11.2 — What Everyone Is Doing Right Now

At this instant there are about eight billion people alive. This page works out roughly what they are doing, using the method from 11.1 and real statistics where they exist.

Every number here is an estimate with a stated method, and several are uncertain by a factor of two. That is the honest state of the question.

Sleep

How many people are asleep right now?

The largest single answer, and it is about a third of humanity.

Average sleep across adults worldwide is somewhere around 7 hours, with children sleeping considerably more. Take a population-weighted average of about 7.5 hours per person per day.

\frac{7.5}{24} = 31\% \text{ of all person-time is spent asleep}

So roughly 2.5 billion people are asleep at any instant.

That is only true because the world is spread across time zones. If everybody lived in one time zone, the number would swing between nearly eight billion and nearly zero. In practice the population is unevenly distributed across longitudes — a very large share of humanity lives between about 70° and 140° East, covering India, China, South East Asia and Indonesia — so the global sleeping fraction genuinely does rise and fall through the day, roughly between 2 and 3 billion.

The peak in the number of people asleep worldwide falls when it is night across South and East Asia, which is where the people are.

Work, school and travel

How many people are at work?

The global labour force is roughly 3.5 billion people, out of about 5.7 billion of working age.

An employed person works something like 1,800 to 2,300 hours a year, varying enormously by country. Take 2,000 hours, against 8,760 hours in a year:

\frac{2{,}000}{8{,}760} \approx 23\%

3.5 \text{ billion} \times 0.23 \approx 800 \text{ million}

So around 800 million people are working at any moment. That counts paid work only. Unpaid domestic and care work, which time-use surveys consistently find is a very large quantity and is done disproportionately by women, would add substantially — plausibly several hundred million more at any instant.

How many are in school?

Around 1.5 billion children and students are enrolled in education worldwide.

A school year is about 190 days of about 6 hours, which is 1,140 hours out of 8,760:

\frac{1{,}140}{8{,}760} \approx 13\%

1.5 \text{ billion} \times 0.13 \approx 195 \text{ million}

Around 200 million people are in a classroom right now, and the figure swings hard with the school day and the holiday calendar in the big population centres.

How many are travelling?

This one breaks into pieces and the pieces are very different sizes.

In the air: air traffic tracking sites typically show around 10,000 to 20,000 aircraft airborne simultaneously at peak. Average about 150 people per commercial flight, and most airborne aircraft at any time are commercial. That gives roughly 1 to 1.5 million people in the air, which is about one person in six thousand.

On trains: Indian Railways alone carries about 20 million passengers a day. Say an average journey is 2 hours, so at any instant:

20{,}000{,}000 \times \frac{2}{24} \approx 1.7 \text{ million}

Roughly 1.7 million people are on an Indian train right now. Adding China, Japan, Europe and everywhere else plausibly triples or quadruples it, so perhaps 5 to 7 million people worldwide are on a train.

In cars and on buses: this dwarfs both. Time-use surveys in developed countries find people spend around 60 to 90 minutes a day travelling, most of it by road. If the global average is 45 minutes, that is 3 per cent of the day, and:

8 \text{ billion} \times 0.03 \approx 240 \text{ million}

Around a quarter of a billion people are in transit on the ground at any moment — more than a hundred times the number in the air, which is not the intuition most people have.

At sea: about 1.7 million merchant seafarers exist worldwide, perhaps half at sea at a time, plus cruise passengers of the order of a few hundred thousand. Under two million people are on the ocean.

The body

How many people are eating?

Time-use surveys put eating and drinking at around 1 to 1.5 hours a day in most countries, higher in France and much of the Mediterranean, lower in the United States.

Take 1.25 hours, or about 5 per cent of the day:

8 \text{ billion} \times 0.05 \approx 400 \text{ million}

Around 400 million people are eating right now, and the number is extremely spiky — global meal times cluster, so the true figure swings between perhaps 150 million in the global small hours and well over a billion at Asian dinner time.

How many are being born and dying?

These are among the most solid numbers on the page.

Global births are around 130 million a year, deaths around 62 million a year.

\frac{130{,}000{,}000}{31{,}500{,}000 \text{ seconds}} \approx 4.1 \text{ births per second}

\frac{62{,}000{,}000}{31{,}500{,}000} \approx 2.0 \text{ deaths per second}

About four people are born and two die every second. The difference — around two per second — is why world population is still growing, at roughly 70 million a year, although the growth rate has been falling since the 1960s.

In the time it takes to read this page, perhaps 1,200 people have been born and 600 have died.

How many are having sex, in a bathroom, or in hospital?

Worth doing because they are the questions people actually wonder about, and the arithmetic is the same.

Sex: surveys of frequency in adult populations cluster around once a week, with enormous variation and well-known reporting bias. If about 4 billion adults average one encounter of 20 minutes a week, that is 20 minutes out of 10,080 in a week, about 0.2 per cent:

4 \text{ billion} \times 0.002 \approx 8 \text{ million}

Very roughly 8 million people, which is about one in a thousand — a smaller number than most guesses.

Toilet: people use a toilet around 6 to 8 times a day for a few minutes each, totalling perhaps 25 minutes, about 1.7 per cent of the day. That gives around 140 million people, which is more than are on all the world's trains and aircraft combined by a factor of twenty.

In hospital: global hospital beds number around 20 million, with occupancy typically 70 to 80 per cent. So roughly 15 million people are in a hospital bed right now, plus staff.

Attention

How many people are looking at a screen?

The largest single activity after sleep and work, and the numbers are startling.

Global averages from measurement panels put screen time at something in the region of 6 to 7 hours a day for internet users, counting phone, computer and television. About 5.5 billion people use the internet.

Taking 6 hours for those users:

5.5 \text{ billion} \times \frac{6}{24} \approx 1.4 \text{ billion}

Around 1.4 billion people are looking at a screen at any instant. That is more than are working, six times as many as are in school, and roughly one person in six alive.

Television alone: global TV viewing averages around 3 hours a day across the population that has a television, and that is roughly 1.7 billion households. Several hundred million people are watching television right now.

YouTube alone reports over a billion hours of video watched daily, which by itself accounts for:

\frac{1{,}000{,}000{,}000 \text{ hours}}{24} \approx 42 \text{ million people watching at any moment}

How many are on a phone call, or sending a message?

Messages: something in the region of 100 billion messages a day are sent on the major messaging platforms combined. At a few seconds each to compose, the number of people actively typing at any instant is:

\frac{100 \times 10^{9} \times 10 \text{ seconds}}{86{,}400} \approx 12 \text{ million}

Around 10 to 15 million people are typing a message right now.

Calls: harder to pin down, but if the average person spends around 10 minutes a day on voice calls, that is 0.7 per cent of the day, giving something in the region of 50 million people on a call at any moment — noting that a call involves two people, so about 25 million conversations.

Putting it together

Does it all add up?

Roughly, and checking that it does is the point.

Summing the largest categories: 2.5 billion asleep, 1.4 billion on a screen, 800 million working, 400 million eating, 240 million travelling, 200 million in school. That is about 5.5 billion, out of 8 billion.

The remaining 2.5 billion are doing the things that never appear in a list like this: childcare, cooking, cleaning, washing, walking, sitting, talking to somebody, praying, queueing, waiting. Time-use surveys consistently find these to be enormous categories that are invisible because they are unpaid and unrecorded.

And the categories overlap heavily — a person eating while watching a screen is in two of them, someone on a phone call while travelling in another two — which is why a strict sum would exceed the population.

What is the most useful thing this exercise shows?

Three things, and they are all corrections to intuition.

The mundane dominates. Sleep is a third of all human experience. Everything dramatic — flight, hospitals, sex, birth, death — is a rounding error against it. If you wanted to improve human wellbeing by one measure, sleep quality affects more person-hours than any intervention on any other item on this page.

The invisible categories are the large ones. Unpaid domestic work, waiting, and travelling on the ground are all bigger than the things that get counted, and they are bigger precisely because nobody is measuring them.

And the scale of screen attention is genuinely new. No previous generation had a single voluntary activity occupying a quarter of the waking life of most of humanity. That has been true for roughly fifteen years, which is nothing, and the consequences are being worked out in real time.

What comes next

The next page zooms out further — the full range of physical scale, from the smallest thing that has a size to the largest thing that can be seen, and where in that range you are standing.