You know how people try to comfort you with numbers? The doctor says, “Ninety per cent recover.” The HR manager shrugs, “The economy always bounces back.” A well-meaning friend insists, “Most people move on after a breakup.” They say it with confidence, as though statistics are a warm blanket. But when it’s you lying in the hospital bed, or you staring at the ceiling after a job loss, those numbers don’t mean a thing. You’re not part of an average. You’re a sample size of one.

The mean, median, mode. They are tidy little tools for everyone else. They help families feel reassured, they give societies something to plan with. But when it’s your chemotherapy drip, or your sleepless night, what does “most people” have to do with you? Your body isn’t a dataset. Your despair won’t fit into a curve. For the one enduring it, statistics are background noise, drowned out by the hum of machines or the pounding silence of 3 a.m.

You’ve probably lived this. A doctor tells you, “Most patients tolerate the treatment well,” and you’re doubled over from the side effects. A manager tells you, “The industry always recovers,” while your rent reminder sits unopened in the WhatsApp messages. Recessions are a headline for economists, but for you it’s just counting how many days until the bank balance hits zero. Statistics look neat in charts, but they don’t pay your electricity bill.

And then there are the everyday torments. Someone says, “Divorce is common these days.” Yes, but it’s not their house echoing with silence. Someone shrugs, “Lots of young people are depressed.” That doesn’t make your 2 AM panic attack easier to breathe through. Fertility struggles? There’s always a statistic for those too. But when you’re staring at a negative test, it isn’t “common.” It’s crushing. Numbers make pain sound normal. Living through it makes you realise pain is always abnormal.

Even your phone joins the chorus. Your health app beams: “People your age sleep seven hours.” You roll your eyes at the ceiling at 3 AM. Fitness trackers cheerfully compare you with anonymous peers while your knee throbs. Numbers meant to motivate end up mocking. They remind you you’re lagging behind the bell curve, as if life is a race you’re supposed to keep pace with.

And if you’re between 18 and 30, the sting is sharper still. You’re told, “Most graduates find jobs in six months,” while you refresh your inbox for the 47th time. You’re told, “Breakups are normal at your age,” but that doesn’t make the silence of one unread WhatsApp message any easier. You’re told, “Most students do better on the second attempt,” while you stare at the exam paper that wrecked you. Life in your twenties doesn’t feel like an average curve. It feels like a coin toss, and the coin keeps landing on its edge, with you underneath it.

Different generations cope differently. Your parents or grandparents will say, “Don’t worry, life expectancy has gone up.” They used statistics as armour, proof that things trend upward in the long run. But your generation? You don’t live in long runs. You live in volatility — gig jobs, climate anxiety, fragile mental health. You don’t trust the averages because you know averages hide chaos. You cling to stories instead - therapy sessions, brutally honest Instagram posts, podcasts where someone else admits what you feel. Where one generation clings to numbers, the other clings to narratives.

And it’s not just personal struggles; entire communities are flattened by averages. We are told the monsoon is “normal this year,” even as one village drowns and another burns. Climate reports soothe with global means, but no farmer lives in the “average monsoon.” In the language of statistics, the extremes are always smoothed out. In the language of life, the extremes are everything.

We use statistics as shields, because they save us from saying what we’re too scared to admit. It’s easier to mutter, “Most recover,” than to look someone in the eye and confess, “I don’t know if you will, but I’ll sit with you anyway.”

Ironically, even the averages themselves depend on people like you refusing to be comforted. Every statistic is built on individuals who once suffered alone. Every cheerful percentage began as someone’s solitary anguish — one patient, one parent, one worker staring at the ceiling fan. If enough individuals change the script, the average shifts. But who wants to live long enough to become somebody else’s data point?

And sometimes, the only way to show how absurd statistics sound is to push them to their logical extreme. Imagine if Tinder bios read: “Seventy-two per cent of men ghost within three dates.” Would that comfort the one left on “seen”? Or if your therapist opened with: “Forty per cent of patients improve in twelve sessions.” Would that dull the ache of your own bad day? If statistics were truly consoling, they’d be printed on heartbreak, not hidden in handouts.

Yes, statistics may reassure society. But they abandon the individual. And when it’s your body, your grief, your crisis, you are not a decimal in someone’s spreadsheet. You are a universe of one, and no graph will ever predict your story.

And yet society still clings to its averages. We forgive inflation, potholes, even those corrupt more easily than we forgive unpredictability in one person’s fate. We want neat curves, not messy lives. It is easier to round you off into a percentage than admit your suffering is singular, unrepeatable, unmanageable. After all, spreadsheets don’t cry at night. But you do.