One of the most interesting aspects of human life, and one which has the largest effect on the way we live, is that we never move beyond living in a small world. There seems to be a hard limit that we have within us as human beings an ability to only deeply care and be concerned about so many people at a time. We can see human beings as abstractions beyond that limit, but without the sense of personal concern that makes us genuinely humane towards them. The end result of this is that while we can inhabit a great deal of social worlds, all of them end up being small worlds. We can theoretically inhabit enough small worlds to build up close connections with a great many people, but only a few of them can be close to us at any particular time, and like a medieval court, we must pick up and move from one place to another to get a real sense of what is going on anywhere, and must travel from one small world to another to preserve close connections with others outside of whatever small world we are in at the time.

One of the most momentous changes in human history as a whole, as well as in the lives of a great many people throughout history, was the move from village life to city life. Those people who have lived in both cities and villages have seen how it is that cities have offered isolation and anonymity within a vastly more crowded space, while villages offer a community where everyone knows your name, business, character, and personal and family history, but in such a way that to many people it feels uncomfortably close. There have been a wide variety of efforts within designers of urban and suburban and exurban spaces to design spaces that capture the desired balance between vulnerable isolation from those who could mean us harm who take advantage of the city to engage in acts of vandalism and petty crime and the vulnerability that comes from being too closely known and recognized by others. We want to be known but known on our own terms, not too closely to make it a burden, and that is a tricky matter. It is by no means easy to make sure that we have neighbors who are like us that we can get along with and get to know well, but not too well in most cases.

The small worlds nature of mankind can make a great many activities more interesting. I was watching a video on atmosphere modeling and, as might be expected, one of the problems that people face in trying to pay for pretty faces to show up at a high-end restaurant or bar to draw the men in was that most of the people who arrange for this only have a small amount of models on their rolodex or cell phone contacts and so there are issues with people seeing the same professional models at Las Vegas or Los Angeles restaurants and clubs over and over again, many of whom are not interested in chatting up or flirting with others (to say nothing about anything more) and are just there to collect their fee for the night. Similarly, small worlds can make tourism a challenge, in that random tourists visiting a country can get accosted by locals angry at what their country has done to them, without having had any involvement in the decision-making that led to the suffering of the local people of other countries. In both of these cases, and many others, there are small worlds that one can happen to be in, or not in, that shape our behavior and our expectations of others, and those who are not aware of the small world but only see their own small world affected by others react against something others can do little about.

What is the end of all of this? So long as we live as human beings, we are going to have to be aware that the words and actions have a reach and have consequences far beyond the people that they know about or care about. When the governments of nations engage in certain behavior, their thoughts are usually directed at other governments within that small world of political elites that they care about. But a great many ordinary people will suffer as a result of those actions who none of those governments care a great deal about when they make decisions that affect the lives of many millions of people. One of the things I look forward to in the world to come is having the ability to care about all of those who my words might reach, all who I might encounter, and all whose memory is dear to me, without having to worry about the barriers of distance and time. I think it will take some getting used to, but the thought that we might be able to escape the small worlds in which we live in is a comforting one to me, whenever that moment may come.