My favourite kind of mathematics is the silently heartbreaking kind.

We humans are social creatures, and we spend a lot of time thinking about all the other humans. But we don’t spread our thoughts uniformly across all humans. That is to say, we don’t spend an equal amount of time thinking about every human. (We don’t even know all the other humans, so that would be impossible.) Let’s quantify this.

At this phase of my life, of all the time I spend thinking about people, perhaps 10 percent of the time it’s my boyfriend Oliver. I have two other close friends, Brenna and Tori, (5 percent each), and about a dozen other friends on Tier 2 (1 to 2 percent each, for a total of 15 percent).

Ever since I moved across the country I don’t think much about my family, I’m sorry to say, but let’s say I spend 2 percent each on my parents and sisters, and 2 percent more on all of the rest of my family combined. I do worry a lot about my managing editor and my coworkers and what they think of me, so perhaps that’s another 10 percent for everybody at work. The other women in my weekly book club probably garner another 5 percent, split among the six of them. I also spend an inordinate amount of my thoughts on Harry Styles (5 percent), the kids from Stranger Things (5 percent), and all other celebrities and public figures (5 percent).

Finally, I do think about myself. A lot. Sometimes it’s deep introspection and mulling over my body image issues and failing self-esteem, but most of the time it’s just mundane stuff like Hey, I’m brushing my teeth and that counts as thinking about myself. Perhaps 20 percent of the time when I’m thinking about a human, it’s myself.

(There’s a catch-all Other category which accounts for the remaining 5 percent. These range from Facebook acquaintances and recurring neighbourhood characters at the high end to incidental strangers in coffee shops and train windows at the low end.)

That’s my Distribution of Thought-Time Across People. That is an itemised list of how I have allocated my thinking efforts across the eight billion people who make up Humanity.

Everyone else has her own Distribution of Thought-Time Across People, and it’s not necessarily symmetric with yours.

Occasionally (and a bit too often) I wonder what percentage of Oliver’s thoughts about people are about me. This number is a proxy for how much I’m in his life. Does he think about me roughly as much as I think about him (10 percent)? Or does his life completely and utterly revolve around the idolatry of me, so much so that I occupy his thoughts more than everyone else in the world put together, himself included (at least 50 percent)? Or am I an utter non-event in the play in his head, a placeholder character with whom he interacts with a desultory detachment (1 percent) while maybe he dreams of another woman taking my place? I know I worry myself silly about these things, but what if it’s not silly at all?

I wonder if Brenna and Tori each spend 5 percent of their thoughts about people on me. I’m pretty sure they do, we send the first text to each other half the time, but if I’m carrying on a lopsided friendship, how would I discover that? Would I even want to discover that?

I know my parents probably think about me much more than the 2 percent that I think about them. They probably think about their daughters every day, even though I only remember to call them about once a week, on a good week. I feel a low guilt over this.

But then again, I’m pretty sure Harry Styles spends zero percent of his time thinking about me. Maybe 0.0000001 percent, as one of a myriad of faces filling an arena. Definitely not 5 percent. Harry Styles and I have a very lopsided relationship.

I promised there’d be maths, so let’s do a summation. Let’s sum, over all people, the proportion of their thoughts they spend on me.

Almost all of the terms in this summation are negligible, because why would a random yak farmer in Nepal or a random schoolteacher in Bavaria be thinking about me specifically? The non-negligible terms I’d have to guess. Let’s optimistically assume that Oliver thinks of me 15 percent of the time (0.15). And maybe Brenna thinks about me 5 percent of the time (0.05), but I know Tori has a lot of other close friends, so maybe to her I account for 2 percent of her thoughts (0.02). And maybe my parents think about me 10 percent (0.1) each, but maybe my managing editor doesn’t notice me at all (0.0). All of these numbers are completely speculative. The only number I could make up without making baseless assumptions about other people is how much I think of myself, and let’s say that’s 20 percent (0.2).

When I add up all of these decimals, what score do I get?

The average score a person gets is 1.0. Exactly 1.0. 100 percent. This is because each person has exactly 100 percent of her thoughts to allocate among all the rest of the people, and so if there are N people, then we’re trying to allocate N hundred percent across N people, for an average of 100 percent per person. Q.E.D.

But nobody gets exactly 1.0. Harry Styles probably gets way more than that—he only needs twenty fans who will think about him at least as much as I do, and he probably has thousands if not millions of those. So some people have to get less than 1.0.

Such is the economy of attentions.

What is my score? Do enough people think about me often enough that they’ll push my score over 1.0? (Or maybe I have secret admirers who spend half their time thinking about me? Do I even want to know?) Or am I less important in all of my friends’ lives than I’d like to admit? Do the people who I think of as my inner circle think likewise of me as existing within their inner circles?

I know that this score is, in principle, calculable. If I found my way into the Universe Control Panel Room, paused the simulation, and ran a summation across the database of everyone else’s thoughts, I’d arrive at the answer. It’s just a number.

In practice, of course you can’t calculate this. But I spend too much of my time worrying about what my score will end up being. The whole concept already gives me a silent kind of heartbreak. Sorry.