A 2 Is A 2
I like numbers because they are objective. I have always been good at maths, and understanding it made me like them more. A 2 is a 2. There is no tone in it, no subtext, nobody asking what you meant by it. You are right or you are wrong, and the number does not care either way.
There are more numbers in my life now than there were when I was actually doing maths. That should be good news. But I often ask - is it?
It started with gaming. Completion percentage. Level. DPS. Armour rating. A number for how much damage I do and a number for how much I can take, which is more self knowledge than most people get from a therapist. I am still hooked on both, the numbers and the game.
Then the age of social media kicked off. My first foray into this world was with Orkut. Big in India and Brazil, dead everywhere else, and the first place I was ever given a number about myself. How many friends do I have. Then Facebook, same question, plus a second one. How many people liked that. I got out early. I do not have Instagram or Twitter and I have never opened TikTok, which I sort of count as an achievement.
Then work, which is the part I get paid for. A strategy changes, so the numbers get monitored. Sessions, conversions, users, unread emails sitting there like a tab nobody closed. Then banking went digital and my phone started answering questions I had not asked. How much do I have. How much did I spend. Did it go up. Did the dividend land. Shopping went the same way. Price, wishlist, price again, discount, price if I wait.
And then wearables, which is where it got away from me.
Steps. Heart rate. Sleep score. Body battery. Sessions per week. Calories per session. Calories per day. I log gym sessions in one app and the sleep in another and at some point in the last few years I started checking a number in the morning to find out how I felt, rather than the other way around.
I did not notice while it was happening.
A 2 is a 2. A sleep score is not. Somebody chose a formula, weighted it however they liked, did not publish it, and sold it back to me as a fact. Body battery is not a measurement. It is a brand. Nobody is measuring my battery. There is no battery. There is a proprietary blend of heart rate variability and vibes, rendered in a font I trust for no reason.
Ten thousand steps is the same trick, and it is the one that got me for years. It was not based on a study. A Tokyo doctor suggested the number, a clockmaker put it on a product in 1965, and it sold. I have altered my evenings for a slogan that is older than I am because I got to get those ten thousand steps.
Engagement rate. Readiness. Recovery. Strain. Screen time, which is a real number describing a made up category. All of them presented with the flat confidence of arithmetic, none of them with the underlying working.
I did not get fooled by the maths. I got fooled by the presentation.
And I should have seen it coming, because I do this for a living. I build the dashboards. I know exactly how you pick the window that makes the line go up, and which chart to put at the top, and that the number a client remembers is the biggest number on the page rather than the one with the most behind it. I have spent fifteen plus years making numbers feel like conclusions. Then I go home and let a watch do it to me.
What I actually liked about maths was that it settled things. The answer arrived and the question stopped. None of these numbers settle anything. They are all open. There is no score that means you can stop, only a score that means you can stop today, and tomorrow the app will want to know again.
I quit social media before the numbers got me. I have made peace with the gaming ones because at least those are honest about being a game. I lost on the wrist.
I still check it every morning. I know it is made up. I check it anyway.