A little ambiance to save a life - #157

Turn it off.

Mar 09, 2025

This edition of Shangrilogs comes with an audio option, so you can enjoy it in the dark.

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Across the sky, a band of glitter and gas arches above our valley. You might know her as the Milky Way. Or you might not. A third of Earth’s residents have never seen the scarce splash of Half & Half added to the sky, including 80% of Americans. But we see it, tucked away in these towering peaks where the roads, the people, and the lights are few.

For all of time, excluding the general “now”, humans have been connected to the cosmos through the evening light show, and if you’ve seen it, if you’ve sat with it, you know that it pours down your spine like shrinking potion. You are a speck once again and who cares about email! Who cares about tariffs and taxes! We are but miraculous creatures built for love and joy, brief and spectacular!

But in our clobbered capitalist reality, even in this little paradise, people forgo the THC-emulating awe of the galaxy to leave their lights on. Motion sensor lights, flood lights, seemingly every light in the house for no apparent reason other than that they can.

Maybe like me you grew up in a Shoes Off/Lights Off™ kind of house, where the only thing worse than getting things dirty was spending money. Ghosts categorically are not known for enjoying full light, so if you’re not in the room, that light is on for no one but the power company. Turn around and turn it off.

Maybe like me you grew up believing that there was some infinitesimal chance you would go blind in some strange accident, so better to practice being blind now to get ahead of things, counting your stairs and your steps as you navigate from one room to another in the dead of night, bracing for—but open to—a different life.

Maybe like me there was someone in your house who talked about migration, and you knew that 80% of migratory birds migrated at night. It is safer to run at night, under the protection of darkness; everyone worth their salt in action movies knows that. But that only works if there is no false light, no human light, to misguide them.

Maybe like me you just identified in some small way as a pirate, not for the pillaging, not for the plunder, but for the possibility: an open sea with nothing and no one to guide you but the vast array of faraway stars.

Even when I was afraid of the dark, I respected it.

A week ago, Ben and I were talking about lights with a couple of our neighbors. We had recently swapped our outdoor garage light to a red bulb. We’re big fans of red light in this house. Jibs has a red light on his jacket that bobs around in the dark through bushes and bramble. Our headlamps are set to red for when we’re scrounging around for something in a drawer in the night. And now, our rarely used outdoor light is red. It’s believed that red light has fewer negative impacts on insects and bats, and causes less suppression of melatonin in both humans and wildlife.

Verdict is still out, though. Research is ongoing, and like most research aimed toward the benefit of wildlife and the change of human behavior, it is poorly funded. But we’re trying, and we talked about it over brunch.

“When I’m not drowning in clients and diapers, I’d really like to pick up the Dark Sky conversation in this town,” I said, baby in hand, cinnamon roll in the other.
“Oh, we are!”

My neighbor is on our town’s environmental commission, and to my delight, Dark Sky was already on the agenda. That our town of some 180 people even has an environmental commission should tell you about the values of this high valley, but even good people don’t like to be told they can be better. It’s a tricky balance of a town agreeing to protect night skies and actually telling a neighbor they need to buy a new light fixture.

It’s worth it though, because not only could our town achieve the status of Dark Sky Community, but it seems we might even be eligible to be a Dark Sky Sanctuary. A Dark Sky Sanctuary is usually in a “very remote location” with few threats to its night sky, and also isn’t a Park or a Reserve. Well, that’s this town. A Dark Sky Park requires infrastructure for events, which… could be argued we have, but I would be the one arguing that we don’t. We’re a “join us for pizza in the maintenance shed” kind of place, not a “come experience the magnitude of the cosmos in our sheltered pavilion” place. Sanctuaries offer the experience of what the night sky used to be like before we proliferated across the planet like a virus.

If everyone in town would agree to turn their lights off, that’s exactly what you would experience: awe, magnitude, and the Milky Way at her very best.

Our Land Use Code indicates that there are 88 homes here, which means the town has some 120 televisions. Probably 180 cars given the households with multiple renters. And maybe 30 teenagers.

I bring up teenagers because they are overseers of soft light. Fairy lights, lava lamps, plasma balls, and multicolored LED lights glowing in greens and purples behind futons and Playstations. Teens, in the neverending quest for cool, and probably in hopes to hide acne, have perfected some Dark Sky principles. They are well-practiced in the idea that Big Light at night is bad.

They might argue that Big Light is bad all the time, and they would not be alone. GeeofDee on TikTok in late 2022 shared a video cementing this into current culture by decreeing that her only household rule was that you could “never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever use the Big Light.”

@geeeofdeee shun the big light and the harsh rays it casts

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Big Light, if you’re not familiar, is the typical overhead light available in whatever room you’re in. It’s not the side table lamp, it’s not the reading light in the corner, and it’s certainly not candles. Big Light is utilitarian. Interior designers might include one, but they’re loath to rely on it. As Nora Taylor, writer for Arch Digest and Apartment Therapy, has said: “Any downward, intensely direct light source … tends to mess up the look and feel of a space any time it’s turned on, day or night.”

We’ve really agreed on this since the dawn of electricity, too. Poul Henningsen, one of the cultural cornerstones of the Louis Poulsen light brand founded in 1874 and still successful today, argued in 1926 that the electric lightbulb was ‘seen by civilized people as a necessary evil.’ A luminary in every sense to fans of ambiance everywhere.

You might have even seen in a video I shared a couple weeks back where Caroline Winkler, YouTuber and interiors consultant, was telling the men of Subreddit r/malelivingspace that a key factor missing in all their rooms is multiple sources of light. Get away from Big Light! Have a few soft elements of light! Why? Because it makes everything, including us, look better. It offers hygge and vibes, and feelings of both decadence and mystery. And it helps us, and all our friends in nature, follow our natural rhythms.

In the era of main characters in the early 2020s, we sought to relentlessly romanticize our individual lives. But there is romance available for everyone. We are seeking ambiance, we are seeking connectivity to a world we are losing timber by timber. We are naming our kids Wilder and Wyatt like a lasso to a time when we all knew how to ride a horse. We have found ourselves increasingly surrounded by drywall, plastic, and handheld slot machines.

But at night, we can still find a way to be surrounded by wonder. Even in urban areas, there are Dark Sky initiatives being put in place that allow for the movement of a city while still respecting the sky and the nature beneath it.

Tonight, as various countries around the globe are looking out their window going, “wow it’s light out so late now,” take it as an opportunity to romance yourself and your neighbors. Don’t bother with the Big Light. Turn on a lamp. Light a candle. Turn off your exterior lights. Let the evening fade into sunset and dusk and twilight and dark. Put on a record and let yourself fade with it.

As DarkSky International puts it, light pollution is reversible. We just have to turn around and turn it off.

There are DarkSky chapters around the globe. Find your chapter to get involved here.