people crying right now

How this works (the honest bit). This rests on a soft figure. Crying is self-reported, and how often people cry varies enormously with age, sex, culture and circumstance - infants cry constantly, and many adults go months without. We assume roughly two episodes a month, lasting about fifteen minutes each, as a broad adult average across the whole world population. That puts a few million people crying at any moment. We are not claiming precision: the shape of the number is the point, which is that it is never nobody. This model counts emotional crying, not the reflex from an onion or a speck of dust. Every figure on this page is a model built from population data, each country's local clock and the assumptions above. It is an estimate, it moves every second, and at least one of them is certainly true.