The Real Meaning of “Quantifying Contemporary Life” Is That We've Invented a New Unit Even for “Unboxing Deliveries” | 100 Big Questions About Life

Part two of “New Units for Measuring Contemporary Life.”

In the first installment of “New Units for Measuring Contemporary Life”, we argued that if you want to explain human life precisely, it helps enormously to invent standards for daily life's subtler situations — standards other people can understand and convert. “They're angry” lacks force; “They're angry, the kind that ten handbags won't fix” is unmistakable fury. “This movie is terrible” tells you nothing about how terrible; “This movie shook me about as much as watching L.O.R.D.: Legend of Ravaging Dynasties five times in a row” tells you it's a god-tier disaster. Here, “buying a handbag” and “watching L.O.R.D. once” are two units of life, roughly equal to “calming one bout of anger” and “taking one minor internal injury.”

Inventing new units, in the broad sense, happens everywhere in human society. Lev Landau, the famous Soviet theoretical physicist of the last century, was by all accounts an enthusiastic quantifier: in the “Landau ranking” he drew up to seat physicists in order of merit, he put himself at “two-and-a-half tier,” and only promoted himself to “second tier” after finishing a particular piece of research. Clearly, for him, “one major academic result” equaled “half a tier of academic standing.” Closer to home, the “eating alone” trend of the past few years in China is a new unit too. It can mean “roughly one person's portion (two liang of noodles, a handful of greens, three spoonfuls of seasoning…),” and it can also express how gracefully someone lives alone — content, as the old line goes, with a bowl of rice and a ladle of water.

Contemporary life changes by the minute, of course, so our ways of measuring it have to keep up. Building on the 18 units summarized in the first installment, our lab now introduces the following 12 units and formulas, all in fairly heavy use at the moment, in the hope of further helping and inspiring everyone in the great project of measuring everything.

1 Push = “Liking an app enough that you don't mind turning on push notifications”

What's the standard routine after you download a new app? Block push notifications, turn off alerts, find a folder, toss it in. Only when that sequence is done do you officially start using the thing. So if you love an app enough to reach the level of “I don't mind turning push notifications on for it,” you can call that regard 1 Push. By the same logic: “notifications off, sitting on its own on the first home screen, used often” is 0.75 Push; “notifications off, buried in a folder on the second or third screen, opened occasionally when you remember it exists” is only 0.3 Push. And if you opened it once and never again, that's 0.1 Push.

0.4 S = “Marking someone as a starred contact and answering their WeChat messages instantly”

How fast you answer an online friend is a good gauge of how close the two of you are. A professional typist's entry-level speed is said to be 0.4 seconds (S) per character; take that as the baseline unit for an instant reply and you get: 360 S, the casual acquaintance who answers or doesn't, depending on their mood; 86,400 S, the work WeChat group where nobody says a word except to grab red envelopes; 5 S, the good friend you're close to, where the conversation rarely goes cold; 0.5 S, the crush you'd stay up half the night waiting on for a single line. And the person you've thrown into the blocked list and never want to see again? Roughly +∞ S.

1.5 PB = “Having to keep dragging the progress bar to get through a domestic series with only occasional good moments”

This is another unit for how good a show is, and the exact opposite of “426 Op,” which we introduced in the first installment. “426 Op” means an anime so good you can never bring yourself to skip the opening; 1.5 PB (Progress Bar) means watching at 1.5x speed to skate past the watered-down plot. Rating a show gets much easier from here. If it's already diluted to 2 PB, there's little point watching it properly — you may as well scroll through cut clips on Bilibili. If it's 0.3 PB, that's real quality, with at least a few scenes worth a second or third viewing. And if it's 4 PB and you still made it to the end… that only proves you have a lot of free time, my friend.

100 Director = “Barely in the door, still a long way from legend”

This one is most common in celebrity circles, in the full form “B is still 100 C's short of A.” Two famous jabs use it: “Feng Xiaogang is still 100 Lu Chuans short of Ang Lee,” and “Jia Yueting is 100 Lei Juns short of Steve Jobs.” Here “Lu Chuan” and “Lei Jun” each stand for one unit — one Director unit and one tech-leader unit. The usage isn't new, but in today's fandom slang it “praises and puts down in a single sentence,” an elegance that comes from never saying the thing plainly. When you're someone's diehard fan or their most sophisticated hater, you put them in the A slot; when you want to convey mild contempt, or the frustration of watching someone fall short, you move them to B or C. For instance: you are 2.3 Dagugugu Jis short of Wang Xiaobo, Xinxiang is 500 Beijings short of New York, Baidu is 1,024 Bings short of Google, and so on.

1 PDD = “Finances downgraded to the point where you need Pinduoduo just to keep life normal”

In the QDaily Dictionary we once introduced several tiers of financial freedom, including “fruit-stand freedom,” “supermarket freedom” and “OFF-PDD (Pinduoduo) financial freedom.” Extrapolate from there: finances at the 1 PDD level are worth about 0.8 of a “streaming-subscription freedom,” 0.3 of a “food-delivery-app freedom,” or 0.15 of a “movie-ticket-app freedom.” The gap from “Beijing-Shanghai rent freedom” to “convenience-store freedom” may run to 355 PDD; from “book-buying freedom” to “duty-free-shop freedom,” you still have about 447 PDD to go.

8 VoM = “The gap in status between two people in a chat is so wide that they can send me voice messages”

The three most obnoxious things you can do in instant messaging are sending voice messages (VoM), typing “you there?”, and spraying stickers — and voice messages lead the list, which shows how much trouble the habit causes. If your whole screen (usually 7 to 10 messages) is full of 59-second voice clips, you can safely conclude that the two people in this conversation are separated by a status gap as wide as the Liusha River. Needless to say, the only person who can rack up a full 8 VoM while you dutifully tap and listen to every single one is, nine times out of ten, your mother. 5 VoM might be the boss, the customer or the client you're furious with but can't talk back to — or a partner still in the honeymoon phase, when everything they do is adorable. With a coworker you know reasonably well, who asked and got your okay to send voice, neither side dares push it, so 1 to 2 VoM is about right. For a modern young person who values equal, dignified conversation, of course, the ideal is always a self-respecting, unservile 0 VoM.

3 DF = “A well-developed survival instinct when posting online”

You can't move around the online world without ways to protect yourself. Our lab has covered the “friendly-forces device” — the dog-face emoji above all — several times in the QDaily Dictionary. Three dog-face (DF) emojis in a row is the standard kit, and there are text versions too: the playful “manual dog head,” the more forceful “trolls, back off,” and the pre-emptively spineless “apologies in advance if I've got this wrong.” They work no differently from “bounce back, door's shut,” the favorite retort of squabbling schoolchildren.

So we can use this measure to check how carefully you tread online. Trash a currently famous star on social media using their full name, and your survival instinct is below -20 DF. Post to Moments and delete it right away, or set posts to be visible for three days, and you're at roughly 15 DF. Go six months or more only reading and never posting, and your vigilance and self-discipline deserve real admiration: at least 30 DF.

0.1 TPP = “This Weibo account pulls Big V-level traffic”

QDaily once described an online phenomenon in our #meme column: any Weibo account with a bit of traffic will inevitably have trolls (T), porn spam (P) and paid posters (P) in the comments, the three garrison forces of the blogosphere. If a blogger's comments have all three, and you hit one or two of them in every ten, you can pretty much address them as a Big V. If you hit only one of the three, that's still a mid- or small-tier V at the 0.02 TPP level. If you almost never see any of it, and catching one feels like a novelty, then you're a nobody, like you and me. Higher isn't always better here: above 0.5 it starts to look unseemly, and you might wonder whether this person's public image has gone astray, or whether they've been buying followers.

2 Cat = “How much weight you put on getting soft at work after graduation”

This ruler is for office workers who keep cats. A grown cat usually weighs 3 to 5 kilograms, so from graduation onward a cat owner's weight tends to follow this pattern: slow for the first two years, up only about 0.5 Cat; 1.5 Cat within five years; a steep climb to 3 or 4 Cat after marriage; then steady at around 5 Cat once there are children — an elongated “S” curve. Just mention discreetly how many Cats you're up so far, and the people around you can tell whether you still have room to grow or have already peaked.

If you can't bear to watch that curve get too steep, no problem: adopt an orange cat, which starts from a heavier baseline. And if you keep a dog? Easy — convert 1 Cat to 0.5 Dog.

1 CVS = “The sense of belonging you feel leaving work at midnight and seeing the 24-hour convenience store still open”

According to a study IKEA published recently, about a third of Chinese renters feel a sense of belonging in spaces outside their home. In our lab's survey on where urban belonging comes from, the most-liked answer was also “the convenience store (CVS) on the corner.” By the same measure, “having a small place of your own” is worth 12 CVS, “sitting by a library window on an afternoon” maybe 2.5 CVS, and “finding a restaurant that does your hometown food properly,” 4 CVS.

Also, if a cat or a dog is present in any of the above, add 0.8 CVS per animal.

21 De = “So busy at work that a week of deliveries piles up unopened”

This unit comes from the QDaily Dictionary as well, and it splits into two sub-indicators: a buy-buy-buy index and an unboxing-deliveries (De) index. The first measures your appetite for squeezing an order in on a packed day (the flow); the second calculates whether your current workload has passed the point of “time to buy, no time to unbox” (the stock).

Exaggerate a little and assume three packages a day. Unboxing and trying things out the moment they arrive is 1 to 3 De, which surely means you haven't done enough overtime. A week's backlog is 21 De, which means you've been too busy to look up. And if you've been running flat out for months at either 0 De or 84 De, then… then perhaps worry first about whether you're going to work yourself to death.

1 ZX = “Unexpectedly falling for something you were sure you'd never like”

The human mind is unpredictable, especially in front of something inexplicably interesting. Even if it isn't your taste at all, a few more exposures may have you saying, sincerely, “Damn, this is actually great” (Zhen Xiang, ZX).

So how big a reversal is 1 ZX? Roughly this: a friend recommends a show (whose title alone leaves you cold), you finally get around to it much later, and you binge the whole thing with real pleasure. More dramatic: you used to find short-video apps boring, then unexpectedly get hooked on Kuaishou livestreams of Ussuri River fishermen hauling in nets at dawn, or long-haul truckers' winding road stories, and turn into a heavy user — that's about 2.5 ZX. Or: you used to look down on fandom, then one day fall for the charm of some tacky idol, and can't stop yourself from working through their entire back catalogue and spending money to vote them up the charts — that reversal reaches 5 ZX.

What does the process look like in reverse? You've probably had this experience: you loved an idol drama as a kid, rewatch it as an adult, find it riddled with things to mock and can't get through it, and conclude it's only good for turning the male lead's face into memes out of nostalgia. That disillusionment is -1 ZX.

Having introduced the 12 new units that have recently entered everyday circulation, our lab has, as usual, also collected the following 5 units that have lost their value to inflation or distortion:

The Like — a defunct unit for expressing approval on Moments

Today, when moving your thumb takes less effort than blinking, the Like has long since shrunk to the level of “noted,” with an extra chill of “I saw it, but I have nothing to say.” Real appreciation now starts at repost plus comment plus Like, with a tip on top. A perfunctory Like amounts at most to “I'm aware you exist,” and may not even qualify as a nodding acquaintance.

Hahaha — a defunct unit for expressing strong emotion in online chat

As everyone knows, the “ha” content of “hahaha” ran short long ago. The trend now is at least seven ha's, and you can fill the whole screen with them if you like. Exclamation points and question marks are the same: one on social media is basically none, so use three at a minimum. Likewise, you have to chop a long sentence into a string of short lines and send them one at a time, Pear Blossom style, or bridge every pause with an Oscar-worthy sticker, before you can prove through the screen that you are genuinely happy, angry or sad.

300 Million People — a defunct unit for measuring how big a hit a product is

At some point, without anyone noticing, the order of magnitude for user numbers in brand ads quietly rose from tens of millions to hundreds of millions, accompanied by every possible variant of the astonishing figure meant to say “we are a national, phenomenon-level hit”: web-series views starting at 10 billion, read counts of a million-plus, an official 98% attendance rate, live-stream audiences in the millions. Don't just frown at it — take notes. Now you know how to write your year-end review and your summary slide deck, don't you?

“Vision” — a defunct unit for measuring lofty ambition

Vision was never easy to quantify to begin with, and since becoming standard jargon in today's startup and venture circles its meaning has inflated absurdly. The direct result is that whether you praise someone for having plenty of vision or knock them for having too little, it always carries a whiff of “treating yourself as the protagonist and everyone else as an NPC,” and comes across as an ego trip. Not recommended for frequent use.

“High-End” — a (semi-)defunct unit for measuring aesthetic taste

The words for describing beauty turn over remarkably fast. From “Nordic” and “French,” represented a few years ago by a handful of European countries, to “Normcore” and “sexless style,” exemplified by a few famous brands, to “high-end face” and “catfish face,” which put effortless, overwhelming good looks above everything else… and just as you finally get the standard where looking like a Tibetan fox counts as beautiful, well, the last few months it's been “Morandi” tones and “Hong Kong style” instead.

Those are some of the new units of measurement our lab has found for you. Grasp the spirit of the thing, think it over, and carry the habit of quantifying contemporary life into every detail of your own.

You're welcome.

Cover image, illustrations / Zheng Shuya