Our lives are totally dependent on people; we work around people, work with people, against people...
Everything we do is for, with or because of another person. And, even if we are doing something alone, for ourselves, unless we're locked inside our own houses with all forms of communication turned off, we'll never be doing it fully alone.
This got me thinking, how many people do we see on a day-to-day basis? Those of us who live in a city, or commute to work are likely to see hundreds of people everyday whom we'll never lapse eyes on again in our lifetime. How many people do we meet everyday is another question, how many of these people we see do we actually interact with and spark up some conversation, be it through work or just being polite?
So even if we only met two or three new people everyday (although I would say it's more) and we live for 80 years, taking almost 10 away for our mostly ignorant childhoods, that's 70 years of meeting 2 people every day. This would mean we met, on absolute average, 51,100 in our lifetimes. Yet, there's no way we could name them all, not even half.
Seeing someone is completely different to meeting someone. But on the other hand, no matter how mind boggling it is, in years to come we may cross paths, and become friends with one of the people we sat next to on a train, walked past in the street or were served by in Asda when doing our weekly shop.
When we think about our futures, we think who we will be with and where we will live with who, not what colour our hair will be or what condition our teeth will be in. Because, at the end of the day, being alone is no fun so the majority of us constantly surround ourselves with people whom we can interact and have a laugh with.
There's 6,840,507,000 people in the world; that's nearly 7 billion people. And we won't even see half of them in our lifetimes.
I don't know how many people we see in our lives, but it doesn't take a Rocket Scientist to work out that we see alot.
So I ask myself, when one person says something horrible or does something to me, why do I worry when there's another 6,840,506,999 people in the world?
wow
ReplyDeleteThat's deep. Far too deep for a Friday night anyway!!
ReplyDeleteMaybe the world is a much simpler place due to the fact we only meet a fraction of the people in it, we base opinions on people due to the fact we secretly find something unique about them, maybe meeting everyone in the whole world would be a disappointment because people we know would seem less unique..
ReplyDeleteYou say why worry about one mean person saying something when theres 6,840,506,999 others out there? Well imagine out of all them people how many of them are mean?
Finding people to spend time with is trial and error, think of the 51,000 people you calculated we meet in our lifetime, how many really good people will you surround yourself with in your life that youll actually be able to spend time with, i think meeting everyone in the world would open my eyes to how man bad people there are in the world rather than how many nice people there are...
I loved your topic though and understand what your saying. Rather than think of the one mean person compared to everyone in the world, try think of the bad action they did towards you and compare that to what great things your friends and family would do for you :)