There is a theory, beloved by motivational speakers and LinkedIn carousels, that you are connected to every human being on earth through six degrees of separation. Six handshakes, and you’re holding hands with a Mongolian shepherd. Six introductions, and you’ve reached a fisherman in Tierra del Fuego who has never heard of you and, frankly, has fish to deal with.

This is a beautiful idea. It is also doing a lot of work for a statistic that has never once made anyone feel less alone at 2am.

Let us do some arithmetic. Not the cruel kind. Just the kind that tells the truth.

The average human life, lived at a reasonable pace in a reasonably populated place, produces about 80,000 encounters. That is the upper ceiling — the cashier who handed you change, the man who held the elevator, the woman who sneezed on the 5A and made brief, apologetic eye contact. Encounters. Not meetings. Not people. Encounters.

Strip it down to people you actually spoke to, whose name you caught, whose face you could pick out of a lineup: somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 over a lifetime, depending on how much you move and how often you talk to strangers at bus stops.

Strip it further to people you have met more than once: a few thousand, optimistically.

Strip it to the people whose lives you are actually tracking — whose promotions register, whose heartbreaks matter, who you would call if something happened: Robin Dunbar gives you 150. He has been giving us 150 for thirty years. We keep arguing with him. He keeps being right.

Now add the ones you actively dislike.

They count too. Contempt is expensive cognitive real estate. The colleague whose laugh makes your jaw tighten. The relative who has, for twenty years, been wrong about everything with extraordinary confidence. The ex who appears in your head uninvited during otherwise pleasant dinners. They are in the 150. They are in your world. They are paying no rent and they know it.

So here is where we arrive, without fanfare: your world — the inhabited, emotionally furnished, actually-experienced world — is perhaps 199 people. It is not 8 billion. It was never 8 billion. Eight billion is an integer. It is not a world.
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Now consider Taylor Swift.

At the time of writing, Taylor Swift has 350 million Instagram followers. She has filled stadiums on six continents. The Eras Tour was attended by approximately 10 million people, each of whom left with a friendship bracelet and the unshakeable conviction that Taylor would understand them.

Taylor Swift’s actual world is, by all observable evidence, about twelve people.

There is a rotating cast of close friends, a mother who appears at critical moments, a boyfriend whose name the internet knows better than his own family does, a handful of collaborators, and a security team that has presumably heard things they will take to their graves. The rest — the 350 million, the 10 million, the stadiums — are encounters. Enormous, loud, bracelet-filled encounters. But encounters.

She moves through her 199 the same way you move through yours. She has people she lights up for. People she is tired of. Probably one or two she cannot quite bring herself to remove from the list. She calls her mother. She texts the same four people when something goes wrong. She too has a that person who always makes her feel worse about herself but she hasn’t figured out how to stop seeing them yet.

The scale is different. The arithmetic is identical.
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Which brings us to the fisherman in Tierra del Fuego.

He is six handshakes from you. He is also, in every meaningful sense, not in your world. He is not in Taylor Swift’s world. He is not in the Mongolian shepherd’s world. They are all connected, in the way that airports are connected — technically, structurally, via a chain of transfers that nobody is actually making.

The world is not small.

Your world is small. Mine too. Everyone’s.

199 people, give or take. Some of them chosen. Some inherited. Some that arrived and never quite left. Some you would not have chosen in a hundred years, and yet here they are, fully furnished in your interior life, occupying square footage you did not offer.

That is the whole of it. That is the world as it is actually lived.

Six degrees of separation is a party trick. One hundred and ninety-nine people is a life.

You can’t always choose carefully who makes the list. The least you can do is look carefully at everyone who already has.
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