The world is bigger than you can imagine - by Scott Sumner
The Pursuit of Happiness
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The world is bigger than you can imagine<br>Why it is difficult to evaluate an economy
Scott Sumner<br>Jun 04, 2026
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This post will begin with some silly dorm room philosophy, but eventually I’ll extend the idea to something that I’m actually qualified to discuss—the macroeconomy.<br>It has become an overused cliche that the universe is so vast that the puny human mind is unable to even imagine its scale. So let me begin with a claim that might be more controversial; a human life is so vast that a person cannot reasonably evaluate their own life. Try to sum up your life? It’s probably impossible.<br>The Pursuit of Happiness is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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It sounds a bit arrogant for me to tell other people that they cannot evaluate their own life, so I’ll stick to my own example. If it doesn’t apply to you, that’s fine. I won’t try to press the point. Perhaps I’m different.<br>In your vision, there is a blind spot that you don’t notice. The brain sort of fills in the gap, making it seem like you see the entire field of vision. I suspect that life is sort of like that. My mind gives me the impression that I can look back on my entire life, but all I’m seeing are a few tiny fragments.<br>When I was nine years old, time seemed to go by very slowly. My age nine life must have been vastly richer than my age 70 life, with lots more happiness and pain, boredom and drama. It was one of the most important parts of my life, at least in “utility” terms. And yet I recall almost nothing of that year, perhaps just one or two dozen events. But that’s not even a single day for a nine-year old!<br>Here’s another way of looking at things. I sometimes try to categorize my life by type of event. But the more I look, the more I see. You have school, and work, and time spent with friends. Then there are the days where you are sick. There are days spent traveling. That includes both lots of vacations and lots of travel for work. And time spent at work is itself quite diverse, featuring lectures, research, office hours, committee meetings, lunch conversations, commuting time, etc. And those are just the tip of the iceberg.<br>At age 70, I will occasionally recall some important past event that I had completely forgotten. Clearly, I had not completely forgotten it, but the memory was inaccessible most of the time, including those times when I try to look back and evaluate my life. The sudden recollection of one of those deeply buried memories triggers a feeling analogous to deja vu, but different. It triggers the feeling that life is much bigger than I had thought, that much more has happened to me than I can recall at any one time. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows coined the term “sonder” for this feeling.<br>There’s also a vast amount of time spent on things that are more passive than play, work and school. Thus, I’ve read many books and seen even more films. How should I think about the part of my life immersed in alternative worlds through the narrative arts? This is from the Taiwanese film YiYi, which I’ve seen twice:<br>Pangzi: My uncle says we live three times as long since man invented movies.<br>Ting-Ting: How can that be?<br>Pangzi: It means movies give us twice what we get from daily life.
I occasionally think about those medieval peasants that were not able to go into a dark theatre at age 12 and have their minds blown by the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Substitute Star Wars if you are a decade younger, or The Matrix if you are Gen X.) I’ve spent a lot of my life immersed in films, many of which are far more engrossing than my “real life”. How should I think about that time?<br>When most people evaluate their lives, they probably think about career success or failure and their family life. That’s fine, but is it possible that we underrate the importance of all the time we spent on hobbies like collecting stuff or watching sports or listening to our favorite music in college or using drugs or hiking in the wilderness or lots of other “trivial” pursuits? Are we actually evaluating our life, or are we evaluating the official version of the most important parts of life? In some ways, artists like Borges, Conrad, Velazquez, Cezanne, Kubrick and Dylan seem more real to me, a bigger part of my life, than many casual friends I’ve had over the years.<br>The film It’s a Wonderful Life probably describes the way that many people visualize looking back on their lives. But an honest appraisal of my life would have to include It’s a Wonderful Life. The two hours spent watching that film (big screen of course) was much more engrossing than the two hours right before of after I watched the film, when I probably did something boring and eminently forgettable. If someone asked me to “look back on my life”, I would not start by saying “Well let’s see, I...