Magnitude

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about magnitude.  It’s a concept that humans seem to have a hard time fathoming.

It’s hard for a single person to understand what trillions of dollars worth of debt means.  It’s hard for a single person to understand that a relatively small percentage of Americans make up the bulk of the tax burden for the entire country.

People freak out about things like shark attacks.  They make sure to go inside in a lightning storm.  Their hands get sweaty when they’re about to board an airplane.

But all of those things are not very likely to get you killed.  If you get killed by a shark, lightning, or a plane crash then you should be proud.  You beat odds that even a lottery winner would be envious of.

Parents watch their children like a hawk; waiting for that predator lurking around every corner.  They limit internet usage; positive that an online personality will steal their child’s innocence.

But even those things are rare.  Crazy rare, in fact.  There are  over 300 million people in the US.  Less than 2% of violent crimes are kidnapping of juveniles.

And it’s all because we, as humans, can’t really fathom the idea of relative magnitude. All we can do is internalize things and make them personal even if they aren’t likely to ever personally affect us.

I read this article this morning about the dangerous sport of ‘car surfing.’ No doubt popularized by Styles and Teen Wolf, it seems that 58 people have died from it in the last 18 years.

58 people?  That’s not even worth mentioning.  While most will read that article and think to themselves, “Oooh, that’s dangerous.  I better not do that,” I instead think, “That low?  Sounds like a reasonably safe sport to take up.”

I suppose part of it is that it’s easy to control things like whether we get hit by lightning, eaten by a shark, or thrown from the top of a moving car.  In a world where nearly everything is out of our control, we might as well cling to the things that we can control.

It may only increase our safety by fractions of a percent, but the peace of mind that it brings may be worth all of the unreasonable worrying.

Is it really that we can’t fathom magnitude, or is it rather that we refuse to fathom magnitude because doing so would mean acceptance of a huge system that we’ve lost control of?