Well, single people, I’ve got bad news for you. You just made it through Valentine’s Day, and now we’re going to spring this disheartening calculation on you. It’s okay though. Being single is not the worst thing that can happen to a person. And all this math really means nothing—maybe there are no such things as soulmates, and settling down with someone has more to do with time of life than the actual person. Also, there are cats and dogs for consolation—I’d rather have a dog than a boyfriend, anyway.
Imgur user Bandit78 posted a tweet in which someone tried to figure out a person’s chances of meeting someone who finds them attractive.
The post says, “if 99% people find you unattractive then around 75,000,000 people on earth still find you attractive.”
“My self confidence just shot up,” someone else replied.
But um…the bad news comes when you try to actually break that number down into people who could actually be your soulmate.
First, the guy cut that number in half because of gender. Then he broke it down into “dating age range.”
A good number of those people are already taken, and then a certain number of people are LGBTQ. Plus, there’s the factor of whether or not they find each other attractive (he gives the statistic that he finds 1 out of 5 women attractive, but that only 1 out of 100 women find him attractive). And the factor of how many new people he tends to meet a day, along with the number of days he has left to live (which is an estimate, because he can’t see the future).
“Assuming locking eyes with any person is equally likely, the probability of locking eyes with a particular stranger, and that stranger being part of set A is: (0.0000852)*0.000004598) = 3.92e-10.”
I’m not following all the math, so I just have to believe him when he says, “I literally have a higher chance of winning mega millions.”
But the comment below is the funny part: someone wrote: “replies like this are why 99% find you unattractive.”
Yup, nailed it.
h/t: Imgur: Bandit78