What is energy?

No, not energy in the scientific sense but in the colloquial sense. Someone has good energy. I feel the energy in my body. There are “energy” centers in the body. I mean the phrases around energy that are vague yet seem widely understood, especially among hippies, San Franciscans, spiritualists, and those pining to fit into such circles.

I feel conflicted about this use of the word. On the one hand, it is very handy in conversation — people seem to understand very clearly what you mean when you experience someone or something that has good or bad “energy”.

But when I ask what energy is, I come short. Is it the feeling within me that I get when I interact with someone or in some environment? Is it thus generated solely from within myself, prefixed by my own cultural upbringing, perspectives, experiences, traumas, and Pavlovian responses? Or is it a perceptible force emitted by others, to which other humans can be attunes? It is a sort of a spiritual odor that we can't see but have another sense through which we can perceive?

My guess boils down to the intellectual cop-out: it depends or its probably a mix of all the above. In what proportions, who knows. Many questions in life that demand specific answers yield unknown equations — “well, it's a mix of all the things you've identified, though in what quantities and affected by what conditions, we know not!”.

Such vagueness may be inherent in language or philosophy. Mathematics is the preferred language for measurable specificity, while our words, phrases, and statements — however tightly we may aspire to construct them — always seem to have a porousness for ambiguity or questioning.