Every person you meet today has their own worries and joys, just as full as yours. Tap anyone in the crowd and see what they're dealing with.
IllustrationA demonstration of a principle. The people in the crowd and their worries are made-up examples, not data. What you enter isn't stored or sent anywhere unless you save your result yourself.
The yellow figure is you. Tap anyone.
You
You worry about what others think of you.
Tap anyone in the crowd.
About 47% of the time, people are thinking about something other than what they're doing. That's what a study found in which about 2,250 adults reported via their phones what they were doing and thinking about (Killingsworth and Gilbert, 2010). Whom exactly they think about, the study didn't measure. But their heads are full of their own things, and there's little room left for a random passer-by.
In your story you're the main character. In theirs you're a passer-by.
It sounds sad, but it's a relief. Hardly anyone dwells on your decisions, because everyone has enough of their own. You can use that space for yourself.
Related articleNobody's watching you as much as you think →A quiz in 4 situations: how many people actually notice you.How it works
The crowd is an illustration. The people and their worries are made-up examples, and the ratio of hard to good days in the crowd (14 : 11) measures nothing. The scales only show how many people one figure stands for; the world population (8.2 billion) is a rounded UN estimate. The 47% is the share of random moments in which people reported thinking about something else; three quarters of the sample were in the US, and depending on how the question is asked, the share comes out between roughly 12% and 60% (Seli et al., 2018).
Whatever you add to the crowd stays only in this browser window. Nothing is stored or sent.
Sources
- Killingsworth, M. A. and Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, 330(6006), 932
- United Nations (2024). World Population Prospects 2024
- Seli, P., Beaty, R. E., Cheyne, J. A., Smilek, D., Oakman, J. and Schacter, D. L. (2018). How pervasive is mind wandering, really? Consciousness and Cognition, 66, 74–78
