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The Sycamore Tree: The Anthropocene Reviewed

2021-01-26 · review / recommendation · John · 9:46 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Philosophy & meaning (also: Health) · mode: Personal essay · tags: recurring series, self promotion, heavy topic, self correction

In an Anthropocene Reviewed essay, John describes his depressive brain's game 'What's Even the Point', argues that despair and ironic detachment are unproductive and that the questions of philosophy matter, and finds an answer of sorts in the shade of an old sycamore tree, which he gives four and a half stars.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — The Why game John's children play with him at breakfast

  • ★★ John's children play the Why game with him, answering each reason he gives for finishing breakfast with another 'why', down to the species wanting to go on. (playful) — 00:00:00
  • ★★★ At the end of the Why chain John says that, in spite of it all, he believes the human enterprise has value. (hedged) — 00:00:39 · meaning of life

00:01:08 — What's Even the Point: John's depressive game in an airport, with Millay, Penn Warren and Woodson

  • ★★★ John's brain plays a similar game, What's Even the Point; a Millay poem he has quoted in two of his novels describes his depressive blizzards perfectly. — 00:01:08
  • ★★ Waiting in an airport to fly to Milwaukee, John feels the chill and sees the flight as apes herded into a tube spewing carbon dioxide between population centers. — 00:01:37
  • ★★★ In the game John's brain says there is no point to the human endeavor: no permanent legacy, and our lasting contribution is being the first species able to muck up the planet. — 00:02:06 · meaning of life
  • ★★ While the game plays, John can find no point to making art, planting gardens or falling in love, since you are always alone in what Robert Penn Warren called the darkness which is you. — 00:02:06
  • ★★ Agreeing with Jacqueline Woodson that we must consider what we construct as dark, John says what descends is not darkness but a blizzard of blinding frozen white light. — 00:03:07
  • ★★ John reads the poem's 'bright trouble' as the light you see when you first open your eyes after birth, your first and greatest fear. — 00:03:35
  • ★★ In the airport John is disgusted by his failures and attempts at meaning; his brain tells him consciousness is a burden, life a terror, and the universe doesn't care if he's here. — 00:03:59

00:04:52 — Ironic detachment and despair, and why philosophical questions matter

  • ★★ Once the game starts John cannot stop it, and the only way to survive seems to be ironic detachment: if he can't be happy, he at least wants to be cool. — 00:04:52
  • ★★★ Though hope feels flimsy amid life's horrors, John says despair is unproductive: like a replicating virus it only makes more of itself and renders him inert and apathetic. — 00:05:42 · hope
  • ★★ During the game John struggles to do anything and often can't find a reason to get out of bed. — 00:05:42
  • ★★★ Philosophical questions about the point of life and where to seek meaning are often dismissed as pointless, but John thinks they are genuinely important, because he needs to survive his mind's game. — 00:06:09
  • ★★★ John does not want to give in to despair or hide in detached ridicule of unironized emotion, or be cool if cool means cold to experience; he wants to feel what there is to feel. — 00:06:35

00:07:02 — You keep going: therapy, medication, meditation, exercise, waiting

  • ★★★ While the game plays it feels endless, but John says now always feels infinite and never is, and you keep going. — 00:07:33

    “Now always feels infinite and never is.”

  • ★★★ John lists how you keep going: therapy, a different medication, meditation even if you dislike it, exercise, waiting, and refusing to give in, with philosophy, self-help and religion. — 00:07:33

00:08:02 — The sycamore tree in the park, sycamore history, the point, and the rating

  • ★★★ One overcast day in a forested park, John's nine-year-old points out squirrels racing up an immense American sycamore with peeling white bark and huge leaves, and John finds it beautiful. — 00:08:02
  • ★★ John says some sycamore trees alive today date back more than 300 years, older than the nation. — 00:08:29
  • ★★ John says George Washington once measured a sycamore tree over 13 meters in circumference. — 00:08:29
  • ★★ Herodotus wrote 2,400 years ago that the Persian emperor Xerxes, marching through a sycamore grove, found one so beautiful he decorated it with gold and left a soldier to guard it. — 00:08:55
  • ★★★ Looking up at the tree that turned dirt, water and sunshine into a place where squirrels play, you realize you are in its vast shade, and John says that's the point. — 00:09:24 · meaning of life

  • ★★ John gives sycamore trees four and a half stars. — 00:09:24 · The Anthropocene Reviewed (podcast)

    “I give Sycamore Trees four and a half stars.”

In the description and comments

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: depression · meaning of life · Platanus occidentalis

Also: People: Edna St. Vincent Millay · George Washington · Herodotus · Jacqueline Woodson · Robert Penn Warren · Xerxes I

Works: poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay quoted in Looking for Alaska

Concepts: absurdism · hope · irony · nihilism · Philosophy

Places: Milwaukee

Only in the description or credits: audiobook · Hannis Brown · Indianapolis · Jenny Lawton · Joe Plourde · Nadim Silverman · Rosianna Halse Rojas · Stan Muller · The Anthropocene Reviewed (book) · The Anthropocene Reviewed (podcast)

Also centred on depression: Perspective · Minus Its Charms · taking a break · What Helped Through Depression

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