Let's say I have a 230v version of a AA battery resting on a table say, I touch the + terminal, think of me as a resistor of 1 ohm, the circuit needs to close, and can take infinitely many parallel paths, which is a bit confusing, but let's think of it as a single path to the - terminal.
The ground acts as a resistor, the resistance of the floor under my feet, up through the table legs through the air and into the - terminal. Think of the floor, table legs etc as another resistor with an enormous resistance, we now have a circuit with 2 resistors, first the me resistor of 1 ohm (say, just for a sense of ratio) and then the ground resistor of 1000000 ohms or some huge number, now the current through the circuit is miniscule and the voltage difference between my hand and the floor should be tiny no?
Equally, if I get one of the table legs, and use it to touch the + terminal with instead, I would expect this to be very safe? But what has changed, the resistance in the system hasn't changed much (ok now I force the circuit to mostly go through a table leg, but I don't think this is significant as it was always going to have most of its current through a table leg), so the current should be the same?
Equally equally, what's so different if I am levitating instead, now the circuit has to go through the air to reach the floor and air presumably has a really big resistance, several orders of magnitude greater than wood, but I already felt the resistance of the ground should be very big so I don't know I care too much?
To clarify, my question is, why isn't the current through me miniscule when touching a live wire as I imagine the resistance of the path to complete the circuit to be very high? In diagrams I often see all the grounds joined together to one vertex, but does this really make sense? to get from one ground point to another ground point you have to go through a lot of resistive material incurring a high resistance, no?