They Say "One Round of Barbecue" Is a Unit for Measuring How Serious a Situation Is. There Are 18 More

Weight has units and length has units, so "luxury" and "awkwardness" need units too — invent enough kinds of minimal unit and you can describe any situation precisely.

A world without units would be primitive, and nobody would understand anybody. Consider:

Describing a distance or a volume face to face, you could still mime it — arms spread wide for "thiiiis big," "thaaaat far away."

Introducing yourself is harder. You reach for something familiar as a reference, and the other person may not get it at all: "I just turned two and a half rope knots old, I live in the suburbs three hilltops from downtown, and I'm as tall as five grown hens." How old, where, how tall — all anyone can do is guess.

Science would collapse outright. Following a vague manual of proportions, you take "a pinch" of iron, "an appropriate amount" of oxygen, half a spoon of sulfuric acid… hiss! The iron spoon dissolves.

Because we have internationally agreed base units — the meter, the kilogram, the second — we can describe length and weight precisely, understand each other, and even convert on the fly as the situation requires. I know that when you say "five hundred meters and I'm there," you have in fact only just walked out the door, and you know that when I say "five minutes" and I'll be done writing, I actually need two more hours.

Not everything has an internationally agreed unit, unfortunately. How loudly a couple in a movie theater discusses the plot can be measured in decibels; the "disturbance index" this creates for everyone around them is much harder to state. That vagueness quietly raises the cost of working things out with each other.

The Japanese channel BS Fuji once ran a variety show, 《宝岛的地图》 (Treasure Island Map), that set up a "World Unit Certification Association" inside the program. Weight has units and length has units, they said, so "luxury" and "awkwardness" need units too — invent enough kinds of minimal unit and you can describe any situation precisely. Take the luck index. Define "a long line ahead of you at the register, and suddenly a clerk says, you can check out over here" as the minimal unit, 1 Rg; then "going to the zoo and catching the pandas awake" comes to 35 rg, while "married twenty years and your wife is as gentle as ever" reaches 2 Mrg.

We already use units like these without noticing. One well-worn joke: "In the Northeast, there's no problem a round of barbecue can't fix; if one doesn't work, have two." "One round of barbecue" is functioning there as a unit for measuring how serious a social incident is. Push the logic of Treasure Island Map a little further: if liking a friend's post about getting their foot crushed in a bus door is worth one round of barbecue, then bailing on a two-person trip the night before departure might take seven rounds of barbecue before you can be friends again.

To help everyone spot the measuring formulas already in use but never spelled out or put to full use, the QDaily Research Lab has gone through its past research observations and the QDaily Dictionary and distilled a set of new units for the finer situations of contemporary life. Counting "one round of barbecue," there are 19:

1 Mtb = "By the end of the trip, at least one photo good enough to post to Moments with a location tag and collect likes"

Young people abroad use "instagrammable" to describe a vacation that passes muster, the test being whether the trip produced enough photos worth putting on Instagram. The domestic version only requires swapping Instagram for Moments, which gives you Mtb (momentable), the unit for measuring how well a trip went off. Its minimum value — "by the end of the trip, at least one photo good enough to post to Moments with a location tag and collect likes" — equals 1 Mtb.

Two trips can look identical on paper: five minutes of sightseeing, two hours in line. If the 50 photos you fire off in those five minutes all have your face in shadow, make you look fat, and include other tourists photobombing, the trip is a washout. But if even one of them, after five hours of editing, goes up on Moments and pulls 120-plus likes, the trip passes — at least 25 Mtb. And if you happen to play it right and assemble a full nine-photo grid in one go, the trip's index can shoot past 300 Mtb with room to spare.

1 Sh = "Listed on Xianyu for a week with nobody asking"

The Zhang Zhimings of this world will always bring home something useless on the grounds that "every man needs, at some point in his life, an electric skateboard / a Dalí figurine / a Supreme brick": a nose-hair trimmer, an eyeliner stencil, a cheap DSLR bought years ago after much deliberation, a digital camera that takes worse photos than a phone. Each one leaves you asking heaven and earth, for years afterward, whether you were possessed when you hit "buy."

The unit for measuring how useless an object like this is: Sh (secondhand), with a minimum value of "listed on Xianyu for a week with nobody asking" = 1 Sh. By that measure, a 16GB iPhone — "once you installed WeChat there was no room for another app, you deleted photos as fast as you took them, you finally decided to say goodbye to that cramped existence and put it up for resale on Xianyu, and in six months not one person asked the price" — scores a full 233 Sh on the uselessness index. In fact, since Apple no longer makes low-capacity phones, unless a collector takes it home as an antique nobody is likely to ask after six months either; as time passes, the uselessness index approaches infinity.

287 Cit = "Knowing that the cheap, good-looking apartments on the real-estate portals are a lie"

If someone tells you, "Apartments in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou are easy to find — the photos on Fang.com and Anjuke all look decent, and the prices aren't bad," their first-tier-city adaptation index is 0 Cit (citizen). They haven't really prepared themselves to step into the real world, which makes them the foremost innocent of this new era.

After all, every young person who has been tested by the real world knows that on rental sites a cheap, good-looking apartment is fake from the photos down to the price, the floor plan and the agent's inspirational tagline.

10 Hos = "Going to the hospital without posting a woe-is-me update to Moments"

How mature you are is inversely proportional to how helpless and fragile you act when you're sick. Even so, "being able to go to the hospital by yourself" rates only 0.2 Hos (hospital) on the maturity index. "Going to the hospital alone, and not posting a woe-is-me Moments update about going to the hospital alone" is the real mark of having grown up: 10 Hos.

73 Bm = "Marrying so late that you can't find an unmarried best man or bridesmaid"

Plenty of young people today don't much care about getting married — and then there are the ones who can't find a partner but insist they don't care either — so the average age at marriage has been pushed back a long way. Marrying at thirty isn't even late now, which makes measuring the late-marriage index by age badly out of touch. Whether the people your age around you married earlier or later than you is the real-world benchmark.

In practice that shows up in the number of best men and bridesmaids you can invite to the wedding. Under the folk rule that only unmarried people can serve, anyone marrying late today will discover, with regret, that every close friend and relative is already married. So we are setting Bm (best man/maid) as the new unit of the late-marriage index.

If you can barely scrape together one unmarried best man and one unmarried bridesmaid, and one of the two is a cousin who only just turned eighteen, your late-marriage index is very high indeed.

24 Wp = "Wedding photos of classmates turning up in your Moments feed constantly"

This is the new unit of the getting-older index. We take "the first wedding photo of someone your own age showing up in Moments" as the benchmark and set its minimum unit at 1 Wp (wedding posts).

When wedding rings, marriage certificates, bridal portraits and reception shots start appearing in your feed regularly, you have joined the ranks of the prematurely old, with a getting-older index of 24 Wp. And when, after all that, weddings stop appearing in your Moments feed at all, it means you really are old: the getting-older index has passed 1024 Wp.

10 Song = "The length of one shower"

"Can you give me the time of one song" — Jay Chou proposed the song as a unit of time back in a track he released in 2008, and young people today have already put it into practice across any number of daily activities: "today's run has to last nine songs," "a shower takes about ten songs," "put the face mask on, take it off after three songs."

A very practical modern version of "one stick of incense."

1 W = "The Beijing of 2007 you want to go back to and never can"

This is the new unit for counting housing prices, and it takes a little arithmetic. We take "Beijing in 2007" as the benchmark and set its base unit at 1 W.

Since prices set a fantastical new high every year, knowing the city and the price is enough to work out the year. "Back when this joke came out, Beijing housing prices were still only 3 W" places the joke around 2012, give or take — as good as carbon-14 for archaeologists.

426 Op = "Watching a whole series or anime without skipping a single episode's opening"

"I'd trade my integrity for life / never eat another chip… if only xx never ended" and "I never skip the OP" are both the highest praise you can give an anime. But since the second works equally well for anime and ordinary TV, and is relatively easy to quantify, we've chosen Op as the new unit of a show's craftsmanship index.

If even the opening credits are unwatchable, the show itself has probably kept up the same eye-searing standard throughout — a craftsmanship index of a flat -100 Op, and you should give up as early as possible. If the opening never wears out no matter how many times you see it, the craftsmanship index is more or less assured, and the show is worth a look.

60 Hud = "A photo from the get-together posted to Moments collects 100 likes in twenty minutes"

If "old friends meet, take a group photo, post it to Moments, and it takes two hours to collect a hundred likes" counts as the minimum unit of the was-it-worth-it index for get-togethers, 1 Hud (hundred), then "the same group restaging an old photo in the same poses, and the throwback shot collects a hundred likes in under twenty minutes" is worth 60 Hud. But if you spend the evening in awkward small talk, the photos come out ugly, and the post scrapes together three likes all night, that's a social disaster: -133 Hud.

1 Mom = "Your mom asks you what a buzzword means"

Buzzwords arrive fast and leave faster. Anyone still saying "the important thing has to be said three times" today has an internet-savvy score of zero and a cringe index of 18,000. To avoid that tragedy, you can judge whether a phrase has gone stale by how far it has spread: once even your mom is asking what "Big Bro X rules the streets" or "of course I choose to forgive her" means, they aren't far from the Spring Festival Gala and you should start avoiding them — a staleness index of 1 Mom. And when a buzzword comes out of Cai Ming's mouth, the staleness index can reach 3256 Mom. The Gala is, after all, where buzzwords go to die.

1 Tup = "Using WeChat's built-in thumbs-up emoji once"

The minimum unit of the middle-aged index for social habits.

Anyone whose WeChat handle is Happy Big Brother, Angel of Happiness or Glorious Motherland scores 173 thumbs-up emojis on the social middle-age index. Posting three unfiltered, all-natural nine-photo grids in a row to Moments, all of them of the same plum tree, is something only a parent born in the 1960s would do — the equivalent of 1,000 thumbs-up.

81 Cc = "The cooking skill to have friends over for homemade steamed pork with rice flour"

As the entry-level dish of choice for young people today, cola chicken wings hold a Super Star-like standing. Which tells you, in reverse, that a young person still posting photos of cola chicken wings has usually been cooking for less than a week — hence our decision to set the minimum unit of cooking skill at 1 Cc (cola chicken wings). Having friends over for a home-cooked meal requires a cooking index of 81 Cc; opening a private supper club takes 587 Cc; and if you hope that supper club will also feed your family, add at least another 153 cola chicken wings.

1 Avo = "Owning a keeper made specially for half an avocado"

The more single-purpose your tools, the higher your life-aesthetics index. If your kitchen kit is fine-grained enough that half a leftover avocado has its own dedicated keeper, your life-aesthetics index is 1 Avo (avocado). A pot kept for simmering a single serving of yanduxian (bamboo shoot and cured pork soup) in spring is 20 Avo; a tamagoyaki mold used only for rolling one very plump cabbage omelet, 38 Avo; a set of "cleaning beads for cleaning a wine decanter," 169 Avo… The list could run on forever — right up until the standards of life aesthetics turn toward decluttering and the whole collection is given away or thrown out.

176 CU = "Throwing out the broom and buying a Dyson with five attachments"

It's called consumption upgrading, and technically anything slightly better than what you had should count. In practice every category has exactly one designated upgrade, and only buying that one delivers the maximum sense that "my quality of life really is different now." Both are upgrades, but going from a hand broom to an ordinary vacuum cleaner is nowhere near as satisfying as going from an ordinary vacuum to a Dyson, and going from Blue Moon to Lion or Kao is nowhere near going from either of those to a set of The Laundress that costs as much as a washing machine. Collect the designated upgrade in every category and the consumption-upgrading index may go off the scale.

Simply switching from Rejoice to Kao bought from overseas, for instance, is 1 CU (consumption upgrade), but buying a Dyson is worth 176 CU. Add a Foreo facial cleansing brush (35 CU) and a ReFa face-slimming roller (72 CU) and your overall consumption-upgrading index reaches 176 x 35 x 72 = 443,520 CU.

100% Tra = "The money you save shopping equals what you spent on flights and hotels"

The bigger the ratio between what you save shopping overseas and what the flight cost, the higher your overseas-trip-was-worth-it index. Everyone who travels carries a special kind of vacation arithmetic in their head: "this jacket is 400 yuan cheaper than at home, this skincare 800 cheaper, this bag 2,000 cheaper — 3,200 in total, minus 3,000 for the flight. Which means the trip cost nothing and I'm 200 yuan up. Flawless!" By the same logic: one bag earns back the airfare; a set of cosmetics saves two nights of hotel; two winter coats cover next month's living expenses as well… an absolute steal.

If you spend 40,000 yuan on skincare that sells for 60,000 at home, you hold a 20,000-yuan difference; and if the rest of the trip only costs 10,000, you have had a 200% Tra shopping experience.

1 Zara = "Wearing one trend element that Zara has expressed"

An elusive fashion unit. One Zara-expressed trend element on your body might make you this season's trendsetter, a trend-chasing index of 1 Zara. Overdo it — seven or eight Zara trend elements at once, studs, satin, slits, ruffles, butterfly sleeves and fringe all piled on together — and the trend-chasing index reaches 7 Zara, at which point you're an accomplished player of subculture instead.

After all, how would you know what Zara has copied over, from the big houses down to the obscure labels? Shrugs.

3000 Cs = "Slacking off at work and finding even a shoddy web series riveting"

No urge to slack off means your job is too quiet. As pure pleasure goes, only wasting time breathlessly, while you should be working, is truly agreeable. And if slacking off to watch Eternal Love — a show you'd normally never bother with — turns out to be irresistibly good, the difficulty of whatever is on your desk probably exceeds saving the world, reaching 3000 Cs (cyberslacking).

A new unit, a new state of mind.

If living without precise units is like living in the primitive age, then getting to know these new units and using them fluently lets us describe precisely the new experiences that modern technology and modern ways of living have brought — instead of getting our "cringe experience" secondhand by watching someone announce "let me tell you a story first" or post a run of selfies.

The QDaily Research Lab has done only a small piece of work toward the great enterprise of "explaining human life precisely." We hope it serves as a starting point, and that readers go on to invent more units of their own and spread them into more people's daily lives — that alone would satisfy us.

Beyond the new units and formulas above, the Lab has also noticed some once-clear measures whose meaning has been diluted by overuse — failed units. We're listing five of those as well; please use them with care:

1. "Baby" — a failed unit of the infant-age index

Age impossible to determine: no way to tell whether it means the kind with no teeth yet, or the kind whose teeth have been knocked out for saying "I'm just a baby" one too many times.

2. "Industry's conscience" — a failed unit of the reliability index

Because the industry has so little conscience, even thoroughly mediocre companies call themselves the industry's conscience; the shabbiest startup today carries at least 3 industry's consciences. Put your hand on your own conscience and tell me — is that appropriate?

3. "Five-star review" — a failed unit of the service-satisfaction index

The top value in internet rating systems, but usually no more than the passing mark for service. Alipay pops up a rating prompt for the merchant the moment you've paid, and you tap five stars without thinking, wanting only to close the page. A delivery rider sends an earnest text — "how about a good review" — and soft-hearted as you are, you grudgingly open the app and give five stars… Its reference value is no higher than the "very satisfied" button on the satisfaction pad at a bank counter.

4. "Prime goods" — a failed unit of the scarce-premium index

The term started out in dakou CDs, the cut-notch discs. Young people who loved music and collected CDs used it for discs that were hard to find, expensive, scarce, made by masters, or hyped to the skies by the press. It has since degenerated into a Taobao term, mostly meaning whatever the most expensive item in a given shop happens to be. If a shop sells T-shirts at 50 yuan across the board, the one priced at 100 is the prime goods.

5. "Black tech" — a failed unit of the technical-sophistication index

Search for black tech and you'll find a waterproof business shirt for 40 yuan with free shipping, a "universal socket" that just has a few more holes, and an "anti-gravity phone case" that works on exactly the same principle as a suction hook. We can't help asking: could everyone please stop blackening technology? Play three black techs today and follow with a pair of jaw-dropping black techs, and how well the name fits the thing is about level with "authenticity guaranteed" on Taobao.

Cover image: Lin Xiaoyao

Animated images: Giphy