One word for our current world: Gobsmacked

These days I often feel what in British English is called “gobsmacked” — overwhelmed with wonder, surprise or shock; astounded. Many things cause this reaction — the billowing drift of clouds in the sky, the green of new leaves on the trees in spring, the silence of the night when the human world rests a little. These are things before which I feel wonder, things that help me leave myself behind.

Living in a household with two cats gives me other lighthearted experiences of being gobsmacked — the cats wrestling and thundering through the house, jumping up on the bed and landing on me as I sleep, leaping straight up in the air after a fly or a miller moth, flipping backwards in midair to swat at whatever is in flight above them. More often than seems possible, they actually grab these creatures out of the sky. And when anything changes in their environment — a chair moved, a shoe left in the hallway, a book on my desk that wasn’t there the day before — they have to investigate; four-legged natural scientists seeking to understand their world. I’m gobsmacked by the power of what might be called inconsequential.  Maybe there is no inconsequential.

Other moments of being gobsmacked are darker. Take the news that Elon Musk is now a trillionaire. A single person possesses a trillion dollars. I don’t actually have the capacity to imagine a trillion dollars, so I asked my trusty computer search engine how much space a trillion dollars in one-dollar bills would fill. A variety of websites informed me that if you stacked the bills directly on top of each other, the paper tower would be 67,866 miles high. One source claimed that laid end to end, a trillion $1 bills would stretch from the Earth to the sun and beyond. But these explanations are merely distracting, the stuff of small talk at a cocktail party. How can I really get at what it means for a single person to have a trillion dollars?

I decided to add up the gross domestic product of the nations of the Earth starting with the lowest GDP country and moving up the list until their combined GDP totaled a trillion dollars. According to the International Monetary Fund as reported by Worldometer, there are 218 countries on earth. The combined total GDP of the lower 100 countries gets you a trillion dollars.

This is not to say that I’ve added up the GDPs of the hundred poorest countries.  Some in that group of a hundred, mostly countries that are geographically small with low populations, are quite wealthy — Malta, the Bahamas, Bermuda, Liechtenstein, Monaco, the Cayman Islands, Andorra. Others, mostly in Africa, are quite poor — Burkina Faso, Guinea, Benin, Burundi, Chad, Niger, Mozambique, Madagascar, Malawi, Somalia, South Sudan, Liberia, Gambia, the Central African Republic, Eritrea, Yemen. A few of the poorest countries, Syria and Afghanistan, for example, are in the Middle East and Central Asia where war takes its perpetual share of whatever wealth there is. Yemen has a GDP of $384 per capita, while Afghanistan’s per capita GDP is not much higher at $448. Of the hundred countries, the two with the highest per capita GDP are Monaco at $256,581 and Liechtenstein at $226,809.

Here’s another element of my state of gobsmackedness — those hundred countries whose total GDP adds up to a trillion dollars have a population of 696,193,389. This, of course, is a vague estimate of the number of human beings living from the material possibilities of a trillion dollars, an estimate I’ve created by averaging statistics provided by the United Nations Population Fund, Worldometer, the World Bank, Population Pyramid and Macrotrends. Whatever the exact number, the GDP of nearly 700 million of us is equal to the amount of money Elon Musk has gathered to himself. I try to make sense of the numbers — nearly 700 million people in a hundred countries with a combined GDP of a trillion dollars, and a single person whose personal wealth is exactly the same — a trillion dollars.

As for Wyoming, the Bureau of Economic Analysis lists our state GDP as approximately $52 billion, and while that puts us very high in the list of a hundred, you’d still need to multiply our GDP by almost 20 to get a trillion. Twenty Wyomings to equal the wealth of one person. Meanwhile, the U.S. Census Bureau lists 58,000 Wyomingites as living below the poverty line while 59,400 have no health insurance.

Gobsmacked.