We don’t know about you, dear reader, but our understanding of time gets pretty abstract when its comes to the idea of hundreds of millions of hours. ( like a lot, but if we were good at math, we wouldn’t spend our days thinking and writing about podcast comedy and .) So when Netflix , exhaustively detailing its users’ viewing habits in the second half of 2023, we needed to put some context around the top-lined fact that the human race collectively spent 541,900,000 hours watching when it debuted back in late August.
Turns out that that adds up to a meager 62,000 years, which—and this is a fun fact—is also how long ago humanity figured out that bows and arrows work better if you put sharp, hard things on the ends of them. We’re not entirely sure how human society would have developed if it had devoted that time to watching instead of things like agriculture and inventing bigger, sharper arrows, but it probably would have involved more straw hats. , though, Netflix’s (very long, with more than 6,000 entries) report is a bit misleading, in that it breaks up every show into seasons; that’s why , doesn’t start showing up until the low 20s, even though, collectively, the 8-season series accrued something like 1.
5 billion hours (177,000 years) of viewing time. Which, if you’re feeling anthropological, would take us back nearly to the first appearances of the human race itself, which we now cannot help but view primarily as a biological machine for the creation o.
