Numerical superiority

Sometimes I wonder if numbers have lost their meaning. I was listening to one of my favorite radio programs today when this struck me. The ironic thing here is there is only one radio program I listen to. There are many reasons for that. First and foremost, I really don't need to hear commercials to know what I want or why I should choose brand x over brand x squared. However, the program I love combines two topics I love a great deal: sports and comedy.
I should probably deconstruct my enjoyment of athletics at some point, but for now suffice it to say I think the Jim Rome show is pure comedic genius. He does a nice job of blending legitimate topics, social consciousness, and over the top, almost offensive humor.
During a commercial break there was actually a commercial that I found entertaining and intriguing. As a general rule when a commercial entertains me I cannot tell you what the product is...for instance, the commercial a couple of Super Bowls ago with the cat herders. I still remember the cat herding, the lint rollers...but if my life depended on knowing what was advertised my life span would come to a rapid conclusion.
Be that as it may, this particular Netflix commercial is trying to point out how wide and vast their collection of movies is. So the game show style answer is 40,000 movies. And there is the rub. This "huge" number designed to stun me with its hugeness...inspired a comment of "that's all?"
Numbers have become so huge that huge numbers seem small and insignificant. We have so-called "Million Man Marches", protests and rallies generously estimated in the hundreds of thousands (juxtaposed against video of a few thousand quite frequently), sports salaries that see players well below average receiving millions of dollars, budget deficits so astronomical that every President since Carter has presided over record high deficits...numbers measured with "b"s and "c"s in front of the illions. They aren't real numbers any more.
Compared to those numbers I hear all the time 40K seems like nothing. Until, that is, you think about how many movies that actually is. I am almost 34...that is over a thousand movies for every year of my life. Assume every movie is 2 hours...they probably average less, but that is a nice round number. It makes it easy to say I could watch 12 movies a day. It would take over 9 years of watching movies 24 hours a day to watch them all. That is a lot of movies.
So yeah...40K is a lot. And it SHOULD seem impressive. Sadly, our societies' preocupation with bigger, stronger, more, etc., has made numbers into shells of their real meaning.
I think what I am really trying to say here...talking about 40k movies...is in that sort of quantity, there must be...okay, there IS a lot of crap.