I just read that at year 0 (=2010 years ago), the entire world population listed 300M people. Mind you Facebook did a movie what it is like when 500M users are registered. Only 2,000 years later we’re talking almost 7B people listed. Wow. A lot.

Let’s go back in time. What was it like to be in a small town back then, what was a manageable amount of people, number wise – Hundreds, thousands? You could actually know the entire town. All of them, names, ages, occupations, secrets – you name it, you could know it. “Hey john, how is work”, “hi Shannon, congrats for being a Mom”, “David, you bastard, getting that brownstone house at the corner”. As Gary Portnoy said many years after “When everybody knows your name”.

Everything was manageable. Nice.

If you wanted to meet the love of your life, it may have been easier. Well, you knew she existed, her name, height, looks, tendencies, loyalty, hobbies, family orientation — you just had to make it happen (“hey you…so… what do you say, you/me”).

Today. Everything may look the same only magnified by the magnitudes of reality. Lots of lots of everything. Many buildings, many bars, many jobs, many cities, many interfaces. Many-many.

Problem is as the word strongly suggests – “many”.

We don’t have more time. In fact we have less – emails, tv shows, cultural events, social activities, mobile, travel, financials, responsibilities, expectations — what to do first, and when?

So the problem is that we have less time to do just about anything but our desires stayed the same as that guy calling “John, Shannon, and David”.

We are not aware of the things we love and never knew existed.

Your wife is indeed actually out there (I swear). You just need to discover her with the little time you have.

As a friend of mine “Gigi” once told me — and I agree, I find “Discovery” a fascinating, global and fundamental problem. If we had help discovering things we like we could be better. Better as human beings. We could know more, meet the right people, spend our time at the right things.

Companies like Google did a good thing to us all. Information we seek is now available. We just need to type it. My question is what happens when there is too much out there and I don’t know what exactly I’m seeking.

“Will you … be my “.

Confession: I work at a company called Taboola that helps people around the world (1/6 of the population in the united states) on sites like CNN, the NYTimes, Slate from the Washington Post and many others discover videos they like and never knew existed. Here is something The NYTimes (reported by Christophor Rick) said about Taboola 2 weeks ago