The curious ubiquity of the number three

Have you ever noticed how so many things come in three? The three little pigs. The three branches of Government. The rule of thirds. The Holy Trinity. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I could go on. 

Why? What makes three the go-to number? 

Here’s my three-part interpretation. 

It mimics our reality 

We live in a three-dimensional universe. The room you’re sitting in right now has width, breadth and height. This alone may give the number three its gravitas. We move through it, we see through it, we feel through it. It embodies the boundaries of what we can do. 

It is the original architecture of our understanding, the lens through which we can make sense of the world around us.  

It’s harmonious 

Three is the honest broker, the peacemaker and transcender. It brings harmony to the conflictual tendencies of dualities. 

In high school, our philosophy teacher would give us a question to answer. We’d have to argue the case for and against but then came the most important part. We’d have to develop a third section to reconcile the two opposing arguments. This was my first encounter with dialectics: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. 

Leave synthesis out of the conversation and thesis and antithesis will burn each other down to the ground. It is that third act that enables common ground to emerge.  

It’s edgy    

Three is where the plane leaves the tarmac of dots and lines for the skies of complexity.  

A study about causal reasoning revealed that people identified three causes on average to any phenomenon or historical event. Three causes seem to be the right equilibrium between an explanation that is too reductionist to be taken seriously and one that is too complex to take action on. 

Three is the edge between our hunger for truth and our call to action.