Put away the ruler

The moment you start measuring something, it changes.

There is an old idea in physics that the act of observation alters the thing being observed. The same principle runs through everything humans try to quantify. If students are graded on their work, they start completing it for the grade. A relationship which you are in for what it gives you becomes a transaction you are managing. Taking photos to prove you went somewhere optimizes the trip for what can be captured and posted. The metric becomes the target, and many times the original thing the metric was supposed to describe is no longer the priority.

We reach for measurement because we want to understand. Data feels logical and solid, and it gives those who have a functional left brain a way to compare, track, improve, and solve. Some things genuinely do need to be measured, especially for health, because measurement gives you utility or enablement you would not have otherwise.

Unfortunately, a rating out of ten does not substantively capture one's feelings just like a GPA does not capture what someone actually learned. The measurement is often a compression, and compressions always lose information, and the information they lose is usually what matters the most.

Consider how many things in your life you have stopped experiencing as much as you'd like because you started measuring them. Meals you maybe only ate because you wanted to post on Beli, or runs you went on because you needed to reach your target mileage on Strava (guilty). Each of these individual measurements offers clarity, yes, but each one also places a mental boundary between you and the experience itself.

At the same time, measurement and experience are not mutually exclusive, but the moment you quantify something, your perception of it changes, even if that change is subconscious.

So, I think many things are worth leaving unmeasured, but I also only believe people will stop tracking things if they -

1. disregard their social perception to an extent, and

2. realize that, in certain scenarios, the significance of human experience overrides the worth of measurement -

because the attempt to quantify something has the ability to destroy the very quality that made it count in the first place.