Specific phobias are extreme and persistent fears and avoidance of specific situations or things like dogs, flying, spiders etc. They are the most common mental disorders in the U.S - in. a year 9% of U.S. adults have a specific phobia.
Now and then I read a truly incredible statistic. On a web page about the extreme fear of dust (amathophobia) there was this gem:
“It is unknown how many experience amathophobia, it has been approximated that nearly 20 trillion adults annually suffer from some sort of specific phobia.”
A trillion is a thousand billion, or one followed by twelve zeroes. What’s my share of that outrageously large number? According to Wikipedia the world population is roughly 7 billion, where a billion is one followed by nine zeroes.
If we divided 20 trillion by 7 billion, we would find a lower bound for the number of annual phobias per person (by assuming everyone was an adult) - 2,857 phobias. Note that we can cancel out nine zeroes before we even enter those numbers in a calculator. That’s a huge sack of phobias for us each to be carrying around.
Dividing by 365.25 to get the number per day, that’s still almost 8 (7.82) phobias. If we are awake for 16 hours per day, that means a phobia pops up roughly every two hours.
Today is Friday the 13th, so some people also are thinking about Triskadekaphobia.
When writing a speech you can choose to make numbers comprehensible by describing them per person per day, or huge and incomprehensible if you multiply them by the population of a country or the world.
The image of a woman with a sack came from Wikimedia Commons.
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