Futility in numbers..?

I wonder how many people my great-great-grandmother knew? In the early 1800s, I wonder how large the average social circle was? When you read Jane Austen, the hunger for contact with new people is palpable. Extroverts must have found it so difficult to be content with reading and walks in the country, when they secretly craved the company of other people whom they hadn't known since birth. Perhaps they felt a yearning for something which they couldn't put into words, an uneasy feeling that their horizons were too small? Of course there were always big cities, parties, theatres, the Opera... but for the majority they were once-in-a-lifetime treats, or marvels only heard of from others fortunate enough to experience them.

I know so many people - through work and years of involvement in various communities - that I quite often am lost for a name when someone smiles and speaks to me in the street. It happened yesterday. I have learnt to make non-commital conversation and ask vague questions cleverly crafted to give me clues to the person's identity.

I have never tried to count, but I must have known literally thousands of people by name over 48 years. And then there are the people I see regularly, whose names I may never know but who nevertheless form a part of my interior landscape. The people in my dreams may well have real lives - they must come from somewhere, and my dreams are densely-populated.

So - my great-great-grandmother? I bet she was in daily contact with 50 people at the most. There would be family of course, and close relatives, and people in her village who were regular faces... perhaps a travelling salesman or two, and an awareness of Queen Victoria's existence, which probably didn't impact much in a tiny Northern village.

I can't help thinking how much less stressful it must have been. So much of my brain is given over to classifying people by whether or not I already know them, whether I can remember their name, whether they remind me of someone I already know (I read that women are especially prone to this). How restful to go to bed knowing that all the people you knew and loved were in your thoughts, rather than waiting their turn...

I suspect, though I'll never know, that there was far less angst and feeling futile back then. How could you not feel you mattered when you were one of only 50 or so significant people in your life? Whereas I'm aware of being one of 6.75 billion.

Back then, news travelled slowly. If you heard of a disaster it was dreadful - but by the time you heard of it, there was nothing you could do. Whereas now we hear the news and see it as it happens (see my poem 'Overload' below) and there is immense pressure on us - each one of us - to make some response and try to help.

Well - we can't always help. I am desperately sorry for the people involved in the shooting in Belgium, but I can't change the outcome by my feelings. And yet - there they are. I am suddenly projecting back in time, imagining how I would have felt had it happened to my children, remembering the kindness of the people I met in Belgium over 25 years ago, grieving a little with them...

Is it awful to say that I think we put too much pressure on ourselves by this incessant involvement in something which is none of our business? Of course there are many occasions when it is helpful to send money, and we're quite good at that, I think - but even that can be a way of distancing ourselves. And perhaps we're right to.

If there is some disaster, I tend not to listen to the news for a few days. I have decided to protect myself from the immediacy of it, because it makes me feel helpless. Perhaps it is not unfeeling to decide that I cannot emote for the whole of humankind, whatever the media decree. Maybe I am right to protect that small part of my brain which is NOT coping with the stress of an exploding social network? And yet here I am on the Internet, compounding the problem. Could I have become a People Junkie?

Ultimately we all seek to 'matter' to somebody, as we seem to matter less and less to ourselves. I think this is what is behind the celebrity cult, the efforts of unknowns to become known. If they are known to 3 million viewers, then possibly there is some meaning to their life after all.

I'm not sure that we are any better off in terms of emotional well-being than my great-great-grandmother was.

What do you think?