@idiotsecant is correct. Length of arc correlates to voltage, while most of the potential pain or damage from an arc will correlate more to amperage and/or to duration.
The amperage of static elecricity discharges like this can be quite high, tens of amps is common.
So walking across a carpet and getting a shock can easily be tens of amps at thousands of volts, and we're just totally fine (because it's for a tiny fraction of a second).
Lethality of electricity is multi-dimensional, trying to reduce it to a single quantity does not really work (exposure time and electrical frequency are very important).
Sounds a bit like fuse wire (except the frequency dependence)... There's both a current and a time component. High overloads can be tolerated for a very short time without blowing the fuse, while low overloads can be sustained for longer before the fuse reaches its maximum temperature and breaks.