One of the benefits of western capitalism is the high degree of personal freedom it affords us, they say. People have choice they say. They can do this, that or the other without fear of censure (well, more or less) and go here or there at will.

It is actually true – to a certain extent, although of course we all know that we aren’t talking of a particularly large extent, probably not half as large as we sometimes believe it to be. And it isn’t just because of the Big Brother state and its continuing tendency to become ever more big brotherly.

What I’m talking about here is a little different. The question isn’t how limited the true extent of our freedom really is, but how limited our actual inbred, genetically encoded need for that “freedom” sometimes proves to be.

Up there...

In quantitative terms, it is exactly… 7%. That, it seems, is the percentage of our daily life that a third party, an outside observer, Big Brother, might describe as “unpredictable”.

At least that is what a survey published in Science and reported by arstechnica would seem to suggest. In concrete terms researchers dug up customer location data held by cell-phone service providers and effectively tracked, retroactively, the movements of their customers. What they found is simple: 93% of said movements were, well, predictable. People, it seems tend to stay within a well-defined, relatively small area almost all the time.

As arstechnica puts it, “All users were roughly equally predictable, regardless of the size of their typical travelled region. Everyone seemed to have a set area that they rarely left, and that area was always travelled in a very regular way—even the jet-setters appear to rarely deviate from their travel patterns”, thus, “Regardless of how widely they travelled, the researchers could adequately predict their locations, 93 percent of the time”.

... or down here?

Thus, the article concludes, “this research has a variety of practical implications”. I’m sure it does but, to be honest, I don’t want to know. Some “implications” might indeed be practical, like the better town planning suggested by the article. Some others might also be practical but to be honest I shudder to think to whom they might be “practical”…

Actually though, this brings to mind an observation by Gerald Durrell, one of the great ambassadors of the animal kingdom to humanity. Contrary to popular belief, he had noticed that most animals, even birds, don’t really roam the wild all that much and certainly not by choice. If they can get what they need, essentially food and a mate, within a fairly limited area, they are happy to stick to that area for the rest of their lives.

Which brings to mind… myself. I don’t consider myself all that predictable and, despite everything my phone might think, my life is actually quite adventurous.

For example, it would be tempting to assume that I always have my lunch at the EP’s ground floor canteen at 12:45 day in, day out, come what may. Well no, it isn’t true at all. I am after all a real individual, a free person so I occasionally surprise my cell-phone and go to the 12th floor canteen.

Call it my 7% moment.