps, but without feeling. What we need is not a longer list but a different posture altogether—to hold a single, marvelous thought in our minds for five minutes, perhaps, and allow it to steep within us until it becomes a deep, soul-stabilizing, felt appreciation for what we have acknowledged a thousand times but never truly seen. It is time spent feeling.

The astronauts who experienced the overview effect did not come back with new information about Earth. They came back changed. The sight of the whole thing, suspended in the dark, rearranged something in them.

Christmas is an invitation to the same kind of seeing—not new data, but new altitude. A chance to look at the goods you've been standing on and finally feel their weight.

For Christians, that means letting the magnitude of the rescue land again, perhaps for the first time in years, as the pastor will say. For everyone, it means pausing long enough to see the people who have stayed, the hopes that have held, the fact that you are here at all, capable of love and meaning and joy.

Not gratitude as checklist. Not acknowledgment as habit. But the simple, stunning recognition that some things are far better than we've let ourselves feel.

That recognition has a name. We call it joy.

John

Thanks for reading The Mayfly Letter.

Your support allows me to continue doing something I truly love.

John Conrad