I was at the Las Vegas International Airport California Pizza Kitchen late last Saturday night, preparing to fly back from a friend of mine’s wedding on a redeye to Boston that also featured what felt like 400 union steelworkers. I did not sleep. My girlfriend was to my right, totally burnt out. We’d had a long week of travelling Nevada and California together and we’d both reached the edge of our available energy. I opened my notes app and started listing out days from our trip M, T, W, Th, F, Sa, and then numbers 2, 4, 7, 7, etc. At times I strained to recall which numbers to place. When I was finished, I showed her to her bemusement. “NUMBER OF DRINKS” was my preferred header. 

Like an inadvertent tic I’d counted each drink for the week with the intention of adding these to that enormous spreadsheet I’ve mentioned previously.  It’s an impressive spreadsheet, rows and rows of daily data measuring and correlating an enormous number of factors in my life. I have a certain weird pride when I open it up to show someone and the viewer recoils at the neurotic wall with thousands of numbers in front of them. 

The genesis of this is one of self perception. That is to say: I wanted to avoid lying to myself. The issue in solving problems in life is that without measurement you’re either seduced by that self-flattering bias, or you overcompensate against it. I’m either ignoring something entirely, or launching a full blown crusade that might well not be needed. My idea was to begin counting beans – how happy am I? How much sleep did I get? How many drinks did I have? I hoped these would promote improvement in my life. At first, they did. 

My sleep scores were too low, so I established rituals to get that number up. I saw how many drinks I was having and resolved to lower it. And It was working, I’d distilled objectivity in my own life through these measurements. I added more. Time on phone, diet, creative time, etc. I correlated all of them, and now I was cooking with gas. A true technocrat. My path to happiness was via the data, I just had to maximize the right things. I joked about this in my old article, but there’s truth in it. Once you have a model it just feels like you need to optimize to solve problems. 

The returns didn’t continue. I set goals confidently looking at my computer screen only to see the numbers stay stagnant. Like an out of touch corporate executive, I stared at my spreadsheet with a certain level of obliviousness as to why my efforts hadn’t moved the needle. My creative minutes are down, why is that? I think I’ve been lazy, or distracted, or I’m just not creative right now. I’ll work on that, but it was to no avail. Sometimes I’d get short term wins only to see them evaporate. Data entry became a drag. A ritual punishment where I flogged myself and regretfully typed all of the ways in which I wasn’t meeting my own standards. When someone would suggest I was a creative person, I’d mothball it. I wasn’t. I had the data to prove it. 

It all felt increasingly useless to me, but I can’t break away from reality right? Going back to the open and dangerous seas of self perception seemed like a disaster waiting. It goes without saying that I kept doing it, row after row. Finally, I was scrolling through tiktok when one up popped a gallery of quotes. I enjoy these little collections of writings and quotes that people curate, often they’re a great way to find new people to dig into. Included was a quote by Rene Guerion that hit a little too close to home – 

“Modern Science is knowledge of a lower order because it is only concerned with that which is measurable” 

I suddenly and intensely related to this. My personal science is broken. In my quest to stop lying to myself via my subjectivity, I’ve created first a new vehicle for lying to myself, and eventually a new reality altogether where the spreadsheet numbers define how I feel over reality. It’s the mental effect of measuring so much. 

The 4 minute mile was defined as impossible from the inception of the concept of the mile during the Roman Republic until 1954 when Roger Bannister ran one in 3:59.4. The next guy did it 46 days later. Mental barriers are powerful things, Roger Bannister knew that more than anyone as a neurologist. This is what I worry about most when tracking everything in my life. To define is to limit, and when I’m measuring everything I’m defining my life by those numbers and, critically, how I feel about it.

If I get 5.5 hours of sleep, I am exhausted.

If I was on my phone for a while, I was unproductive. 

If I drink, I am hungover. 

I’ve established a world where I am letting the numbers define how I feel rather than my own perception. What does it mean when a day’s happiness is a 3, versus a 5? And, as exemplified by the 4 minute mile, that effect is real. If I think I should be tired, I actually become tired. If I think I’m unproductive, I become so. 

Knowledge that doesn’t serve you can be bad. When I say I’m lying to myself, I mean that I’m using that data to define what matters, but I’m doing that via my own interpolation. I suspect a lot of us are doing this. We simply have access to too much data. I need an overall re-centering of myself, deciding how I feel based on all of the wonderful nuances of life rather than a selection of numbers that, at best, are a small representative slice of a whole (and at worst a well kept fabricated and inherently limiting reality.)

Mark Twain has a well known passage called “Two Ways of Seeing A River.” In it, he writes of the beauty of viewing a river with no predisposition, and then how that the majesty of the currents was sucked out by the practicalities of being a steamboat captain. The deep knowledge and exposure to the waves ruined the beauty for him. 

“What does the lovely flush in a beauty’s cheek mean to a doctor but a ‘break’ that ripples above some deadly disease.”

Like Twain on the river, I’d obsessively measured how I was viewing progress and the beauty in my life, and lost both in the process. 

The worst part is that it’s not even that effective. My default when trying to change myself is to get out the measuring tape and start optimizing. That all feels very surface level to me at this moment. It feels like a mistake. Calling myself ‘repressed’ conjured images of someone with deep trauma and experiences that I simply do not have. If I did, I wouldn’t have made it this far with my current mentality. I do worry about when I run into hard times, I don’t think this way of doing things could bear that load. 

A spreadsheet cannot capture how to be a kinder person, nor can it capture how to reconcile a complex falling out. To solve those and others, it requires we get beyond trying to understand specific metrics, and start to understand ourselves in a beautiful, nuanced, human sort of way. Beyond little white boxes. I’d like to be in a place where I can see data about my life as outputs to note but not internalize. Minor data points on the beauty of life, unable to ever fully capture what’s really going on fully even with the most careful and attentive measuring. And a place where I feel okay with being honest with myself naturally, instead of adapting or punting.

I don’t need a spreadsheet as much as I need a curriculum that enables the best practices without neurotically tracking every detail. Structure that encourages honestly thinking about life and acting rather than substituting that with numbers. In the meantime, I’m not sure whether to keep doing the spreadsheet. I probably will. It’s still useful, but my perspective has already changed and I don’t anticipate going back. 

Colin