Ansley Avis is a 3rd-year Ph.D student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she has not yet learned how to surf. She is passionate about the philosophy of mind and its many intersections, and is currently developing a project on ADHD for her qualifying exam.
A post by Ansley Avis
“It’s one banana, Michael, what could it cost, $10?”
-Lucille Bluth, Arrested Development
Imagine an elephant.
Got it? Perfect. How many toenails does it have?
Your elephant probably didn’t give you an answer. That’s okay, it would still be unfair to say that you failed to imagine an elephant. While their toenails are unique, they aren’t necessary to capture what makes an elephant an elephant. You could have thought about a long trunk, big ears and rough, grey skin, a trumpeting noise, or some other combination of features and gotten the gist of it. Even if you have aphantasia, you were presumably able to tell that you were thinking about an elephant, not something else.
Now imagine a trillion dollars. This is how much money Tesla shareholders recently voted to allocate to Elon Musk over the next ten years.
How did you do it? Could you be sure that you were imagining a trillion in a way that would meaningfully set it apart from a billion, or two trillion? If you switch from imagining 1 to 2 trillion, do the changes you make track the actual trillion dollar difference between these numbers?
We can’t imagine a trillion in the same straightforward way that we can an elephant. Our minds just don’t have the resolution necessary to do so. This holds even for legendary thinkers – 400 years ago, René Descartes wrote on the impossibility of imagining a chiliagon, a 1,000 sided polygon. Descartes noted he could at least conceive of a chiliagon; even if he couldn’t accurately picture it, with a little effort he could still understand it intellectually by drawing on his mathematical knowledge. But when we read a story like the one above, how do we intellectually grasp $1,000,000,000,000? This isn’t a shape with clearly defined parameters – it’s untold power. Our failure here is both imaginative and conceptual. If we want to understand the implications of numbers we encounter every day, we have to get creative.
This failure matters – we’re not just missing the toenails, we’re missing the entire point. In this post, I’ll explore how we may be able to turn to imagination to address this problem. But by developing certain imaginative habits, we can use the flexibility of our imaginative faculties to grasp big numbers in less straightforward ways.
Big numbers are integral to the operation of various communities we belong to. They determine how aid is allocated to those in need, how resources are distributed to our schools, emergency services, police, roads and more, and set the scope of influence certain individuals wield over entire communities, even countries, via campaign contributions, advertisements, and investments. They appear on our ballots and in our newsfeeds, and we can only respond to them insofar as we can understand them. Thus, our failure to appreciate these figures poses a threat to our autonomy as political and moral agents.
We encounter very large numbers every day. I live in the US, along with about 340 million other people. Here are some of the headlines that made our national news for us this year: “US budget deficit hits $284 billion in October”; “Nearly 42 million Americans lose their food stamp benefits”; “Wisconsin group sues Elon Musk, alleging million-dollar check giveaways were voter bribes”; and, of course, “Tesla shareholders approve Elon Musk’s $1 trillion pay package.”
When we see numbers like this, we often continue on with a superficial sense of their gravity. But we don’t really get them. We might take our inability to comprehend them as evidence of their grandiosity, but vague awe isn’t enough for us to make comparisons and judgments, or recognize when something isn’t right.
We need intelligible context. If Tesla hits the projected growth needed for Musk to accumulate 1 trillion dollars over the next decade, he will make 275 million dollars per day. That’s two brand new Macbooks per second, or the median annual income in the US ($83,730) every 27 seconds. Imagine reheating a burrito and coming away with $200K. You probably wouldn’t be reheating burritos anymore. One trillion dollars could fund the US military for a year with billions to spare. Were he to be more frugal, Musk could match Russia’s annual military spending with only 9% of his net worth. Sure, the ultra-wealthy cannot liquidate all of their wealth at once, but this is hardly a limitation. Our failure to conceive of these magnitudes means a fraction of a billionaire’s wealth can be effectively portrayed as insignificant, despite still being in the millions or even billions.
How we interpret big numbers impacts our political beliefs and moral judgments. Middle class Americans can be convinced that a wealth tax is unfair and would kill entrepreneurship, even when one could theoretically still rack up hundreds of millions of dollars. Failing to conceptualize these numbers makes it more appealing to vote against our best interests. We might think of these fortunes as someone’s “hard earned money,” even if we don’t actually believe anyone could work hard enough to earn another person’s annual salary in under a minute. And if we can’t understand these figures, we can’t process just how many people could benefit from more efficient use of this money. Ultimately, our ability to measure harm against good is distorted.
When we fail to grasp big numbers, we’re vulnerable to being complicit in our own harm. We cannot hold those in power accountable. Our autonomy is undermined because we a) may endorse situations that we would not otherwise and b) allow individuals to buy influence in media and politics, accepting their ability to alter our access to information and sway the legislative process.
So, what can we do?
While we can’t directly imagine a trillion in the way we can imagine an elephant, we can practice using our imagination as a scaffold to make these numbers more meaningful and clear for ourselves and others.
Journalists occasionally do this by putting numbers in terms of a country’s GDP, for example, but this is not standard. It can also lead to other big numbers that need to be broken down. But at least by comparing an individual net worth to that of a country, we can try and imagine what they might be able to do: raise an army, for example. (Or, in Musk’s case, a robot army.)
I suggest we strive to make these sorts of conversions habitual and culturally ubiquitous in order to expand our autonomy. We can use the versatility and vividness of our imaginations to contextualize obscure statistics, transforming them into a more meaningful and secure hold on the world.
Reframing these figures in more salient terms can be eye-opening. A million seconds is about 11.5 days, while a billion seconds is almost 32 years. That’s the difference between a vacation and half a lifetime. 1 trillion seconds is 30,000 years – longer than recorded human history.
Websites like this one provide easily sharable material to conceptualize these relationships at scale. Designed by Matt Korostoff, this page represents $1,000 as a single pixel and uses a vertical scroll to situate large magnitudes of wealth as they relate to average people, particular individuals, and the estimated costs of a few striking policy initiatives. The numbers are a bit out of date (the 400 richest Americans now hold over $6.5 trillion dollars), but the impact remains. I can imagine this small group sitting in a relatively empty 747, vibrating with all kinds of potential.
It’s true that we already make connections like these on occasion, but stochastic understanding isn't enough. We should try and break this habit of glossing over big numbers. Of course, we can’t expect everyone to individually come up with these conversions, but we can try to make them accessible and commonplace enough that you don’t need a calculator to read the news. People with careers in public-facing communication can make it a point to emphasize salient and impactful analogies, and with a few readily available, we can make it habitual and lower effort to imaginatively tackle big numbers wherever we encounter them.
Personally, I often come back to the 11.5 days / 32 years conversion. It draws together a few common orders of magnitude in terms that are salient to me, more meaningful and distinct than a billion versus a million. I can also see how significant the increase from 1 to 2 billion is by thinking in terms of a human life instead of just doubling a big number – a lot can happen in 32 years. When I read about 40 million people losing their grocery assistance, I can imagine shaking a different stranger's hand every second for 440 straight days. And when I casually drop a million while rounding that number, I recognize that as 11 days of blistering hands in and of itself.
It would be an understatement to say that improving our imaginative ability won’t fix our political problems. But cultivating these habits would at least strengthen our autonomy and help us stay aligned with our own values. And maybe, at scale, it could make a dent. Using our imagination to contextualize otherwise unfathomable numbers provides one more layer of protection against complacency, and one more foothold in reality. We may never fully grasp big numbers toenails and all, but at least we can make them clear enough to engage with them.
References
Descartes, R., & Williams, B. (1996). Sixth Meditation: The existence of material things, and the real distinction between mind and body. In J. Cottingham (Ed.), Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies (pp. 50–62). chapter, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fore, P. (2025, October 23). Elon Musk defends $1 trillion pay package: “I just don’t feel comfortable building a robot army here and then being ousted.” Fortune. https://fortune.com/2025/10/23/billionaire-elon-musk-defends-trillion-dollar-tesla-pay-package-proposal-robot-army-world-richest-man-salary/
Income in the United States: 2024. (2025, September 9). Census.gov; US Census Bureau. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-286.html
Isidore, C. (2025, November 6). Tesla shareholders approve Elon Musk’s $1 trillion pay package. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/06/business/musk-trillion-dollar-pay-package-vote
Kirsch, N. (2019, December 4). Why Elon Musk Is Cash Poor (For A Billionaire). Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/noahkirsch/2019/12/04/why-elon-musk-is-cash-poor-for-a-billionaire/
Korostoff, M. (2018). Wealth, shown to scale. Github.io. https://eattherichtextformat.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
Peterson-Withorn , C., & Durot, M. (Eds.). (2025, September 1). Forbes 400. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/
Pringle, E. (2024, October 2). Bill Gates is open to losing $101 billion to the tax man—but not policies that replicate North Korea’s “unbelievable equality.” Fortune. https://fortune.com/2024/10/02/bill-gates-tax-rich-north-korea-entrepreneurialism-american-dream/