How Much Energy Does It Take to Hurt Your Feelings?

This article is about the work we do to get our feelings hurt¹, the dimension of which is $[M^1 L^2 T^{-2}]$. And by “we” and “our”, I mean humanity, or the internet to be exact. This article is not about how our feelings get hurt at work, the dimension of which is $[Salary]$.

It’s (probably not) natural to write down the following equations: $$W_{FH}=N w_{FH}=N p_{FH} t_{FH} \tag{1}$$, where $N$ is the number of people we consider, $w_{FH}$ is the energy the brain takes to get a certain feeling, in this case, anger. $p_{FH}$ is the efficiency of our brain, $t_{FH}$ is the time we take to get over the feeling. According to Does Thinking Really Hard Burn More Calories?, $p_{FH}$ would be $12.6 \space \mathrm{W}$. Let’s say we take an average of $300 \space \mathrm{s}$ to deal with this. And we can define the efficiency as: $$P_{FH}=\frac{W_{FH}}{t} \tag{2}$$, where $t$ is the time it takes for a certain tweet to be read.

So let’s say a tweet gets $10^{6}$ views in $3.6 \times 10^3 \space \mathrm{s}$, which is from a celebrity or influencer, obviously. Put in the numbers, $w_{PH}=3.78 \times 10^3 \space \mathrm{J}$, $W_{FH}=3.78 \times 10^9 \space \mathrm{J}$, $P_{FH}=1.03 \times 10^6 \space \mathrm{W}$.

Here is a table of the energy of some events:

Yes, the energy this takes can have a plane take approximately 100 people from LA to London back and forth twice, which is a fun group trip.

Well, it’s impossible to get one dollar from everyone on this planet, but saying something so awful that you hurt a lot of people’s feelings is possible. Tower of Babel has been built, and we can use it to hurt other people’s feelings, like throwing a stone off the tower (a $7714.29 \space \mathrm{m}$ tower to be precise, see the table above), and $10^6$ stones at a time. And the language problem for Tower of Babel has been solved a long time ago.

OK, my professor would be so mad that I use the conservation of energy like this. And I know for sure I have to consider entropy and that the imagined mechanism does not work. It’s 1 o’clock in the evening, and I have no idea how I got here, maybe it’s “sleep write”, you know, like sleep walk. By the way, writing in a nice form does make it look real, I should have used $\LaTeX$. Good night.