The Metrification of Emotion

What happens when love, grief, and anger are translated into likes, shares, and views? This episode analyzes the devaluation of human affect through its quantification.

Feelings were always hard to grasp. Their vagueness was their essence. You couldn't say how much love you feel – only that you love. You couldn't measure grief – only live through it.

Today we have numbers. A grief post with 10 likes. A joy picture with 1000. An anger tweet with 50,000 retweets. Suddenly what was never measurable seems measurable.

We examine how we begin to judge our own feelings by how "performant" they are online. When deep grief receives little resonance, it feels less valuable in the system than a trivial joke with viral reach.

This changes not just how we express feelings. It changes how we experience them. We begin to feel for the camera. To experience for the post. To live for the reaction.

The manifesto warns: We lose the capacity for genuine empathy when we only understand emotions as data points. Empathy becomes performance. Authenticity becomes strategy.

The deepest human experiences – birth, death, love, loss – elude any metric. Their dignity lies in their immeasurability. This dignity must be protected.