The Tyranny of Quantification

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 21^st 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?

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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