Light Pollution is a Crime Against Humanity

how seeing the milky way changed how I see everything else

Photo by 🇻🇪 Jose G. Ortega Castro 🇲🇽 on Unsplash

“That was a real turning point in my life”.

That’s what my husband told me last week during a casual conversation about religion and spirituality.

It was a reflection on the first time we ever saw the Milky Way.

And I mean really, fully seeing it—with as much detail as the naked human eye possibly can.

It was while we were on our honeymoon in Zion National Park in 2019. The first time we were in the park was in the dead of night. The intense darkness that engulfed our rental car was the only sense of scale we had for the colossal size of the towering sandstone walls that flanked us as we descended into the canyon.

I poked my head out the passenger-side window to see if I could make out the top of the canyon walls, and as I did, I saw their jagged tops outlined against an impossibly glittery navy sky.

“Oh my god, PULL OVER”. At the next pull out we got out of the car, leaned against the hood, and looked up.

I was immediately struck and overwhelmed by what I was seeing. I felt warm. My body started buzzing and my eyes welled with excitement.

The very fabric of our galaxy was outstretched before us like a cosmic river, seemingly a living, breathing entity all its own—I almost want to throw up thinking about it.

In that moment I felt so insignificant yet inextricably connected to everything that has ever been and ever will be.

In that moment, I felt awe.

Seeing the edge of the galaxy you live in from the inside does something to a person. Our galaxy is fucking enormous. But to know that there are infinite galaxies in our universe and a potentially infinite number of universes? Time and space collapses when you sit with that feeling for long enough.

And when you do sit with it long enough, you can’t help but feel how special all of this is. That in the bigness of it all, the perfect conditions came together, almost randomly, so that you could be here and see it all.

What a trip.

Makes worrying about… really anything, if I’m being honest, feel like a complete and utter waste of time.

Having experienced awe first-hand in such an undeniable, slap-you-across-the-face kind of way, I got curious—Why do humans experience awe? What’s the mechanism behind it? What’s the purpose?

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It turns out, awe is the subject of a lot of exciting and emerging research.

Leading the charge is Dacher Keltner out of UC, Berkeley, author of Awe, who, alongside Jonathan Haidt, published the first academic paper on the subject back in 2003, with the simple goal of attempting to pin-point what exactly awe is—in order to study something, you have to define it.

Awe, they suggest, is triggered when we encounter something vast and mysterious that transcends our understanding of the world. And we’re not just talking about something vast in size (like the Milky Way, ocean, or the Red Woods)—awe could be invoked by the quantitative vastness (like the wildebeest or fruit bat migrations), temporal vastness (like the deep time of history or future i.e. the Pyramids or AI), or conceptual vastness (like a piece of music, quantum physics, or the social lives of bees).

Following two decades of research following that initial paper, Keltner now suggests that awe is a critical component for enhancing physical and emotional well-being, strengthening social connections, shepherding personal growth and transformation, and cultivating a sense of purpose and meaning.

Given the current mental health crisis and loneliness epidemic, this feels significant. I mean, just look at the stats:

• Approximately 1 in 5 U.S. adults live with a mental illness (52.9 million in 2020). (Source)

• Anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in the U.S., affecting 40 million adults (18.1% of the population) each year.

• In 2021, 41.5% of adults reported symptoms of anxiety or depressive disorder, compared to 11% in 2019. (Source)

• In 2021, overdose deaths in the U.S. increased by nearly 30%, reaching over 93,000 deaths, the highest number ever recorded. (Source)

• The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) states that suicide was the 10th leading cause of death in the U.S. in 2020, with 45,979 deaths.

• 61% of Americans reported feeling lonely, an increase from 46% in 2018. (Source)

• Gen Z adults (born 1997–2012) are the loneliest generation, with a Cigna study reporting that 79% of Gen Zers feel lonely, compared to 71% of Millennials, 50% of Boomers, and 38% of the Greatest Generation.

That’s bleak as hell.

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But the positive effects of awe aren’t just theoretical. We’re talking hard science here, people.

For starters, experiencing awe reduces the activity of the default mode network (DMN), which is the part of your brain that is active when the brain is at rest and is involved in self-referential thinking. This reduction in DMN activity is associated with a diminished focus on the self—i.e. that sense of feeling connected to everything, and being a part of something larger than myself I mentioned earlier.

This enhanced feeling of connectedness increases empathy towards others and promotes prosocial behaviors and the strengthening of social bonds.

We’re looking at a potential antidote to loneliness here, just from seeing a sky full of stars.

We also see altered activity of the parietal lobe, which is involved in spatial orientation and the perception of one's body in space. This may contribute to aforementioned sensation of being physically small or insignificant in the presence of vastness.

There is also activation of the brain's reward pathways, including the striatum, which is associated with feelings of pleasure and reward, and the insula, which processes visceral and emotional experiences. The activation of these areas helps explain the emotional aspects of awe, like the elevation of mood, as well as goosebumps, chills, or, in my case, tears.

Awe is also associated with elevated vagal tone, reduced sympathetic arousal, and increased oxytocin release—all things that help a person feel calm, happy, and connected.

Awe has a lot going for it.

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The problem, though, is opportunities to experience awe have all but been engineered out of modern life.

Light pollution cancels out the night sky.

High-rises and skyscrapers block our view of the horizon, preventing us from seeing sunrises and sunsets.

The grind of late-stage capitalism keeps us from slowing down and noticing the little moments of awe happening all around us—the smell of trees blooming in the spring, a colony of ants carrying something 20X their body weight in a perfect single-file line, a flock of geese flying in perfect formation overhead; how do they know where to go? Where did they come from?

It seems criminal, then, that in our society with all of it’s issues, that we’ve been severed from this thing that in so undeniably critical to our humanity.

It took me until I was 27 years old to see the night sky, and I was raised in a fairly rural area—my husband even more rural than me.

We often have to go out of our way in search of awe, like driving out to the wilderness or going on a trip. The quintessential crown jewel of awe, the “overview effect”, is experienced by astronauts when they see the Earth suspended in the blackness of space, dramatically altering the way the see the Earth and humanity forever. The experience can be yours for the low, low price of $133,000.

We go to such great lengths to be struck by awe—it is often suggested that novelty is an essential ingredient. For example, someone who lives in Norway wouldn’t be struck by the Northern Lights, or a person living in the African bush wouldn’t be moved to tears by a herd of elephants silently moving across the landscape in the soft morning light.

But I disagree.

I think there’s a difference between novelty and awe. You adapt to novelty, never to awe. I see the moon almost everyday and my heart still flutters with excitement every time. I will stop whatever I’m doing to see a sunset in progress, no matter how many I’ve seen.

I think a lot about ancient civilizations, their fascination with the night sky, and the many myths, stories, and works of art about it.

And they saw it every single night in the same way I saw it in Zion in 2019, if not better.

It clearly never lost it’s luster.

Awe, I believe, is a state of mind. It’s happening all of the time, you just have to be open to it.

At this very moment, my stream of consciousness is traveling through my fingers, into written language, so that I might be able to communicated what’s in my head with others.

AWE.

A tiny spider no bigger than a pencil tip just walked across my computer screen—how does something so small exist?!

AWE.

I think it’s abundantly clear to everyone at this point that the more we “advance” and the faster we go, the sicker, and more miserable the human animal becomes. But the people are revolting. Visits to National Parks and Dark Sky Reserves are way up, light ordinances are happening in cities all over the country, and people are turning to mindfulness practices more than ever before so that they might have the space to experience all of this.

Amidst all of the chaos of the modern world, I get the sense that there’s a push to feel more of our humanness, and experiencing awe is so clearly a part of that.