big picture person

I'm not a big picture person. Big pictures actually terrify me because I never see them coming. Once, I pasted a picture in Word, expecting it to be small — it took up half the page. I started sweating, first from stress, then from embarrassment — I was intimidated by something I could cut out of my sight with a click.

I've since learned that I'm a megalophobe, and I'm not alone. There's a whole subreddit about megalophobia and many experts have explained why megalophobes are afraid of big things. I'd share those expert opinions here, but a Google search will flood my screen with exactly the kind of pictures I try to avoid, so I'll spare both of us that horror.

I believe that megalophobia is caused by existential dread. When we see things larger than we expected, we recalculate the size of what we're seeing. We measure the unexpected size in terms of familiar things like the width of our fingers or our height. Then we become aware of how small we are. That jarring confrontation with our insignificance feels threatening — it's like seeing a hand-sized spider when we didn't expect to see a spider at all

Pictures of Earth make me the most uneasy, and shrinking them doesn't help. They confront me with the fact that skyscrapers don't touch the clouds, and all roads may lead to Rome, but I wouldn't know from space. I'm an electron orbiting an atom comprising a pixel making up a picture of the Earth. I'm small and insignificant.

The rest of the solar system is somehow worse to look at. At least when I look at Earth, I know it's not empty. However, the other planets are so large and imposing that I can't believe they're empty and, yet, they probably are. Their emptiness punctuates their bigness. 

We find ourselves in a universe too big for us to comprehend, to know in its entirety. Yet, we try to make sense of a world we will never see completely by speaking in terms of countries and continents, and we divide our lives into years and months to measure the time we've used up and how much we have left. This abstraction allows us to cope with the too-big universe until we are confronted by its enormity.