From Book 6 of Karl Ove Knausgard’s My Struggle:
When I was sixteen, I thought life was without end, the number of people in it inexhaustible. This was by no means strange, since right from starting school at the age of seven I’d been surrounded by hundreds of children and adults; people were a renewable resource, found in abundance, but what I didn’t know, or rather had absolutely no conception of, was that every step I took was defining me, every person I encountered leaving their mark on me, and that the life I was living at that particular time, boundlessly arbitrary as it seemed, was in fact my life. That one day I would look back on my life, and this would be what I looked back on. What then had been insignificant, as weightless as air, a series of events dissolving in exactly the same way as the darkness dissolved in the mornings, would twenty years on seem laden with destiny and fate. The people who had been there then would become even more important, infinitely significant in as much as they had not only been shaping my perception of who I was, had not only been the people through which my own face emerged and became visible, but embodied the very understanding of how this particular life turned out the way it did.
If you meet three new people every day, you would know 80,000 people over the course of a life. That’s a big number in some ways, but also small and obviously countable in others. They could all fit in one stadium. And they represent only the tiniest fraction of the humans alive today, most of whom we’ll never get the chance to meet, and who will live their entire lives without the knowledge or care that we exist.
I think the correct response to this is an attitude like Knausgard’s retrospective one — recognizing the importance of the few people who do fill our lives today.