Quantifying ourselves to death.

How to counter the "counting culture."

Imagine you could have an app that told you how much your dog loved you, numerically, by measuring it’s oxytocin levels. You could get updates every time there was a major drop and you could get a weekly summary of how much your dog loved you that week straight to your Apple Watch. Would you use it?

What about your family members? Would you want to have minute by minute tracking of how much your parents or children or wife loved you? I would hope not.

This may seem extreme. A bit Black Mirror. I mean, not everything needs to be so measured, right? Some things just need to felt with the heart. But let’s look how far we’ve already gone down this slippery slope.

We track everything now. If something in life can be turned into a number and that number can displayed on a screen, we generally let our curiosity get the best of us and want to see that number. All the time.

Our health

Want to go on a walk to disconnect? Clear your mind or just catch up with a friend? It is perfectly normal these days to insist on bringing your phone on a leisurely walk through the park lest you miss out on “the steps”. It’s a bizarre twist on “if a tree falls in the forest”, but its “if the physical activity wasn’t quantified in an app did the exercise even happen?”

You can get a Sleep8 mattress that tracks how well you sleep. Why rely on how you feel when you can have the data?

Maybe you want something more subtle to track your stats to let you know how you’re performing in the game of being alive? Try an Oura ring instead.

from Emily Sundberg’s FeedMe

In a world where we complain about the surveillance state of social media and how much data Mark Zuckerberg collects on us, it seems no one likes surveilling us more than ourselves.

But it’s not just our health that we’ve turned into data. Because maybe health tracking can be justified. You get tests done at the doctor right? But what about everything else?

Our films

Artistic pursuits like films are no longer good or bad, they are “an 83% on Rotten Tomatoes” or they “did $200 million opening weekend.” Before you watch the movie your friend recommended, are you checking Letterboxd?

This is strange. These are things that would much better be viewed through a qualitative lens but instead, like everything else, we have quantified.

Our memories

How good was your vacation? How good was your weekend? How beautiful was your wedding? Don’t worry about it, this too can be calculated. How many likes did the pictures get? How many responses did you get on your story? An easy answer can be found in a tallying of the hearts.

Their wallets

Do we need to measure Elon Musk versus Jeff Bezos by their net worth? Does the difference of a few billion matter between two people with more money than God? For all intents and purposes at a certain point your money is just infinite anyways.

Why do we care how much our pop stars, comedians, and our athletes make? This knowledge will never make you feel better and it is likely the least interesting thing about them.

Should Adam Sandler’s bank account a matter of public interest?

Our beauty

Even more bizarre is the quantification of the most immeasurable of measures like beauty. Why is it more accurate to say “her face is a 9, but her body is a 6?” She’s either pretty or not. Do you find her attractive? Leave the numbers out of it.

Why does it matter?

From Spotify Wrapped to Good Reads, it feels like we have gone crazy with our desire to attach a number to everything we do and enjoy. What are we losing by doing this? Are we adding more detail with these numerals or are we eliminating the magic?

I can’t help but feel each quality we replace with a quantity is one step away from being human. One step toward us turning ourselves into the AI we claim will replace us. Our brains becoming as filled with 1s and 0s as the machines.

There is something lost when we digitize and tally everything. The beauty of the forest is being lost for the counting of the trees.

I promise you, the walk will be more enjoyable if it’s just a walk, not a pursuit of 10,000 steps.

You will know if you under slept.

And you can tell how your workouts are going by looking in the mirror and deciding if you look hotter or if you feel stronger and more energized.

There is a freedom you gain when you stop turning yourself into a cyborg with whoop bands and “smart” jewelry.

Your memories will feel more special if they’re not translated into “likes” and “comments”

Let’s return to using adjectives to describe things rather than numbers to rank them.

But what about…

Now don’t get me wrong, there is a time and place for measuring. It’s called the workplace. Companies need to make money, they need to calculate the ROI of everything they do, and I understand when it comes to financial pursuits you can’t rely on vibes. But does our life outside of work need to mirror that? Is it good for the soul to put our every breath into a database?

I think this irony was hit on well by Bo Burnham in his song “That Funny Feeling” when he describes a “stunning 8K resolution meditation app.”

Meditation traces its roots back to pre-Buddhist proto-yogic India as a way to look inward to realize the ultimate truths of reality. Now it can be measured in timed increments from a digital device that tracks your progress… to realizing ultimate reality? Can an app tell you how close you are to enlightenment?

It’s time to realize that we can not measure our lives. If it is a quality life you seek than you must look at it qualitatively.