The human race watched 62,000 years of One Piece on Netflix last year

We don’t know about you, dear reader, but our understanding of time gets pretty abstract when its comes to the idea of hundreds of millions of hours. (Seems like a lot, but if we were good at math, we wouldn’t spend our days thinking and writing about podcast comedy and X-Men ’97.) So when Netflix released its new installment of its twice-yearly “What We Watched” report today, exhaustively detailing its users’ viewing habits in the second half of 2023, we needed to put some context around the top-lined fact that the human race collectively spent 541,900,000 hours watching the live-action One Piece show when it debuted back in late August.

Turns out that that adds up to a meager 62,000 years, which—and this is a fun fact—is also how long ago humanity figured out that bows and arrows work better if you put sharp, hard things on the ends of them. We’re not entirely sure how human society would have developed if it had devoted that time to watching One Piece instead of things like agriculture and inventing bigger, sharper arrows, but it probably would have involved more straw hats.

As Variety points out, though, Netflix’s (very long, with more than 6,000 entries) report is a bit misleading, in that it breaks up every show into seasons; that’s why last year’s streaming sensation, Suits, doesn’t start showing up until the low 20s, even though, collectively, the 8-season series accrued something like 1.5 billion hours (177,000 years) of viewing time. Which, if you’re feeling anthropological, would take us back nearly to the first appearances of the human race itself, which we now cannot help but view primarily as a biological machine for the creation of, and then consumption of, Suits.

Other highlights from the list include the healthy success of limited series like Dear Child and Who Is Erin Carter?, which both picked up roughly 50 million views, ahead of the most recent seasons of Lupin, The Witcher, and Sex Education. Over in film, meanwhile, Sam Esmail’s Leave The World Behind was the top performer with 121 million views to its name, coming in ahead of Gal Gadot’s spy thriller Heart Of Stone (109 million views), Adam Sandler animated reptile comedy Leo (96 million views), and Spanish thriller Nowhere (86 million views.)

(And if it’s a little confusing to jump between “hours viewed” and “total views” like this, that feels of a piece with Netflix’s own attempts to shift perceptions on this stuff. The streamer has said recently that it views the total time it’s sucking out of us as a more valuable metric than things like “subscribers” or “views,” although, at least in film, it still feels far cleaner to count how many people actually decided to click “Play” on the “Adam Sandler is an old lizard hitting the road” comedy than how long they supposed sat still for it.)