(Roughly) Daily

Our problems are so vast, our distance from them so great. Benjamin Cohen asks how we navigate our “derangement of scale”?

… Parents say the days are long but the years are short. Sophocles says time eases all things. Thoreau says time is but the stream we go a-fishing in. Einstein tells us time is an illusion. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that. All of them are right.

A human life can be 70, 80, maybe 90 years. The tuataras, a New Zealand reptile, can live to be 100, as can a crocodile. A Seychelles giant tortoise can live close to 200 years. Sea animals have us all beat. Bowhead whales can live past 200 years. For some sea urchin species, it’s 300. The ocean quahog clam can live past 500. On the other end are insects. An adult dragonfly might live a week. Shadflies, also called mayflies or fishflies, live just a day or two.

Geological time has an entirely different range of long and short. My friend studies ice cores from millions of years ago, examining glacial variation to better understand how climates change. The Pleistocene, Pliocene, Miocene. These are epochs, an official scientific term for a measure of time—less than a period, more than an age. Epochs span millions of years. They put our biological lifespans to shame. We are shadflies to the sandstone sediment of the Miocene.

Our current epoch, scientists argue, is called the Anthropocene. It’s new. The term comes from Paul J. Crutzen, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist who wrote that “human activities are exerting increasing impacts on the environment on all scales”—impacts so profound that we created an entirely new stamp on the timeline. The Anthropocene is a commentary on our scales of time as well as space. It isn’t just how old things are or how long they take, but how big they are and how vast their dimensions are. 

I’ll admit a little hesitancy for the concept. It’s an audacious move, to declare the dawn of a new epoch from within; I’m not sure if there’s a bit too much modern exceptionalism at work. But I also can’t say the full scientific validity matters for me. Say what you will about the Anthropocene, but I nod to it for trying to gauge what’s so strange and difficult about our moment. It is the relationship between biological generations and geological epochs, between the scope of mortal activity and that of global planetary activity. It is all scales everywhere all at once.

Understanding the significance of our own lives requires some understanding of scale. “Just as the microscope and telescope extended our vision into spatial realms once too minuscule or too immense for us to see, geology provides a lens through which we can witness time in a way that transcends the limits of our human experiences,” Marcia Bjornerud, a geologist, writes. The Anthropocene, she suggests, is a fine time to “adopt a geologic respect for time and its capacity to transfigure, destroy, renew, amplify, erode, propagate, entwine, innovate, and exterminate.” We need to know how to navigate our epoch: to recognize our profusion of scales and strive to understand, amidst their collisions, not just how to care for the world beyond us but how a person can be, what it means to stand as a morally vested individual. 

And yet we humans are still not particularly good at seeing ourselves in time or space. I’m certainly not. So here we are. Not only has our age come face to face with an emergency of scalar challenges—brashly called a global climate crisis—but we have produced a daunting sense of distance from addressing it. The problems are physically too far away, too large, too vast; the psychological distance we feel from addressing them is too great. It’s a double-distancing. Hopelessness comes from the scalar mismatch between we individuals, who are wee individuals, and the problems of an 8,000-mile-diameter earth. 

All of this was on my mind when I first met Robert Socolow [here], an 88-year-old physicist who, over the course of his life, turned to environmental science and technology to help humanity respond to our most complex challenges of scale. One of those efforts has been with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, where Socolow helps with their Doomsday Clock. That’s the device that, since 1947, tracks humanity’s proximity to self-destruction. The clock is a metaphor, presuming to measure Blake’s hours of folly by minute and second hand; the hands are set by “nuclear risk, climate change, disruptive technologies, and biosecurity,” among other concerns. They’ve changed positions 26 times in the decades since they began metaphorically ticking. Since 2010, the clock’s hands have only moved closer to midnight. 

In 2025, Socolow himself revealed the face of the clock at a press conference in Washington, DC. It was January and he was at the US Institute of Peace in Foggy Bottom. With a crowd of reporters looking on, cameras flashing and shutters digitally clicking, Socolow stood by a modernist wooden stand and spun a turntable to reveal the clock hands at a small, acute angle against midnight. A world of scalar challenges fell into an urgent sort of order. The end was 89 seconds away.

Most of us are daunted, every day, by the vastness of planetary activity and the proximity of our personal choices. We look at the clock, unsure how to balance clashing scopes of time and space. But if I’m unsettled, I want proximity to settle me. I want to be close, I want to feel part of the world I inhabit and see and feel, I want to hold those I love near to me. So what should we do?…

… The confusion may come from what the writer Timothy Clark calls “derangements of scale.” Our experiences as modern global humans, Clark writes, are like being “lost in a small town” and then handed a map of the entire earth for locating yourself and finding your way. In the Anthropocene, he writes, “we have a map, [and] its scale includes the whole earth, but when it comes to relating the threat to daily questions of politics, ethics, or specific interpretations of history, culture, literature, etc., the map is often almost mockingly useless.” Our scales are too imbalanced; we are unable to think the unthinkable. It goes without saying that it can be paralyzing, demoralizing, to be an individual acting as part of the collective, globe-sized world…

[Cohen shares his conversations with Socolow, with call-outs to Tolstoy, Camus, Augustine, and Solnit…]

… The attempt to capture our smallness inside the grandness of the universe is a timeless human quest, I get that. Tolstoy’s theological view is a typical one; God is that which is without scale. Even if I’m not so theological about it, I share the modern anxiety. And that anxiety is currently a dominant emotion. 

Clark writes that “deranged jumps in scale and fantasies of agency may recall rhetoric associated with the atomic bomb in the 1950s and after.” After talking to Socolow a number of times, I don’t think it recalls so much as continues that rhetoric. The new atomic age was a test case for the coming collisions of scale that derange us now. The Doomsday Clock was about sounding the alarm. It was meant to shake people, to grab them by the shoulders and yell that they pay attention to human-made catastrophe.

We’ve flipped in the past 50 years, nearly the exact span of my own life. A half century later, and so many people have gone from urgency to hopelessness. They feel bombarded by all scales, not just the next one.

There’s room to reconsider that bombardment. There’s time to think to the next scale. Socolow has been doing it his entire adult life. So were Augustine and Tolstoy and Camus and so is Solnit. It isn’t new, we aren’t alone.

And so Socolow and I stand in his home office, trying to measure. It’s misty outside and calm inside. He is thinking in linear feet of books, where the spatial scale of distance is a proxy for the temporal scale of his life’s work. I’m thinking in years, measuring my sense of contribution and belonging against the shadfly-like limitations of a mere biological lifespan. I’m cautious, excited, gratified that the two of us can talk and compare across the scales of our current lives. That Blake couplet in the epigraph above [title quote] runs through my head. Socolow’s keenly aware of his own place in our epoch. Nearly a hundred linear feet of a life’s work at an archive, and still, as we consider our various measures, he tells me, “I am searching for ways to be constructive, and there are small opportunities here and there so far.” There is wisdom here, even if no clock can measure it…

Eminently worth reading in full: “By All Measures,” from @longreads.com.

* William Blake, “Proverbs of Hell”

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As we take the long view, we might we might rejoice in the naively and nobly inventive: it was on this date in 1605 that El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (or The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha— aka Don Quixote), the masterwork of Miguel de Cervantes (and of the Spanish Golden Age) and a founding work of Western literature, was first published. Widely considered the first modern novel (published in the Western world), it is also considered by many (still) to be the best; it is in any case the second most translated work in the world (after the Bible).