A thought experiment: try to recreate everything you’ve done since you started reading this article. Every thought, every distraction, every movement, every feeling. Have you wanted some coffee? Have you thought about closing this page? Have you scratched that itch on the side of your head? Have you wondered if you should call the kids today? Have you thought about what you’ll do for lunch? Now, take each of these things we can barely construct in the shortest moments of our lives—the impulses, the questions, the longings, the satisfactions—and multiply that by the minutes of the day, the days of the year, and the years of our lives. Then, multiply this again by seven billion distinct persons walking this world in any 24-hour period. Where to start? The possibilities, the decisions, the desires, and the frustrations are unaccountable and uncountable. No graph, no data set, and no equation can incorporate all of the complexities and nuances of a single human person, let alone seven billion of them.

My latest at The American Conservative.  Too read it all, please go here–

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/biography-and-the-art-of-being-human/