A Conversation for Ask h2g2

How many people do you meet in a lifetime?

Post 1

Just Bob aka Robert Thompson, plugging my film blog cinemainferno-blog.blogspot.co.uk

I saw a statistic about something that happens about 40 times a year in the UK.* This was out of a base of a million and a half times when the opportunity to do it occurred. I tried to make the point that this makes it so rare it is not really worth mentioning, and it made me think it might be on the scale where you are statistically unlikely to ever meet anyone who has done it.
I wonder if anyone has ever made an estimate of how many different people a modern person is likely to meet and interact with over their life. I would count in this actually exchanging words, not just passing obliviously in the street.
I reckon the total is probably less than a hundred thousand. What do you think?

* It was people being caught using a stand-in to take the driving test for them, but that isn't what I am posting about.


How many people do you meet in a lifetime?

Post 2

KB

Hmm, no idea.

A lot depends on what you do for a living. Someone who works on the till in a busy supermarket, or a police officer, probably exchanges words with hundreds of different people in a typical day, without exaggerating. A farmer, considerably less. Ten might be an exceptionally busy day.


How many people do you meet in a lifetime?

Post 3

Rev Nick - dead man walking (mostly)

I was in the military, and directly embedded later, for over 37 years. So I got around and met a lot of people of a number of nations. I would still say that I met and conversed with maybe 400 to 600 tops. And that count would include my growing and schooling years.

It might be noted that the work that I did often brought me back into contact with folks known before.


How many people do you meet in a lifetime?

Post 4

KB

No doubt about it, I probably go through most days speaking to the same people 10-20 people. I'm sure we all do - we all probably live our lives by a certain routine in some form or another.


How many people do you meet in a lifetime?

Post 5

Baron Grim

Most of my days and hours are spent either at work behind a locked door or sitting at home with my pets.

But then a couple of nights each week typically, I'll go to the bar.

Since I remember fewer than probably 1% of the people I "meet" there, do they count?


How many people do you meet in a lifetime?

Post 6

bobstafford

Interesting question and the answers will vary dramatically, mine is north of
50,000 not including repeated daily contact with co workers

Time period 20 years


How many people do you meet in a lifetime?

Post 7

paulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant

There were hundreds of people in my elementary and high schools, and thousands at the college where I studied. Then I attended graduate school and worked at the reference desk of a public library for decades. I meet people at the pool where I swim, in the stores and shopping malls where I shop, and at rehearsals of the choral society I sing in. I'm the secretary for the association that runs the trailer park where I live [104 trailers].

100,000 sounds plausible.


How many people do you meet in a lifetime?

Post 8

Bluebottle

smiley - headhurtsEven if, say, you lived on an island that had a population that was stable at 135,000 that population would fluctuate considerably as new people are born, others move away and/or move here and there'd be a considerable number of tourists. And you wouldn't necessarily speak to every single person – ie, farmers, people who work antisocial hours and don't go out shopping, preferring to have home deliveries...

Since my job changed, I probably only speak to the same dozen or so people each day.smiley - shrug

<BB<


How many people do you meet in a lifetime?

Post 9

Hoovooloo

With regard to meeting someone who had someone sit their driving test for them, you would have to first ask the question of whether this kind of activity is concentrated in any particular community or region. For instance, if half the people doing it are Scousers, your chances of knowing someone whose done it are affected by how far you live from Liverpool. My driving instructor was from a racial minority, and he described to me in detail once how "they're all at it", i.e. many of the people from a particular minority in the area were driving on licences obtained by this method. How he knew this, I never asked.

Some fag-packet calcs:
30 people in my class at primary school. Talked to all of them loads of times. On average talked to one sibling and one parent of each at least once. So there's 100.
30 people in the class above, the class below, and the parallel class. Probably talked to each of them a couple of times. Another hundred.
Probably 25 staff at my primary, 50 staff at middle and 75 staff at high school. So there's another hundred.
30 kids in my middle school class, three classes in my year. Another hundred.
Same number in the year above and the year below, but probably only talked to half of them or less... so another hundred between them.
Siblings, parents of all those put together, another hundred.
While at primary and middle school I went to church. Easily another hundred people spoken to there.
While at primary and middle school I encountered all the various people you see and talk to as a result - doctors, supply teachers, visiting presenters, etc. Easily another hundred.
Given my grandparents' large families, visiting relations gives another hundred or so.
So: so far I've only covered my life up to starting high school, and I've got nine hundred.
In high school there were about 1000 kids over the five year groups. I'd guess I spoke at least once with almost all of them... but I moved through the years, so the number is more than 1000. But let's be conservative, and say 1100. Running total two thousand.
Shopkeepers, bus drivers, swimming instructors, railway ticket inspectors, dentist, doctor, hairdresser, neighbours, friends and other random encounters, a couple of hundred at least.
Membership of the local theatre group, must have added a few hundred through that. Call it two hundred.
So I'm on nearly two and a half thousand before I've got to university.
I'm going to go rogue and say just double that for the time I was there.
And add about a couple thousand since.

So my estimate is that so far I'm on about six to eight thousand. Make sense?


How many people do you meet in a lifetime?

Post 10

Hoovooloo

Further to that - I'll be surprised if my number ever gets as high as twenty thousand, based on the estimate above. My rate of encountering people has dropped severely since university, I think. Settling down'll do that. That said, if I have kids, I suspect the number will head back up somewhat quickly...


How many people do you meet in a lifetime?

Post 11

paulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant

It's been said that, on average, there are about six degrees of separation between you and everyone else in the world.
http://www.sciencealert.com/are-we-all-really-connected-by-just-six-degrees-of-separation

This hasn't been proven conclusively. Maybe it can't ever be proven. Maybe it's just wrong. But If even one of the people you've interacted with has a large network off friends and acquaintances, and those who were interacted with have a lot of connections, who knows? Have you ever talked to your congressman or member of parliament? Have you been to a motivational seminar? Or a professional convention like a library association or bar association or Women's Institute organizational meeting? How about a protest march? The numbers add up.

As for getting connected to countries or continents far away, remember that that foreign student in your class or neighborhood likely knows most of the people in his or her village, and that there's likely someone in that village who has been a delegate to national or even international meetings.


How many people do you meet in a lifetime?

Post 12

Sol

This year for work I will definitely meet around 350 new people and get to know them reasonably well, while I am interacting with them which will be every day for a month, every day for two weeks, or a couple of times a week over three months. This is fairly typical of my working life for two of the last 20 years and foir the forseable future, considerably fewer than four or five years more, but not ridiculously more than the rest.

I also work with around 300 colleagues and it's possible I will interact in a reasonably significant way with a lot of them over time at least once. That's about three times more than for ten years, but about the same as the other ten years or so.

That's just work. But the rest of my meeting new people is probably about the same as everybody else's.

It's too many people, actually. There are people I really should remember and just don't. I wonder if the quoted number is about right for actually having some chance of them sticking?


How many people do you meet in a lifetime?

Post 13

Chris Morris

paulh:

six degrees of separation could well be true; having looked at the facebook friends lists of family members I find that my daughter shares a friend with one of Gnomon's daughters and z is the friend of a friend that my brother was in a relationship with 40 years ago.

As for knowing people in real life, after teaching for 34 years my wife must have educated around 7000 people.


How many people do you meet in a lifetime?

Post 14

2legs - Hey, babe, take a walk on the wild side...

either lots and lots... if It can be as little an interation as a 'hello' in the street, or saying thankyou to a girl in a till at a shop, then the number oculd be really high, plus all the thousands and thousands of people I've met in pubs, bars, nightclubs, etc.... I've visited practically every dept at my hospital so that oughta add up, plus in my working years, then back to university plus post grad uni, before which college, then schools etc... smiley - alienfrown hundreds of thousaands is possible I guess smiley - headhurts


How many people do you meet in a lifetime?

Post 15

Rev Nick - dead man walking (mostly)

I must read more carefully - I understood the question to be "how many people do you know in a lifetime?"

Indeed, I have probably met a good 8,000 or more whose names I didn't remember mere minutes later. A discussion of this or that, and move on. National federal-government conferences can be like that.


How many people do you meet in a lifetime?

Post 16

paulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant

Remembering people's names doesn't come easily to me.


How many people do you meet in a lifetime?

Post 17

swl

There's an exhibit at the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art where the artist has put a list of everybody he has ever met on the wall - http://generationartscotland.org/artists/douglas-gordon/gallery/list-of-names-(random)/

There's something strangely compelling about it when you see it on a three-storey interior wall.


How many people do you meet in a lifetime?

Post 18

paulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant

There's a memorial in Prague, with the names of Jewish victims of the Holocaust written on the walls.smiley - rose


How many people do you meet in a lifetime?

Post 19

Hoovooloo

How many of them had you met?


How many people do you meet in a lifetime?

Post 20

Orcus

All of them, but he had to write their names down somewhere...smiley - bigeyes

(sorry, that maybe an inappropriate thing to joke about - hey ho)

Since I'm an educator type person I don't even want to think about this - thousands and thousands and thousands every year.


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