Everyone

I love counting things, statistics, analysing data, and finding out things I never knew or never realised in the process.  This often leads me to ask questions that you instinctively give an answer to without really thinking about it, in this case the question is, how many people have you met?   The answer instinctively is to say hundreds, maybe even thousands, but when you actually stop and think about it, that question isn't that easy to answer.

The first thing you must remove is the ambiguity of the question, that naturally leads you to ask what is defined as "meeting" someone?  For the sake of this post I am going to define this as someone who you have spoken to, or interacted with, either physically or digitally, how well you know that person is irrelevant for now, we will discuss that aspect later. 

Armed with this definition, the first thing to do is to break your life down into logical partitions, these can be places, or time periods, or any delimitation you desire, as long as it helps you process your life up until this point in a structured way.  For me personally, I find it easiest to divide my life into partitions that are attached to places in particular, schools, college, university, neighbourhoods, workplaces, and training facilities.  These account for most people I have met, on top of these I then added friends who don't fit into any of the above, family, people who I met through others, and sexual partners.  Finally I added the people I met online through various websites, forums, social networks, and other places where I have engaged on a one-on-one basis with people.

Using approximate figures for each component and adding them all up to arrive at a final figure, I have concluded that I have met around 1,400 people.  This doesn't include everyone that I knew of, or they knew of me, but we never interacted.  It also does not include people who were present in the same places but we knew nothing of each other.

What I find interesting about this figure is that it isn't what I was expecting it to be.  I don't know if I was expecting it to be lower, or to be higher, but still something about it surprised me.  When you break it down further and split it into two groups, those you got to know well and those you only knew in passing, the split is around 10:90 with 140 people being those I knew well and the remaining 1,260 being people I didn't know that well.  What's more, if you return to the question of how well you know people and extend the number to include everyone that was excluded above, you still arrive at a number that is surprisingly low to me, approximately 4,000 people.

I live in the UK, which has a population of approximately 66 million people.  Even using the larger figure of 4,000 people, that represents 0.006% of the UK population I have met or known in passing, or have had the opportunity to meet if I had taken the chance.  The minuteness of this number puts into perspective the incredulity we often attach to not having met certain people.  Never having met "the one" for example, if you believe in that mentality, becomes less foreboding when you consider how few people you have actually met.  Even if you were to draw at straws and include people from social media who you've never actually had a conversation with, and who probably don't even know you exist, you still barely scratch the surface in terms of reach.

There is a long held theory that you can connect any two people through six degrees of separation, whilst that can be hard to believe at first, it becomes less so when you consider the mathematics behind this concept.  Using the figure of 4,000 people for example from above, you only need to raise it to the power of 4 before you have a number that is higher than the total number of people who have ever lived throughout the entirety of human history and by quite a margin. 

The conclusion you can draw from this whole thought experiment is that the circle of people you will meet in your lifetime is incredibly small compared to the size of humanity as a whole but it doesn't take that many people to reach everyone. There is a statistic that I came across which I find interesting that says approximately 80% of tweets on Twitter are produced by 10% of Twitter users.  Knowing this statistic changes your perception of the site quite a bit, for one it makes it a lot easier to understand how compressed the "source" material or "root" of the platform is and it makes it a lot easier to understand how much churn is involved when it comes to the way others interact with that content. 

Applying this to real life you can say those 10% of Twitter users that produce so much content are akin to the handful of people in towns and cities that at least appear to know everything about everyone.  These people exist even in large cities that have millions of people who live there, still bubbles and communities emerge and you eventually see that only a small number of people are very well connected, the rest are much more insular by comparison.  In other words, your social network offline is likely to be either very small or disproportionately large compared to everyone you know.