How to calculate ratio of meltdowns to “Baby Shark” views

Friday, April 3, 2026
 

This article will teach you how to calculate the ratio of the number of times a given person, whether yourself or someone else, has had a loss-of-temper or loss-of-control meltdown, to the number of views on “Baby Shark.” At the time of this writing, “Baby Shark” has over 16.8 billion views, nearly twice as many as the next “closest” video, “Despacito,” at 8.98 billion views. The word “closest” in the previous sentence is in quotation marks because, let’s face it, 8.98 billion and 16.8 billion are really not that close, with a factor of 1.87 between them. You want some exact values? Here you go: As of April 2, 2026, at 04:00 UTC, “Baby Shark” has 16,804,980,746 views, while “Despacito” has 8,978,513,462 views. For this article, we will use those values. “Baby Shark” currently gets about 3 million views a day. Twenty-one days earlier, on March 12, at 04:00 UTC, “Baby Shark” had 16,744,368,614 views. That’s 60,612,132 views in 21 days, or 2,886,292 views per day (what a lucky coincidence, too, that 60,612,132 is divisible by 21, so the average is a whole number). Meanwhile, during the same period, “Despacito” gained 19,821,934 views, for a daily mean of 943,901 views per day. For every 1000 times either video was viewed during that 21-day period, “Baby Shark” was played 754 times, while “Despacito” was played 246 times, for a roughly 3:1 ratio.

I am upset with myself. Eleven days have passed since my last meltdown, but I am still salty with myself. I have turned my brother against me due to my last two meltdowns, which were two of the WORST ones I’ve ever had. On March 18, I got very frustrated with my weight; my “plateau” had entered its ninth evening, and it had been stuck in the 203 – 207 range since March 10. On the night of March 18, my brother, Bryan, went to bed early, but at 8:55 p.m. EDT, he was immediately woken up to the sound of me yelling about “hating failure.” I began to jump and scream about how much I felt that, in a perfect world, if you make a serious, dedicated effort, you should not have failure, especially not an anticlimactic failure. I was playing “Free Run” on Wii Fit U downstairs, and I had only three minutes left on a timer that started at 30 minutes. I had run over 8 miles. Nowadays, whenever I do the 30-minute “Free Run,” I usually run somewhere between 8.5 and 9.5 miles. My personal record is 9.667 miles (set on 1/21/2026). This time, on the night of 3/18/2026, the good news is, I completed the 30-minute run with a distance of 8.585 miles. The bad news? I spent the last three minutes of that 30-minute timer in “meltdown mode,” yelling at Bryan and saying very nasty things to them. Unfortunately, Mom had her phone, and she recorded two segments of my wrath, at 9:23 and 9:24. Bryan has been growing increasingly frustrated. “Ray,” he said, “I am only trying to help you!” Four days later, while I was playing Pokémon Brilliant Diamond on my Nintendo Switch, I exploded again. It was March 22, shortly after 3 p.m. After Mom and Bryan ordered me to go to my room to calm down, I decided to go into Mom’s room to use her YouTube account to add a “like” to one of my recent comments on a Mah-Dry Bread video. Mah-Dry Bread, or MDB for short, frequently does “challenge runs” in Pokémon games. Every Saturday, at 4 p.m. EDT, he posts a new video of him doing such a challenge. On March 21, he posted a video of himself playing through Pokémon X with only a Snubbull. I posted a comment requesting that he try a solo run of this game with only a Corsola. On March 22, at 3:05 p.m., I went into Mom’s room to use her account to thumb-up this comment, but Bryan kept shouting, “Ray, not your account!” or something to that effect. He gave me 3-5 reminders of this in the 15 seconds or 20 seconds it took me to get down to that comment. In my moment of frustration, I lashed out at him, saying things like “I HATE YOUR VOICE!” and “I HATE YOUR VOICE MORE THAN TODD HATES ADAM LEVINE!” I continued to yell at Bryan and curse his voice. Mom threatened to send me to an emergency room, calling me “crazy” (in the medical sense, and in a very negative way) in the process. Apparently, the words “emergency room” triggered a negative childhood memory for Bryan. In November 2006, on the night before Thanksgiving, I injured Bryan. It was about 6 or 6:30, and I was upset that Dad left me home alone to pick up Bryan from a friend’s house. There was a lot of blood, and all four of us (me, Bryan, Dad, and Mom) went to an emergency room. Luckily, Bryan didn’t have to stay there overnight; after some stitches and a band-aid in the spot of the injury, we went home and enjoyed our Thanksgiving break. Going back to the night of 3/22/2026, he confronted me. Seven hours had passed since the meltdown, but he had been spending much of that time thinking about that terrible night from November 2006. My last two meltdowns, including a couple before that, have caused him to increasingly feel like I didn’t care about him. My brutal verbal attacks and conflicts have caused him to feel small when it came to trying to help me. My meltdowns are getting worse, both in terms of quantity and in terms of quality. I lost my temper 12 times in the last four months. And 11 of them involved Bryan; the only exception was a HUGE meltdown on 2/22/2026, when I lashed out at Dad while he was driving, for being “too busy lately” to take me to UMass Lowell’s dining halls. Luckily for Bryan, he was able to have a normal 2/22/2026, being completely unaware of that episode. On the night of 3/22/2026, however, seven hours after my last meltdown, he reminded me about the “emergency room night” from November 2006. He said to me: “What if I died that day? Would you even care?” And in the days after, Bryan has been far less willing to talk to me. Three days later, on the night of 3/25/2026, he said to me that I take away so much of his energy. He then asked me if this “depressed talk” was any help to me.

I wish I could go back in time and undo those 12 meltdowns. Unfortunately, time travel doesn’t exist yet and is still impractical.

• 1) Make a fraction. The denominator is the “Baby Shark” view count, and the numerator is the number of meltdowns in the specified interval.
• 2) Use a calculator to evaluate the fraction. To evaluate a fraction, all you need to do is to divide the numerator by the denominator. For example, the fraction ${\displaystyle {\frac {3}{5}}}$ can be converted to a decimal by dividing 3 by 5: ${\displaystyle {\frac {3}{5}}}$ = 3 / 5 = 0.6. Although you may be able to do this one in your head, I do not expect you to be able to divide 12 by 16,804,980,746 in your head.

Within the last four months, I had 12 meltdowns. Since “Baby Shark” now has 16,804,980,746 views, we create a fraction for which the denominator is 16,804,980,746, the numerator 12.

${\displaystyle {\frac {12}{16,804,980,746}}}$ = 7.14074 × 10⁻¹⁰

This is not an attempt to “minimize” or “invalidate” the 12 meltdowns that occurred. Instead, my motive for this article is that, when I get angry at myself for being so ill-tempered, and at the fact that 12 in four months is higher than usual, it FEELS LIKE it happened thousands or millions of times. Looking back at that winter, it feels like Bryan and I were having a “criticism session” every other moment.

• [ ] —  e.g. December 31, 1999
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