Life is good. More life means more good. There’s never too much life, and there’s never too many people. The more people working together in one body, the better. But it’s easy to lose sight of that.

In the Jungle

You’re by yourself in a jungle. How good do you think your life is going to be? You can hunt, yeah. But you need to be at the right place at the right time. If not, you might not catch anything. You can go hungry for days. You can’t sleep too well either. After all, there’s things hunting you too! If you don’t pay attention, they’ll eat you. So your sleep can’t be too deep. You always sleep with one eye open. You’re constantly exhausted. Tired and hungry. You get sick, and there’s no medicine. There’s no one to take care of you. You might even die. Die from something that was easily curable. Or you eat the wrong berries and you die. Or you get into some stupid accident, and there’s no one to help you.

Now there’s a group of 10 of you. You can hunt in more than one place now. If you don’t catch anything, someone else might. You’re not as hungry anymore. You’re not as tired either. You make an agreement. One of you will always be awake. You stay awake a part of the night. Someone else stays awake for another part of the night. If there’s any problems, you can wake each other up. When you get sick, someone can bring you water. If you have an accident, there’s people there to help you. There’s still danger, but not as much as being alone.

Now there’s 100 of you. Together, you’ve cleared out a portion of the jungle. Now you see more in every direction. If there’s a threat, now you have more time for warning. You feel safer. The night is also split between 100 people. You can sleep a lot better now. With 100 people, someone is always hunting. Others are gathering the berries that don’t have poison. Some got good at healing people. Some make baskets to carry the berries. Someone discovered you can make your own berries. Farming is born. And now, you have time to rest. You finally have truly free time. You remember the bamboo reed. You blew on it once. It made a nice sound. You have free time now, so you try to get good at it. Music is born. You’re happy.

Today

This scales all the way up to modern society. Think of all the people needed for you to talk to your friend on the phone. The computer chip designers. The people making the computer chips. The phone factory workers. The truck drivers who got the phone to the local distributor. The road pavers. The tire makers. The car makers. The people at the oil rig. The cashiers at the phone store. The software engineers. The cell tower operators. The farmers feeding all these people so that they can work. And on and on. Thousands upon thousands of people were involved just for you to talk to your friend. Rinse and repeat. Stoves. Cars. Hospitals. Massage chairs. Grocery stores. Fans and air conditioning. All of these require tons and tons of people. Would you like to go back to living in a jungle?

An equation

You can also see how quickly we discover things, based on how many people there are. Say it takes a billion hours to make a discovery. A discovery that makes life better. It would take one person over one hundred thousand years to make a discovery. That is, they would never make a discovery. If there’s a thousand people, then it would take them a bit over a century. With a million people, it takes them a few weeks. The more people there are, the less time it takes. The more people there are, the faster we make discoveries. And this is what we see. The number of people on earth has exploded. The number of discoveries has exploded. Discoveries that make life better.

The more people there are working together, the better life becomes. The people in the past couldn’t imagine what we have today. We can’t imagine what the future holds. We do know this though: more life is better. God told us to grow life, and that’s a blessing. When we do what God told us, we’ll have unthinkable wealth.