It all started with a tiny plastic clip. A Fitbit, back in 2011.
Like a lot of people in tech, I was completely sold on the dream of the "Quantified Self." The idea felt so clean, so logical. If you can measure something, you can improve it, right? As a writer who spent most of his day glued to a chair, I had a vague desire to, you know, "be healthier." I wanted to feel better, get outside more, maybe even spark some new ideas.
Numbers seemed like the perfect tool to bring some order to the beautiful chaos of being human. And for a little while, it worked.
I was already a lifelong gamer, so I knew the little dopamine hit you get from watching a score go up. My Fitbit was just a new kind of game. My initial goal was a modest 6,000 steps a day. It seemed like a gentle nudge to get me away from my desk and into the fresh air. But something funny happened on the way to self-knowledge.
The Goal That Got Away
I honestly can't tell you when my walks stopped being about clearing my head or enjoying nature. But it happened fast. Within a few weeks, the why didn't matter anymore. All that mattered was the number.
6,000 steps became 10,000. Then 15,000. For years, I was a 20,000-steps-a-day guy.
It’s a cliché story, I know. The "steps guy" is practically a meme at this point. But it's a cliché for a reason. It's a trap that’s incredibly easy to fall into.
Soon, I had a whole arsenal of gadgets. Heart-rate monitors for my runs, a smartwatch, a sleep-tracking ring, and more calorie-counting apps than I care to admit. My work life wasn't immune, either. This was the era of Chartbeat and social media analytics. Suddenly, my "job success" wasn't about the quality of my writing but about page views, retweets, and likes.
After more than ten years of diligently tracking my life, I can tell you what I gained: almost zero self-knowledge. I learned that I like making numbers go up, but who doesn't? The constant stream of data didn't add any meaning to my life. In fact, the more I measured, the worse I felt about pretty much everything.
The Two Hard Truths About Tracking Your Life
Looking back, I learned two really important lessons from my decade-long experiment in self-quantification.
First, you will never have enough data. Just when you think you’ve got a handle on your sleep score, a new metric pops up. Heart rate variability (HRV). Daily "readiness" scores. Your "fitness age." There's always another, supposedly better, way to measure what's important. Measurement just creates a hunger for more measurement.
The second lesson was more subtle but way more destructive. The more personal and nuanced your original goal is, the more likely you are to swap it for a simple, dumbed-down metric.
Think about it. Want to be a better writer? That's messy and hard to define. But page views? That’s a number on a leaderboard. Easy. Want to get better at cooking? Forget about creativity and improvisation—just find the most complicated recipe with the longest ingredient list. The metric becomes the goal itself.
They Have a Name for This: "Value Capture"
It turns out, there’s a term for this phenomenon. The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen calls it "value capture" in his book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game.
Value capture is what happens when you let an external system of measurement define what's important to you. You’re essentially outsourcing your values to a number. It's why my meditative walks turned into a relentless march to hit a step count.
Once you see it, you can't unsee it. It's everywhere.
- A restaurant that stops caring about making delicious food and starts obsessing over its Yelp rating.
- A student who stops caring about learning and just focuses on their GPA.
- A pastor who told Nguyen his church became obsessed with a leaderboard for monthly baptism rates, and he started focusing on popular sermons instead of the long-term spiritual health of his congregation.
In every case, a rich, complex value (great food, true education, spiritual growth) gets flattened into a simple, legible score. And we start chasing the score.
Why Numbers Are So Seductive
So why do we do this to ourselves? According to historian Theodore M. Porter, it’s because quantification is a "technology of distance." In his book Trust in Numbers, he explains that numbers are powerful because they don't require intimate knowledge or personal trust.
A student's GPA is easy for anyone, anywhere, to understand and compare. Reading a dozen nuanced, qualitative teacher assessments is hard. A country's GDP is a single number politicians can point to. Understanding the complex, on-the-ground economic reality of millions of people is, well, impossible.
To get that clarity, you have to throw away a ton of information. You strip out all the context and nuance. With value capture, you take that stripped-down, decontextualized number and you make it your life's guide.
The Problem with "Goodhart's Law"
Whenever I get into this conversation with a "numbers person," they inevitably bring up Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
They usually say it as if it explains everything away—that the problem isn't the metric, it's just that people are using it wrong. It's user error.
I have a profound dislike for this argument. As Nguyen points out, it completely misses the point. The law doesn't explain why this happens or what to do about it. The reality is, all measurements are targets. They can't help but be. A metric always presents one direction as better—higher scores, faster times, more engagement.
The issue isn't user error. It's a fundamental problem with measurement itself when applied to the messy, beautiful stuff of human life.
Let's Be Clear: Metrics Aren't the Enemy
Now, I don't want you to think I'm some anti-data Luddite. Measurement has literally built the modern world. It’s given us life-saving science and awe-inspiring breakthroughs.
Metrics can be incredibly useful for accountability. Are we actually lowering carbon emissions? Is a company following federal regulations? Numbers keep people honest. They can reduce bias and push us to act.
The weakness of metrics—the real danger—is when we use them to chase subtle, personal goals. Self-knowledge. Happiness. Creativity. Fulfillment. When we try to distill these things down to a data point, we don't just fail to capture what matters. We actively obscure it.
How Do We Push Back?
Today, I’m lucky. I’m a freelancer, so I don't have KPIs or OKRs hanging over my head. I’m in good health, so I don't need to monitor my blood sugar.
But the logic of metrics is inescapable. We’re all seen as a collection of numbers, as "data subjects." And this is where it gets really scary, especially with AI.
If we continue to define our worth through productivity scores and attention metrics, we’ve already lost. AI will always beat us at the numbers game. That's literally what we build it to do. The answer is not to become more like machines ourselves.
The first and most important step is to simply question the power we give to numbers. To ask ourselves what meaning, what joy, what nuance we’re sacrificing in the pursuit of a metric.
What keeps me up at night is the fear that we've become so fluent in the language of data that we've forgotten how to talk about what makes us human. And we need that language now more than ever as we figure out our relationship with AI. What are humans for? What is AI for? You can't answer those questions with a spreadsheet.
A few years ago, I started untangling myself from my life of numbers. I got off social media, for the most part. I deleted the health apps. The watch I wear now just tells the time.
The only thing that's stuck with me from my decade of self-quantification is a love for walking. I walk when I'm stuck on an essay. I walk when I feel overwhelmed. I walk because I love being outside with my dog. The benefits are as clear to me as anything in my life.
I just can't express them in a number. And I’ve finally realized that’s the whole point.
