On being anything but elite

There are almost 8 billion people alive on the planet, right now. Eight thousand million humans. That’s 8,000,000,000. It’s a big number.

Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote that “Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.” There have been at least 100 billion humans since the first of our ancestors made that one giant step down from the trees for mankind. However, look to the future now, we’ve only just begun…there will come a point, where total membership of the human race, living and dead, may well be numbered in the trillions.

So…

How special are you? Are you a member of the elite or just one of the great unwashed? If you’re reading this blog, it’s most likely that you’re just like me in many ways, nothing like one in a million, just one of several billion. An average Joe or Joanna Bloggs, as it were.

But, we feel special inside, don’t we? We feel that we’re important, at least to that inner self. We don’t want to be just a number and so we try to fill our lives with activity and stuff – family, friends, jobs, cars, houses, holidays, hobbies…we also grasp at the very few people we perceive as being a little bit more special than us, celebrities, perhaps, great musicians, sportspeople, medal winners, Nobel laureates, world leaders, religious leaders, monarchs even. Achievers.

We grasp at them and feel that we know them through their presence in our world, their place at the top of some great pile. We queue to buy tickets to watch their performances on the pitch and their pitch-perfect playing. We follow their every move and hang on their every word through the lens of media, both social and unsocial…antisocial. We study them and watch in awe as they do their thing, whether that’s shaking it or sharing it.

When they die we mourn them like close friends, like relatives. We feel the loss, we are bereft. Another one of us gone. One of the special ones. When once we queued to see them incarnate, in the living flesh, we might now queue in our thousands to seem them lying in state. We want to feel connected, we want some of their special to magically be infused into our being. We don’t want to be ordinary, we want to be extraordinary, like them.