The Complexity of Everything

There exists an infinite number of variables presenting any given society, such that extrapolating information can be next to impossible. Consider this simple statement: "drunk driving increases car crashes." While that may seem obvious, how many people drive drunk? Are there variables that contribute to drunk driving? Does everyone going to a bar get drunk and drive home? How many of said drunks crash? While there may be an easy answer, most actual answers worth anything come from research. People who seek these answers spend countless hours answering questions that may boil down to a few tiny statistics. We then think about how many questions exist, how many people there are, the amount of decisions to be made by any person on any day at any time, and the whole picture becomes one gigantic mess.

I'm telling you this to give you an appreciation for, and to make you think about, how complicated everything is. A single person making a string of decisions makes tiny ripples in the world around them. Many of the ripples stop after a few feet, or a few minutes, but some may continue for miles, years, decades even.

Some people exert a disproportionate influence. This is when one person's sphere effects many lives. Other people's spheres may only last a little while. Take someone who just goes to a job and doesn't do much aside from hit the grocery store on occasion. This person creates tiny ripples that get lost almost immediately. But then, someone pens an article for the NY Times detailing this one person's life and commemorating all the people who seem to have little influence and go unnoticed, and yet still leave something important behind. So, even the person with the seemingly uninteresting life contributes a large ripple.
I'm not saying those with larger ripples are better people. What matters is perhaps that they simply existed. Some people effect almost nothing, while some have a negative effect. It's all part of the cosmos - that great, indescribably complicated thing that can scarcely be described with common words.
So life is complicated. Everything is complicated. It may seem obvious, but thinking about it might help give you an appreciation for the rich complexities of even the simplest situations.