A Trillion Cold Hearts
MrBeast’s insight into the far future
MrBeast Is a Humble Man
There is this guy named MrBeast that pops up on my Facebook feed all the time. The videos looked like an excellent distraction so I watched a couple.
He seems your average dude, albeit with the ability to manifest crazy ideas into real life events. He gives away ridiculous prizes to people playing ridiculous games that can last days on end. We are talking million dollar prizes, or $456,000 for a real life Squid Game.
Wild Stuff.
I was curious about MrBeast because he is younger than me, I first heard his name connected to a cheeseburger, and someone is giving him enough money to build extravagant sets and give way obscenely large prizes.
So I googled him and found out he was a YouTube fairy tale. One of his biggest claims to fame is counting from 1 to 100,000 in 2017. The stunt took 40 hours, but he had to speed up parts of it because YouTube only allows you to upload up to 24 hours for a single video.
That video got him millions of views, so he made another video called “Counting to 200,000 (Road to a Mil[lion]).” Counting from 100,000 to 200,000 took him another 55 hours, which again had to be sped up in order to meet YouTubes upload limitations.
Have you ever counted out loud for 55 hours straight?
MrBeast was performing a stunt, but I think it gives us a wonderful insight into the world of larger numbers. That is because 100,000 is not a large number today.
Today, 100,000 is small. Having100,000 Twitter followers wouldn’t buy you dinner. 100,000 dollars won’t buy you an apartment, and 100,000 blades of grass only covers about a square meter of earth.
A 100,000 doesn’t get you much of anything.
If MrBeast was to read out the name of every American alive and each name took two seconds to say, (if my math is right, which it rarely is), about 185,888 hours or around 21 years. A good chunk of that list would be dead by the time he finished.
I am writing about this because I am very curious about:
our relationship to really big numbers.
Big numbers because fit into a theme in my professional and personal life. A regular theme in my day is that other people put me in intellectual positions where my human senses suddenly feel inappropriate. This happens with a lot of different ideas, but today I wanted to talk about numbers.
Not because big numbers are important. They are really important.
I want to talk about big numbers because sometimes they are so large, they lose their value. And sometimes, when we give them the value they deserve, we seem to lose our own human value.
Let us try an example.
10% of the world still lives in extreme poverty, which is $1.90 accounting for purchasing power parity. Which means that it is not, “Yeah but a $1.90 can take you really far in rural Africa”, But, “Actually, they have to live on $1.90 of rural African dollars.” 1
If we round up to a world population of 8 billion humans, 800,000,000 humans live on $1.90 a day. If MrBeast were to say all of their names out loud, that would take about 1,200 years.
Perhaps we will have solved extreme poverty by then.
However, I struggle to understand that number, and it doesn’t stop me from wanting to put money into a beggars cup on the street here in Oslo, even though I know that beggar is going to make more than $1.90 today. Last week I bought a busking magazine for 100 Norwegian Kroner, which is already 10 dollars-and the lady right behind me bought one as well.
So why do I feel that way? Why do I still buy more than one pair of shoes? Why do I rent a car for my holiday, or buy expensive coffees?
I have no clue. At the same time, though, I don’t think it is wrong.
Let’s make this whole exercise even more complicated.
Someday I could have 100 million descendants.
The very far future is difficult to grasp.
If things go well, we could have a trillion humans in the future(152,207 years of counting). A million trillion, why not (1,500,000,000,000 years counting). The rules are made up right now and there are at least 10⁷⁸ atoms in the universe, so everyone gets plenty of matter in the dataverse of the distant future.
How far in the future? Let us say 100,000,000 years (count: only 15 years).
If you argue that all of those lives have meaning, are important just because they are, then it gives us today an incredible amount of responsibility not to mess it up.
And intellectually, I can’t find a good reason for this not to be true. Does that mean it is absolutely correct? No, I dont.
The far future seems really important.
But I can’t convince myself that its importance is directly in relation to the size of the number.
It is hard to disagree that other humans have some sort of good, that they are worth some of your time and attention. That you should do something good for others.
If I could count out 800,000,000 million people, if I saw them walk by me one by one along a street somewhere, would I want to help them more than the man outside the supermarket?
Almost certainly. Though when? It would take me about 121 years to see them all. If I stood on a street corner at Times Square for the rest of my lift I could probably see about 360,000 people a year if I dont sleep, which would add up to about 18,000,000 people after 50 years.
So I wonder then, is this a failure of myself as a human? Is my intellect strong enough to know the truth, but my mind too weak to act on it? To see it in the reality that I experience every day?
Perhaps. But how much can I deny my daily experience, how can I deny what I see and experience in the world? If my instinct and my lived experience tells me that those numbers, those 800,000,000 million are important to me, but not 800,000,000 times more important than than the busker on the street corner, have I discovered a fault in myself?
If something feels wrong, though the numbers say it is right-do I need to work through this, hack my self as if I was a little wonky in my programming and there was another experience than my own that was more correct?
Do I stand in the way of my own goodness?
Is being a human, being all of our human, a weakness?
What is right and what is human
I don’t have a strong philosophy for this, I don’t know the right answer. I do feel that I know the wrong answer, though.
The key to me is that there is something about listening to your human. Human goodness, no matter how you want to maximize it, is intrinsically human. All parts of the human, not just the intellect.
So then, can we hack away the weaker parts of our human to find the part that is good, that is helpful. Save the best and throw away the rest? Find those biases and work them out of our system?
I don’t think so.
When I try to be absolute (and absoluteness is so intellectual), it lasts only so long. I have to eventually stop thinking because my brain begins to drain of feeling. My brain then feels numb and spongy behind my eyes, things I love seem foreign and distant.
Suddenly goodness does not feel worldly, it is an abstract perfection that I must negate my own feelings, my own experiences and intuitions to accept goodness.
And I think about those million trillion humans of the future, and I ask myself, do I want them to feel this way?
Do we need a trillion humans in the future chilling their hearts in concern for the next trillion? Which trillion will get to live the life they want, to feel the love and joy and art and abandon that we all, in some way, desire?
Who will get to be human in the end?
Do we all need to prune our senses and desires for the remainder of the universe’s existence?
So I am old enough and have hurt myself enough now to know that I can only last so long just living by my intellect and not listening to myself. We all need to be human because none of us should live a life where we don’t get to be human. You are a human, as much as the human you wish to help, and you need to help yourself.
I don’t know why the math is not everything in human life, but I don’t think it can be otherwise without making the wrong choice. Living only by your intellect will lead to catastrophic results, for yourself and maybe even for others as well.
And this is not weakness! This is being human. Again, competence does not require cognition. By extension I would also argue that doing the right thing does not (always) require cognition.
To Conclude with a caveat:
But I will never throw the numbers out the window. Your intellect, and the theories that come from what your intellect perceives, are wonderful tools.
My mind is tool that is meant to be used for the appropriate circumstances. If it doesn’t seem right, then my intellect might not be the right tool, or the only necessary tool, for the task at hand.
Dig into that toolbox and see what else you can use.
Yet when the intellect is appropriate, our knowledge, those numbers, those 800,000,000 million people, those trillion people, are all worth our attention and care. Let those numbers hit you, think about MrBeast’s effort to count them and realize the numbers as important as the seem.
So take them into consideration. Be flexible, though-there are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. You can care for the busker and the extremely poor. No one lives at 0 or 1, and if they tell you they do, listen with scepticism. And if they tell you they want to, listen to them with compassion.
So maybe don’t buy that luxury yacht, or that third car, or that second car, and give the money to people who need it. I am not you, and I do not know your mind. What I do think, though, is that goodness comes from within us, and that is where you need to measure it.
It is possible to be doing things right, even if they are not absolute. Do not follow the numbers absolutely, but don’t ignore them, either. There might not be a global maximum for goodness, but I think I might find the local.
Have the thought, and then listen closely, and see what your body says.
Originally published at https://charlield.substack.com on July 18, 2022.
