This article is riffing on some ideas in found in this 2011 article that is very much worth the read.

There are 8 billion or so people going about their business. Suppose 1 hour of consumable content is produced per 1000 people per day (whether it be books, shows, poetry, video, etc.). Then, suppose that 0.1% of that is truly good content (whatever “good” means to you).

Under these assumptions, 8000 hours of good content is produced per day, and there’s 8 million hours of content that you need to sift through in order to find that good content.

With far less than 24 hours per day to spend on content consumption, that’s a lot of stuff that is simply impossible for you to consume.

We can tweak the numbers and assumptions and things don’t improve much. We can reduce 8 billion to 400 million if we’re only interested in English works by native English speakers (I doubt this is particularly accurate of anyone). That’s still 400 hours of good content per day.

0.1% might be generous when it comes to how much is good. But there’s still 4 hours per day for 0.001%, or 1 in 10,000 hours of content being good. And no matter how strict you make this percentage, the amount of media you have to sift through to find the good stuff doesn’t change. Reducing this percentage doesn’t reduce your chances of missing out on something good, it just means you waste far more energy trying to find the good stuff in the first place.

In any case, there’s a lot of good stuff out there. Which we won’t experience. And this doesn’t even factor how much good has already been created. Jules Verne, Dostoyevsky, Confucius–an endless list.

And that’s a good thing. I’m glad humanity is more complex, more creative, than I or any single person can comprehend. If all of humanity, all of its creations, could fit in a single mortal mind, that’d be an infinite shame.

But there’s no such infinite shame. Instead we have an infinite, human text. There is always much, much more to discover. To hear, feel, think.