The world isn’t as small as people make you believe.
We’ve all heard it—“It’s a small world!” Usually uttered when you run into your dentist at a concert three states away, or discover your new coworker went to high school with your cousin. These coincidences feel magical, meaningful, like proof that everything’s connected and the planet has somehow shrunk.
But here’s what that phrase obscures: the world is staggeringly, almost incomprehensibly vast.
There are nearly eight billion people living lives you’ll never glimpse. Entire cities where you don’t know a single soul. Languages you’ve never heard spoken. Customs, cuisines, problems, and joys that exist completely outside your awareness. Right now, someone is falling in love in a place whose name you couldn’t pronounce. Someone else is solving a problem you didn’t know existed.
The “small world” feeling is really just pattern recognition—our brains lighting up when randomness occasionally aligns. But that occasional alignment only seems remarkable because the default state is vastness. For every chance encounter, there are millions of near-misses, paths that never cross, people who remain strangers forever.
This matters because when we believe the world is small, we stop looking beyond our immediate sphere. We assume our experience is representative, that our bubble captures the essential truth of things. We become intellectually and emotionally provincial without realizing it.
The world is large. Inconveniently, thrillingly large. There’s more to see, learn, and understand than you could manage in a dozen lifetimes. And that’s not a limitation—it’s an invitation.