Park&Co

Quantifying Infinity

I should have been a philosopher. I mean, I’m always trying to find an obscure meaning to this journey we call life. I’ve always wanted to write about it, but as I began to delve into summing it up as concisely as possible, my resolve was “what’s to say when it’s all been said before?” So, instead, I began to seek the truth through numbers, or I guess anything I can attempt to quantify. I believe life as we know it is a continuum measured and quantified in the interim. It’s not solving a sudoku one of the nine squares at a time, but simultaneously addressing all 81 squares of rows and columns until it is solved. It’ s seeing the big picture. The premise “To see the world in a grain of sand.”

One of my very favorite movie excerpts is from “City Slickers” where Jack Palance says to Billy Crystal and his cohorts, “You know the meaning of life? It’s one thing...” He then passed away before he told them. What makes this so fabulous is that he quantified it. It was one thing. My girlfriends and I have made several attempts over the years to figure this one thing out as we write it down on cocktail napkins during happy hour and send them to each other in the mail. Of course, these philosophies were all pre-text messaging days.

Today, as social media goes on into ad-infinitum, I’ve often thought of creating some statistics to measure its value and purpose such as “blog turnover” or return on browsing. Perhaps technology will entirely skew the meaning of life. Do you think? I’m not sure, but right now I’m going to tend to my abacus and “hold infinity in the palm of my hand.”