How do I handle making decisions that affect thousands of strangers?

Your decisions touch thousands of people you'll never meet, and the sheer abstraction of that is frightening. It should give you pause. A number that big can go numb in your hands, becoming a spreadsheet instead of a crowd of real lives. The fact that it scares you means you haven't gone numb, and that's exactly who should hold this responsibility. But don't let the scale paralyze you. You can't picture ten thousand faces, and you don't need to. You need to make each decision as fairly and carefully as if the one person in front of you were the only one, and trust that fairness scales. Good judgment applied honestly to the whole is how you serve people you'll never see. When a decision feels too big and abstract, bring it down to one. Ask how this would land on a single ordinary person caught in it, someone with a name and a hard week. Decide well for that one, applied evenly to all, and you've done right by the thousands. The scale is real, but justice is done one honest choice at a time.