Have you ever looked at a hashtag’s page on Instagram? If you posted something with a pretty crazy hashtag, you could probably go and look at the page afterward and see your post.
However, today I saw someone who had posted with the hashtag #art, so I tapped the hashtag to see what else was there. I tapped over to recent and swiped down to refresh. A thought crossed my mind. I swiped to refresh again. All of the pictures were different. I swiped again, all of the pictures were different. I kept doing this and was in shock. I was swiping once every second or so, and every time, there were eight or nine more pictures.
I instantly felt like a tiny speck in a humongous world. If this was only one hashtag and every second there was more content than I could possibly keep up with, how many other things are happening every second in this huge world?
I had to find out. For the next 30 minutes, I immersed myself in the statistics of what happens every second. Every time you take a breath, what have other people done? I was dumbfounded. We might pretend to understand how many 7.53 billion people in the world is, but we really don’t. It is too many people for our mind to grasp.
Think of it like this: If from the time you’re 5 you met 100 people every. Single. Day, and you lived to be 78 years old, by the time you died, you would not have met even .04% of the world
It’s a great big world, and we will never come close to meeting even .1% of it.
So what do all of these people do? With so many people, there must be some interesting things happening. To take you through a little tour of the statistics I saw, I compiled a small list of things that happen every second in the world. All of these were taken and compared with multiple sources and many of them differed. However, they all had similar numbers. So, I don’t give these numbers to you as hard facts, but simply to help you understand the magnitude of the world we live in.
14 things that happen every second of every day:
- 1 airplane takes off
- 2 people die
- 4 babies are born
- 5 new Facebook profiles are created
- 32 sharks are killed
- 46 blog posts are published
- 75 Mcdonalds hamburgers sold
- 894 Instagram uploads
- 8,358 Tweets
- 48,051 photos taken
- 72,235 Google searches
- 77,315 Youtube videos are being watched
- 300,925 text messages sent
- 2,767,594 emails are sent
All of these numbers grow daily.
The world is a big place. You are .0000000001 percent of it. How will you use your life to affect the rest?