A Message on Caring – Part 1

I’m not very good at feeling the size of large numbers. Once you start tossing around numbers larger than 1,000 (or maybe even 100), the numbers just seem “big”.

Consider Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. If you told me that Sirius is as big as a million Earths, I would feel like that’s a lot of Earths. If, instead, you told me that you could fit a billion Earths inside Sirius … I would still just feel like that’s a lot of Earths.

The feelings are almost identical. In context, my brain grudgingly admits that a billion is a lot larger than a million, and puts forth a token effort to feel like a one-billion-Earths-sized star is bigger than a one-million-Earths-sized star. But out of context — if I weren’t anchored at “a million” when I heard “a billion” — both of these numbers just feel vaguely large.

I feel a little respect for the bigness of numbers if you pick really, really large numbers. If you say, “One followed by 100 zeroes,” then this feels a lot bigger than a billion. But it certainly doesn’t feel (in my gut) like it’s 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 times bigger than a billion. Not in the way that four apples internally feels like twice as many as two apples. My brain can’t even begin to wrap itself around this sort of magnitude differential.

This phenomenon is related to scope insensitivity, and it’s important to me because I live in a world where sometimes the things I care about are really, really numerous.

For example, billions of people live in dire poverty, with hundreds of millions of them deprived of basic needs and/or dying from disease. And though most of them are out of my sight, I still care about them.

The loss of a human life with all its joys and all its sorrows is tragic no matter what the cause, and the tragedy is not reduced simply because I was far away, or because I did not know of it, or because I did not know how to help, or because I was not personally responsible.

Knowing this, I care about every single individual on this planet. The problem is, my brain is simply incapable of taking the amount of caring I feel for a single person and scaling it up by a billion times. I lack the internal capacity to feel that much. My care-o-meter simply doesn’t go up that far.

And this is a problem.

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