A Death is a Tragedy, A Million is a Statistic

Normally attributed to Josef Stalin, this quote has the dually depressing nature of being both nonsensical and aptly descriptive of human nature.
Why should it be, you may ask at first. A million deaths is at least the effects of one death multiplied by a million times. That is where the problem comes in. Humans don't cope well with large numbers. At some point, differing in various populations, humans start seeing thousands or tens of thousands as digits put together. In the human mind, the numbers are converted to standard form, and then the tens dropped off until it's time for bookkeeping.
Leaving the grim subject of death, take distance as an example. The top two or three stories of Raffles City are left fairly empty to create a large chamber. Looking at it, I wonder at how much space there is up there. Then I look at the sky. The sky has such a deep blue colour and such magnitude we just file it away as background, less important than the 10m-long bus driving up. Well, the sky is almost one thousand kilometres high. To help you, imagine Thailand propped up vertically with its southernmost point on the ground. Its northernmost point would just clear the exosphere. A human barely reaches 2m on average. How puny we are.