117 Billion
I have this really bad habit of waking up around 2am and not being able to fall back to sleep. Often, I’m up for the day before the bars in my town are even close to closing.
A few weeks ago when this happened, I did the worst possible thing. I picked up my phone and began scrolling. This, to me, is the equivalent of waving the white flag in a dispute. It means I know I’m not falling back to sleep, so it’s futile to even try.
I wondered, as I scrolled, with approximately 8 billion people alive right now, how many people had ever lived.
The number blew my mind: 117 billion.
117 billion (including the 8 billion alive right now). This is dating back approximately 200,000 years.
At that point, it’s estimated that there were about 30,000 people on earth. Think about that. That’s like the population of a decent-sized town. In 10,000 B.C., there were one million people. That’s fewer people than currently live in the city of Philadelphia. In 8,000 B.C. there were about 5 million people on Earth. Which is about the same population as Brooklyn and Queens combined and significantly less than New York City.
There were about 200 million people on earth 2,000 years ago, which is a little more than half of the population of the United States now. And there were about 1 billion people by 1800. In the 100 years between 1900 and 2000, the population quadrupled.
Here’s my point: a lot of people have lived. A lot. They also all died. Which you will too. Decades from now, I hope. But it will happen.
Try to enjoy the little things more. Take walks. Blast music. Eat oysters. Tell five strangers today to have a great day. Delete Instagram. Jump in freezing cold water in the winter. Write funny notes to your kids, just because. Go to a concert. Drive with the windows down, even if it messes up your hair. Because, honestly, time is flying by. Whether you realize it or not.
I bet, at least some of the 109 billion people who were here and who are now gone, thought it’d last forever. It didn’t. It doesn’t. Let’s not miss it.
