Our Obsession With Metrics

I’ve come to believe metrics-based goals are often misguided. They have their place, but the usage of metrics is so ubiquitous people often see no other way to measure whether their lives are what they really want.

Academic grades. Performance reviews. Wealth. Social media likes. Sales. Growth. Number of stars. Physical size. Hours worked. Ticking off a certain number of tasks. Having more or more expensive stuff.

The number of things in life we measure quantitatively rather than qualitatively is endless. Yes, counting (we’re basically counting when we think quantitatively) is easy and at first makes us feel good because we’ve achieved a number, an externally- or self-imposed numerical goal. But that doesn’t mean it’s qualitatively making your life better or you happier.

Is the accumulation of vast sums of money making you happier, or stressing you out?

While you can celebrate someone else happy their body is massively muscled or fashion runway rail thin ready, are you sure the same goals are good or healthy for you?

Are you stressing over getting straight A’s in school even though research shows B students tend to succeed generally better in life?

Are you working 12 hours a day because it fulfills you, or are you using it as bragging rights or a false sense of self-worth?

Do you create a checklist of daily tasks and rate your success based on how many you tick off or by the quality of the truly important things you do?

Is your company so focused on achieving constant growth that it fails to see that the growth it’s focused on is damaging to others, both within and outside the company?

I say all these being someone who’s historically been a bit obsessed with quantification. I was raised by a man who checklisted and quantified virtually everything. He was an amazing father, but his obsession became my obsession and it took a while to wrestle myself from that mindset. The truth is I’m still struggling with it all the time.

Culturally we’re obsessed with quantification too. We deify winners while entirely forgetting everyone else who competed. We elevate the wealthy to cult-like god status when the reality is they might be awful people who happen to have accumulated a lot of money. We create a ridiculous assessment game in corporate life where we dole out or accept performance reviews, the contents of which often have little to do with the person’s actual performance. We try to accumulate more stuff or more expensive stuff with us serving the stuff rather than the stuff serving us.

Rather than assess my own life by metrics I now try to more often use a qualitative assessment. Rather than measure, I ask myself questions.

Have my actions today helped me improve my health and appearance, and in what ways can I do better tomorrow?

Have I adequately addressed and planned my financial life as an adult and not just chased money for its own sake?

Am I taking this class to learn and grow, or simply to tick off another good grade?

Am I contributing to the improved quality of my life and the lives of others or are am I only measuring my own success based on metrics and not by my life actions’ impact?

Anyway, I think we need to more often measure our own lives and the overall social good in qualitative ways rather than quantitative. Numbers sometimes lie, or at least they deceive even if accurate. I think honest answers to a qualitative question tend to be a better assessment of are we moving in the right or wrong directions.

Ironically, your mileage may vary.