Becoming your Default Hyperbole Number

It is my personal theory that everyone has one.

“I can’t pick you up right now, bud. I’m already carrying 37 billion things.”

“The doctor’s went fine apart from the fact that I had to sit in the waiting room for 37 hours before they saw me.”

“Those socks are 37 years old. You could definitely spring for new ones without holes.”

I call it your Default Hyperbole Number and it’s your go to number when you want to exaggerate for emphasis. You may not even be aware you’ve got one, and I wasn’t as of a few months ago, but once you realize it’s there, you’ll start to notice that lots of people have a random number their brain has latched onto for whatever reason that they pull out every time they use hyperbole in day to day speech. Mine, as the example above illustrates, has always been 37. (Though weirdly, in writing, I seem to prefer 9 zillion.)

This is not a bad thing. Or, I should say, it’s not normally a bad thing. But it’s become a problem for me. See, this number that my brain has bookmarked as the number I bust out whenever I want to represent a great quantity, happens to be the exact age I am turning in a few weeks. Which means, every time I use it to exaggerate something, I’m reminded that this “big number” is the number of years I have been alive on this earth and… doesn’t that mean I’m calling myself old? Or my brain is? It’s a little awkward.

This train of thought is, of course, ridiculous and I could just start using a different random number for hyperbole… except that it’s so ingrained in my head at this point that I’m not sure I actually could change it if I wanted to. And making myself aware of it has put it at the forefront of my brain… meaning I’m using it even more often than before.

Clearly, 37 is very young though it wouldn’t matter if it wasn’t. I have never particularly cared about how old I am and I’ve never been one to lie about my age or hide from birthdays because that’s silly. Age, as they say, is just a number and I completely agree. However, the fact that this particular number is one apparently burned so deeply into my brain that I’ve been using it my whole life without being aware of it has made this upcoming birthday feel like some kind of weird mental milestone and made me realize how deep some of the grooves are in my brain that apparently I have zero control over!

I’m finally reaching the number my brain has been subconsciously obsessed with for years! Feels extra special. Bit tingly.

Which begs the question: what is your default hyperbole number? And were you aware of it before now?

Photo by andymag