How much do you weigh?
Did you check today? I did, as I
do almost every day. I weigh one pound
more than yesterday. Yes, I had a dessert
last night that I didn’t need – and it showed up on the scale. How many steps did you walk today? I had no clue about this until recently when –
no I didn’t get a Fitbit – it turns out that my phone came with an installed
app that measures this. So now I do,
too. A friend with a Fitbit said that it
would change me, and I scoffed. But it
has. I am now doing sneaky things to up
my numbers. I check them in the middle
of the day. On a recent trip to New
York, I set records and, with my family, it was a consistent point of
conversation. The reluctant son and I
became pretty good at estimated how many steps we had walked to that point on
any given day…
Why do we do this? I
think it allows us to take something very complex and reduce it to something
very simple – a number. What does my weight
signify? For some who are anorexic the
number seems to be related to something like beauty – the lower the number the
greater the beauty. Though I think that
attractiveness is part of it – there is a correlation between that number and
the size of my gut which, when it protrudes is decidedly ugly – I think it
likely has more to do with something like health – the lower the number the
healthier I am. Why does this
matter? One component is, I’m pretty
sure, death anxiety. The lower the
number the longer I will live. And as
for steps – the inverse is the case.
So, each time I check one of these numbers, I am checking in
on a scale – actually many of them. How
likely am I to die soon? How much am I protruding? How healthy am I? But this is not the conscious
experience. Consciously, this is a
number and it is a good number (lower weight than yesterday, higher steps) or a
bad one. I feel something in that moment
– good and validated or bad and lacking.
It is a motivational moment. I am
drawn to eat less or walk more – I even park my car further from the store to
pick up a few extra steps – how weird is that?
I think that checking the numbers allows me to split myself
for a moment. There is a part of me that
has been acting – eating or not eating, walking or sitting in my chair working –
and there is a part of me that gets to appraise that – to say, “Good job.” Or “Get to work.” Either way, there is actually a sense that I
am in connection with – and this might sound really weird – an other. An other is the other – the other part of me
that is evaluating me. And in that
moment, someone cares – someone is noticing what I am doing. I am being validated – actually whether I did
good OR bad – I am being validated because someone – that other who is also me –
cares enough to check the book and decide whether to give me a gold star or a
demerit. Someone actually is checking up
on me!
Actually, one of the great discoveries of how to change
someone’s behavior is that just monitoring it will change it. There was a General Electric Plant – the Hawthorne Plant – where researchers tried to find out how to improve worker
productivity. They increased the
brightness of the lights – they dimmed the lights – they did this, they did
that – and they found that the productivity improved when the workers knew that
someone was studying their productivity – regardless of whether the lights were
brightened or dimmed. The psychoanalyst
in me wonders whether those workers felt that there was someone out there – an other
– who was looking in on them and this sense that someone cared got translated
into working harder.
When we work with a client to help them quit smoking, one of
the first things that we may have them do is to simply keep track of how many
cigarettes they are smoking. And (if
they or we have been keeping track ahead of time) we find that simply tracking
when we smoke leads to a decrease in the number of cigarettes that we smoke. While this may be due to the other having an
interest, this also seems to be related to being more conscious of our
activities – actually thinking before we light up – and choosing not to smoke
this cigarette – or not to smoke it now – to put it off. So maybe counting calls up another and allows
us to be more self aware.
What’s so bad about relying on quantification of my behavior to drive it?
I think the problem is that I am driven in ways that are outside of my
consciousness to do stuff that may not be in my best interests. In addition to checking my weight and my
steps (and the temperature outside), I also check the number of page views on
my blog. Regularly. I think a lot happens when I do that. It gives me a break from whatever else it is
I am doing, but it also gives me a moment in which I know whether someone out
there – the other from the outside – has expressed interest in the things I
write about. It feels really good when
those numbers are high for the day, week, month or year – and it is concerning
when they aren’t.
At the last psychoanalytic meeting I attended in New York in
January, a psychoanalyst that I really like (and one I hadn’t met) presented on
blogging. A big chunk of the
presentation was on the numbers and on the importance of getting those numbers
up. Now, to be fair, I have worked with
the psychoanalyst I know and like for a long time and she is really concerned
about whether psychoanalysis will survive in the 21st Century. She wants us to get the word out there that
Psychoanalysis is alive and vibrant and relevant to people’s lives. And that is one of the reasons that I blog –
to support that very mission. But it is
not the only reason that I blog.
At the presentation, I was sitting next to a woman – a fellow
analyst – who was thinking about blogging chapters of a novel that she was
thinking about writing. She said that
she wasn’t sure that she would even make it a public blog – perhaps only a few
people would be able to check in on it – but she thought that having it out
there – even for a few people – would motivate her to write. That was her primary motivation for putting
her chapters up – to motivate moving forward in the process. She was a bit befuddled by the emphasis on
the numbers in the presentation – her motivation for writing was much more pure
– at least in the moment.
I have a friend who has kept track of his thoughts about a
science fiction book that he is writing – and the only person who accesses his
blog is himself. And he expects
that. But there is something about the
idea that someday – once his book is a best seller – others will want to know
what he was thinking when he solved this particular problem or invented this
particular planet – and the imagined presence of others goads him to continue
his work and his blogging.
The presenters in New York said that it is not worth
blogging unless you have 50 hits per hour of work preparing a post. I didn’t have the temerity to ask how they
had figured that out. It was just one of
those things that were put out there and, at least in the moment, I accepted it
at face value. Good, now I can evaluate
whether I am wasting time or not! If it
takes two hours to write a post, then I need one hundred page views to justify
my time. Huh? The value of a page view is approximately one
minute of work time. How does this
compute?
But the numbers certainly push me to write. When I post – there is a bump in the number
of page views. If I don’t post for a
while, they wane. But this is a double
edged sword. I don’t want to post until
I really have something new to say – but if I say nothing, I may lose my
audience. What’s a blogger to do? Additionally, if I post about a movie – it is
likely to get about twice the page views of a book – should I spend more time
in the theater and less time reading books? And writing about analytic topics or
statistics (God forbid) can scare up almost no one.
The presenters seemed very concerned about this. They noted that more people are accessing blogs from their phones. And that people want short and simple content on their phones - people who access from computers are likely to read longer and more complex pieces. Less than 10% of my posts are accessed by phone. Should I shorten them to connect with this audience? Should I avoid using (and explaining) technical language to connect with them? Would my numbers go up? At what cost? Who is it that I am hoping to reach? Is it just more people or is it thoughtful people - people who are interested in struggling with complicated issues?
The presenters seemed very concerned about this. They noted that more people are accessing blogs from their phones. And that people want short and simple content on their phones - people who access from computers are likely to read longer and more complex pieces. Less than 10% of my posts are accessed by phone. Should I shorten them to connect with this audience? Should I avoid using (and explaining) technical language to connect with them? Would my numbers go up? At what cost? Who is it that I am hoping to reach? Is it just more people or is it thoughtful people - people who are interested in struggling with complicated issues?
Fortunately, there is some randomness to the numbers – and I
am not completely driven by them, but by other factors as well. So some of my “best sellers” have been posts
about psychoanalytic talks by Anton Kris and Andrea Celenza and a
psychoanalytic book by Mark Solms. And
some of my best writing may not be read by many. Or it may be discovered at some point in the
future – some of my posts don’t pick up much traffic initially but, after a year
or two, people seem to have a sudden interest.
And I have to fight to figure out what I want to write about – what is
important – just as I have to figure out whether eating that dessert I wanted
but didn’t need was worth the pound that I know would show up on the scale this
morning. And I have to figure out what
it is that I am going to do with my life – if I am so lucky as to have it be
extended by the incredible number of steps I seem to be walking these days. What is the quality that we bring to the
quantity? Certainly it will affect the
quantity – but maybe not immediately and maybe not in the ways we had
expected. I certainly rely on the
numbers – and am driven by them – but they cannot be the only determinate of
who I am – I have to unpack those collapsed signifiers and remember what it is –
or discover what it is – that I am trying to accomplish.
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