New York City is enormous. Its metropolitan area is home to nearly twenty million people.

Yet there is a fascinating detail: the island of Manhattan alone concentrates roughly two million inhabitants— one of the most intense human densities on the planet.

So today I shall employ a somewhat unusual unit of measurement. Not kilometres. Not millions.

I shall use the Manhattan Unit.

An island full of people walking, talking, dreaming, and occasionally colliding with destiny at every corner.

Because large numbers—the truly large ones—present a curious problem: we pronounce them with ease… yet we almost never grasp their true dimension.

For instance.

to avoid confusion, we shall speak in thousands of millions.

Now let us attempt a small mental experiment.

Imagine South America composed entirely of Manhattan islands placed side by side, each with the same population density.

We would obtain approximately 502 thousand million people living there.

Yes. Only in South America.

And if we filled the whole surface of South America, Central America, and North America with Manhattans, the number would climb to 1.213 thousand million people.

Large numbers begin to feel strange, do they not?

...

In 2016, one of the most serious calculations estimated that the observable universe contains roughly two trillion galaxies.

If each galaxy were a person… the Milky Way would be one individual walking across a thousand Manhattans placed together.

And when we speak of potentially habitable planets across all those galaxies… numbers cease to be comparable with any island.

We are speaking of tens of trillions of planets— numbers with eighteen zeros.

Between twenty and eighty trillion, according to that study.

And quite possibly more today, ten years later.

Planets that may have experienced their own mass extinctions. Their own biological resets. Their own evolutionary experiments.

It would be rather unreasonable to imagine that technological intelligence occurred only once in all that vastness.

What may indeed be extraordinarily rare… is coincidence.

Perhaps the great silence of the universe is not an absence of life.

Perhaps it is simply a matter of timing.

The cosmos may be full of voices… yet each one speaks in different centuries.

And so we arrive at one final reflection.

That, in a small corner of the Milky Way, a species emerged capable of thinking, building telescopes, writing poetry, and wondering about its own origin…

that alone is already a statistical miracle.

But that somewhere else there might exist another intelligent civilisation, on another planet… that survived its own cataclysms… passed through its own dark ages… invented its own science and technology…

and that at this very cosmic instant is sufficiently close and sufficiently alive to hear us…

That would not be winning a lottery.

That would be winning every lottery in the universe simultaneously.

Because the problem is not only the distance between the stars.

The real problem… is time.

The universe may be filled with civilizations. But each arrives at the door at a different moment.

And curiously…

something very similar occurs in human life.

The possibilities are many. People are many.

Some more mature. Others still in formation.

But the truly improbable thing… is not that they exist.

The truly improbable thing is to coincide.

I am merely an ordinary human being.

One more person walking across his own small personal Manhattan.

Yet I have had the statistical—almost cosmic—fortune of encountering someone who is far from ordinary.

And since then, even after the inevitable cataclysms of life…

I continue to believe in the same principle the universe itself seems to follow:

the natural evolution of things, the meeting of different worlds, and the mysterious beauty of improbable coincidences.

Because sometimes…

when two stories meet in the same place and at the same instant…

something rare does not happen.

Something astronomically improbable happens.

And yet…

it happens.

Football (soccer) remains one of the last true sanctuaries of meritocracy.

There, no narrative can save you. It does not matter whether the best team wins or loses, because if you are poor… you do not play. If you are unfit for purpose… you watch from the sidelines.

No solemnity can conceal a mistake, no title can excuse mediocrity. The body speaks. And it speaks plainly.

The same applies to other sports, regardless of the size or shape of the ball, but football is the king.

What happens in political power is altogether different. And not only there.

Society accepts authorities even when merit is absent, because power—once accumulated—ceases to be a tool and becomes an object of worship. It no longer matters whether actions are good, bad, or indifferent. Power itself becomes unquestionable.

Family. Work. Government.

The setting is irrelevant: it is always easier to adapt to harmful, unjust, or downright deranged rules than to pause and challenge them.

I am still struck— by that peculiar solemnity imposed in certain circles with a single purpose: to invalidate any question or to disguise the absence of merit.

That shameful excess of reverence. Almost choreographed. Particularly visible in some academic hierarchies and in certain religious groups that no longer venerate ideas, but themselves. A reverence bordering on the militarised.

Sixty-six years ago, in his brief and razor-sharp text “Borges and I,” Jorge Luis Borges quoted Spinoza: “Everything desires to persist in its own being; the stone eternally wishes to be stone, and the tiger, a tiger.”

Thus, the tepid become superficial. The self-interested, accommodating. And the cowardly, devoid of dignity.

That perfect cocktail creates the ideal climate for despots, ignoramuses, and manipulators to ascend to the status of authority.

My analogy today crosses cultures. Japan and Spain.

There is a condescension towards the other that wounds. It wounds as much as those Japanese or Spanish series in which a voice-over explains the plot as though the viewer were incapable of understanding it unaided.

That same condescension seeps into everyday life. When that character appears—black suit, round bowler hat— an anime-born stereotype demanding our attention and instructing us what to think and when to applaud.

But not all of us require a voice-over. Some of us still trust our ability to understand, to doubt, and—above all— not to adapt docilely to that which does not deserve respect.

And that is precisely what this manual is about.

You have just listened to the first episode of the third season of The Lucid Misfits Handbook by Pablo Mera— Pablo E. M. G. to the English-speaking world, and simply “Trompo” to those of us who knew him long before the name travelled.

Today, he introduces one of his newest analogies— almost delirious at first glance, yet ultimately revealing itself not to be so.

His podcasts travel the world and are available on all major platforms.

The author offers more than 13,000 posts drawn from his personal history on his blog, freely accessible at http://pablomera.blogspot.com

And he invites listeners to write to him at tromp@hotmail.com.]