How Metrics Make Us Miserable

The quantified life has become a modern religion. But many of us are measuring life the wrong way.

Photo by Crissy Jarvis on Unsplash

Modern life is awash in statistics. We are surrounded by work metrics, fitness metrics, health metrics, social metrics. At best, these numbers allow us to set better goals: to increase our workplace efficiency, or to reduce our resting heart rate. But very often, the quantification of modern life makes us play the games we can easily measure rather than the games we deeply value.

To take a personal example, I care a lot about my Oura ring heart-rate variability score. But I’ve found that my HRV is negatively affected in the short term by all sorts of activities that I enjoy: not just strenuous workouts, but also staying up late with a friend, or having a cocktail after 7pm with someone I love. A life lived exclusively by HRV-maxing would be profoundly boring. There is no fitness-tracker metric for good friendships.

Or, consider the state of conversation. When we talk to each other on the Internet, we are not just moving talking from the physical world to the digital world. We’re moving conversation from a place with no real-time scores to a domain that is filled with numbers: views on TikTok, likes on Instagram, retweets on Twitter, upvotes on Reddit. These digital conversations take on a different character, because people there aren’t talking just to talk. They’re talking to make a number go up. The external metric of number-go-up replaces the intrinsic value of connection.

In the late 19th century, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously criticized religion in part because he claimed its worshippers allowed an external system of values to stand in the place of the messy, beautiful work for discovering their own genius and agency. I have mixed feelings about Nietzsche’s critique of religion, but I think it applies profoundly to the state of life metrics. The quantified life has become a modern religion: a system of values that takes us over and instills deep values in us, even as it sometimes keeps us from living our own values and building the life we want.

C. Thi Nguyen is the author of the book The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. In today’s conversation, we talk about metrics, the games of life, and how to listen to the parts of our self that cannot be reduced to numbers.

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THE RELIGION OF METRICS

Derek Thompson: Tell me about rock climbing.

C. Thi Nguyen: Rock climbing is one of the best things that’s ever happened to me in my life. I was one of these people who grew up playing computer games and reading. I was like, “Life of the mind, screw the body.” I started to realize it was a problem. I did some yoga. I tried to learn to surf, and I found out that seasick asthmatics should not try to surf. It’s very deadly. And then, I tried climbing. I found it was kind of like solving logic puzzles with your body.

Then I found the rock climbing scoring system that assigned a number to the difficulty of certain climbs. It mattered to me. I kept advancing until I hit a wall. As I [followed] the scoring system of climbing, I became miserable. I kept trying to advance to the next level, and I just couldn’t. The thing that was keeping me happy was now making me miserable.

So with rock climbing, you fall in love with an activity. You find a metric that at first seems to push you toward becoming a more advanced rock climber. But ultimately that metric becomes the single thing that you focus on. It takes over your life.

Thompson: How is being a philosopher like rock climbing?

Nguyen: I got into philosophy because I loved it. I was supposed to be something else as an Asian immigrants’ kid: doctor, or lawyer, at worst. I just kept getting pulled to these weird, fascinating questions like, “Is beauty subjective? What is the meaning of life?”

And then, I went to philosophy grad school, and in grad school, I encountered the rankings. There are two rankings that people care about. One is a ranking system of journals by status. The other is a ranking system of university departments by status. They’re on websites, they’re public. And you get focused on going up the rankings. High-end philosophy journals typically feature very technical, careful, slow work on a set of fairly prescribed questions. This work can be important and valuable, but it wasn’t my jam. I found myself working on it, which is kind of weird, because it’s not like anyone goes into philosophy for worldly success. You’ve basically burned your life and career opportunities by throwing yourself into this stupid discipline. The only reason to do it is for love. And then suddenly, I found myself working on things that I was bored by for like five years, and I also got super depressed, and I also basically lost my love of philosophy and I was going to quit.

And in this case, the thing that I did was I basically ended up having to ignore the ranking system altogether. It was too pervasive, it was too powerful. I had to get rid of it completely. And I started working on the philosophy of games.

VALUE CAPTURE IS THE BIG IDEA

Thompson: These two stories kick off your new book, The Score, on the power of metrics and the value of the games we play in life. [You’ve written about how] pervasive this culture of measuring things has become. It has crept into every nook and cranny it seems of modern life. Tell me two things: The explicit thesis of your book, but also—as someone who’s written books and knows that the message we want people to take away from our books is sometimes not made explicit—tell me the underground-river-secret-message of the book.

Nguyen: One of the core ideas of the book is to describe this thing that I’m feeling and seeing around me that I think a lot of people see and feel around them. I call it “value capture.”

Value capture is what happens when your values are rich, subtle, or developing. Then you’re put in an institution, or near a technology, that gives you a simplified measure, typically quantified, and then, that version takes over. Like me going into philosophy for love of philosophy and then aiming at the rankings. Or starting to exercise for health and fitness and becoming obsessed with BMI or VO2 max or some other simple measure. Or in education, one of the things that I’ve become really obsessed with is this gap between wanting to educate students for wisdom, curiosity, and reflectiveness, and then the institution coming to be focused on a few easy measurables, like speed of graduation and starting salary.

I think the best way to describe the problem of value capture is that when you’re value captured, you’re outsourcing your values. Instead of developing your values on your own, you are taking them off the rack. You’re taking them in a particular formulation that comes from somewhere else, that has other people’s interests embedded in it.

If there’s a message in the book, it’s not “ignore rankings, ignore metrics.” The weird heart of the book for me is about the weirdness of the fact that scoring systems can be so valuable, they can inspire play, they can teach me how to love my body. It’s that scoring systems are very specific tools that capture narrow slices of valuation. But if you get swamped by them, if you let them dominate your vision, then you are no longer contouring, deciding, or choosing between and modifying scoring systems for your purposes. You’re letting them set your purposes.

Thompson: I want you to make the case against metrics by responding to my own defense of metrics. I got into journalism by being an economics reporter. There are a lot of economic statistics that I would argue have extraordinary value. Poverty is a statistic, and I think it is a moral good to push the poverty rate down. Real income—that is wages that are adjusted for inflation—is something I want to rise.

Metrics are incredibly useful, not only to make legible that which was previously illegible, but also to coordinate, actors to get many different people in many different places to say, “Let’s focus on pushing the poverty rate down. Let’s focus on raising average incomes.” If metrics are so useful, how can they be dangerous?

Nguyen: Metrics are useful because they compress information. They are dangerous because they compress information.

My favorite example is a friend of mine who’s a student advisor who says that the new metric for his student advising system is being judged by how many keystrokes go into the student advising computer system per minute—that’s how they’re measuring advising. Obviously, that’s terrible, but I think it’s really good to focus on the best metrics we have, like the ones you’re talking about, to really understand the core difficulty.

There are a few ways to put it. One is to say it’s not that these metrics aren’t measuring something real and that they aren’t objectively tracking something that we want to know about; it’s that they speak so loudly that they threaten to drown out other nearby qualities that are also incredibly valuable but are harder to measure. I think there’s a particular kind of quality or character to what’s easy to metrify. Maybe you have examples of this from economics, but an example I think about a lot is in health policy is saturated fat and correlations to lifespan and heart attack rate.

And then there’s the other stuff like the deliciousness of brie, the joy of a perfectly ripe cheese, the tradition involved, the happiness of it. And these are much harder to quantify. My claim isn’t that lifespan and heart attack rates are unimportant. It’s that this other stuff tends to not be weighted at all in large scale social conversations, because it’s hard to measure.

THE POWER OF ‘STRIVING PLAY’

Thompson: You’ve reminded me of sports. In baseball, for example, teams have gotten smarter. Individual actors coordinated on making game strategy more efficient. But there wasn’t a metric for “how do we make this game more fun?” Attention was pulled toward efficiency and away from fun. In my own life, it’s easy to use my fitness tracker to see that I shouldn’t stay up late or a drink after 7pm. What’s harder to measure is the joy of staying up late. Your book is asking how do we live in a world of more easily measured outcomes while continuing to value what cannot be measured.

Nguyen: There are two directions I want to add to it, so let me try to remember both. The first is to talk about your baseball example and the second is the larger question of what is easy to measure.

My mentor, the philosopher Barbara Herman, a Kantian ethicist, once told me, “I think you’re just confusing a goal and a purpose.” And I was like, “There’s no difference between a goal and a purpose.” And she said, “Of course there is. When you have friends over for cards, the goal is to win, but the purpose is to have fun.” And I think that structure is so common in games, where the goal that you aim at in the game is separate from the reason you play the game. I call it “striving play.”

Striving play is when you’re trying to win, not because winning is valuable, because you want something about the process. Party games make this particularly clear, because when you have your friends over and—unless you’re a complete asshole—if you try to win, but you lose, and you all had a great time, you don’t think the evening has been wasted.

I think the crucial thing here is to understand the structure of games. You have to understand that for some people, winning is the purpose. Their goal and purpose are one. If they just want to win, they just want to win. But for some of us, I rock climb to clear my mind. And what’s interesting is I cannot clear my mind by trying to clear my mind. So the philosophers have a name for this: a self-effacing end. You cannot clear your mind by trying to clear your mind. You try to clear your mind by trying to climb the rock as hard as you can and forgetting that you’re trying to clear your mind.

Thompson: Like falling asleep.

Nguyen: Exactly, you can’t focus on it.

Thompson: As someone with insomnia, I can definitely testify to the fact that one of the worst strategies for falling asleep is attempting to fall asleep.

Nguyen: And similarly with party games, one of the worst way to make a bunch of people chill and relax is to shout at them, “Now it’s time to be chill and relaxed.” And one of the interesting features of humanity is that you can give people a dumb party game and they can try to do some dumb communication task, and the more they lose themselves in that task, the more fun they have.

But notice in this case, what we’re doing is moving through layers of evaluation. We’re diving into the scoring system, we’re focusing on it, and then we’re stepping back and we’re saying from the standpoint of our larger purpose, “Was it fun? Was it chill? Did it relax me?” Baseball has a scoring system—a goal—but the game lost track of the larger purpose. It’s like if you became so obsessed with charades that you just studied it and became a charades asshole and just inflicted your charades skill on people. You’ve missed the larger point.

But when we enter larger social institutions, it becomes so much easier to be like, “No, no, here’s a score,” winning the baseball game. Baseball is more complicated because by the time you get to the professional stage, clear economic incentives are tied to the win. One thing about charades is there aren’t economic incentives tied to the win, so it’s easier to make victory a temporary interest that you can throw away. But I think there’s a larger lesson. In institutions, we often set up a metric for a very good reason. We’re trying to track something that is hard to track.

IS LIFE JUST A SET OF GAMES?

Thompson: I want to pick up the thread with games here. You have a beautiful quote in the book from Bernard Suits: “To play a game is to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles for the sake of making possible the activity of overcoming them.” I love that. What is it that makes games separate from the rest of life?

Nguyen: The fast way of putting it is: The obstacle is the point. But I think a richer way of putting it is that the goals in a game are inextricably connected to constraints and obstacles and rules on getting to them. So, okay, let’s say you’re running a marathon. In some sense, you’re trying to get to a particular point in space. But that’s not actually what you care about. Because if you actually cared just about that, you would take the most efficient means you could. You would call an Uber, you would take a bicycle, you would take a shortcut. But that doesn’t count. That’s crucial. That doesn’t count as crossing the finish line. Crossing the finish line means following the rules, following the constraints that force you into a particular kind of action. It counts only if you did it in a specific way.

For Suits, game life is different from practical life. In practical life, there’s something we want, there’s some outcome, there’s some product, and we just want it by itself and we don’t care how we get it. In games, we’re taking on these obstacles and deliberately putting them in the way.

Thompson: Before I was a writer, I was an actor. I loved the opportunity to pretend to be somebody else. And I wonder if you accept this additional definition of games: an organized process by which people enter into a space where we become the person that the game wants us to be.

My friends in D..C have game nights from time to time, and there are two very different kinds of games that we play. One game is Hanabi, which is a cooperative card game. And the other type is Wingspan or Settlers of Catan, which are competitive games. And when I think about my own heartbeat, when I think about the degree to which my face gets flush throughout the game, these games work me over. The cheap way to say it would be: I don’t just play the game, the game plays me. But at a much deeper level, I am electing to be changed by a set of rules. I become as collaborative or as competitive as the game makes me become. We become this different person, one defined by a set of rules that we elect to participate in.

Nguyen: The most interesting thing about games for me is that they teach us how incredibly fluid we are. We think that we’re these pretty static beings that want the same kinds of things, but you can literally open up a game and it will tell you whether, in my case, my wife and I are going to be trying to kill each other or supporting each other. And then we just do it. We go all in. We turn on a dime.

The anthropologist Johan Huizinga calls it the magic circle. He thinks that the essence of play—and here he unites games with theater—is a magic circle, an alternate space and time that you enter into where you change roles and actions change their meaning. I think this is a fancy way to describe and highlight something that is really obvious, which is just again, my wife and I love each other, and then we go play a game and we try to kill each other. And then we pause and we make each other drinks, then we go back and we try to kill each other. You get absorbed in this technical specificity.

My favorite game designer, Reiner Knizia, a board game genius from, said the most important tool in his game design toolbox is the scoring system, because it sets the player’s motivations. It just tells you what to want and you suddenly want it. My worry is that this is what metrics do to us. We enter a setting and someone’s like, “Here’s the ranking system.” And you’re like, “Okay, I didn’t care about that before, but now I care about it.” I kind of think that games are using this fluidity. But other systems are using that in an authoritarian way to pass and to push values down onto us.

Thompson: I wonder whether you accept this framing that there are games that we elect to play and there are games that we find ourselves playing by accident. There’s a line about being a lawyer that it’s like a pie eating contest where the reward for the winner is more pie. You work, and work, and then you become partner. And guess what? We’re here to reward you … with 10X more work. I wonder how you frame this distinction between the games that we set out to play and the games where we fall into.

Nguyen: There’s a sense in which there’s a really easy thing to say here, which is that games are great when you choose them and games are terrible when they’re forced on you, or snuck up on you. But I’m not quite sure that’s right. And the reason I’m not quite sure it’s right is because a lot of dangerous gamifications to me look like cases that are voluntary where someone picks up something fully... People who get on social media often are fully aware that it’s a game-like system that will change their motivations, and they do it anyway.

THE MEANING OF GAMES, THE MEANING OF LIFE

Thompson: I want to offer what I suspect is a shallow interpretation of what you think people should do with your book, and then I want you to deepen it. I think there’s an easy summary that’s something like: Play the games you want to play. It’s okay to outsource to metrics that which is inessential to you. If you go to Wirecutter to look up like what’s the best coffee mug that heats itself, that’s not exactly like outsourcing your soul to a machine. That’s probably just a good way to get a good coffee mug. But make sure that you protect from the hegemony of metrics that which is core to you, to your soul, to your art. How would you deepen that as a summary of the takeaways from your book?

Nguyen: I mean, that’s a pretty good takeaway.

Let me just tell you about the weirdest thing I did. So on the one hand, I’m a professor. I find GPA gross. But also when I try to un-grade my classes and not use grades in my classes, students just stop coming, because they’re in an environment where grading counts. So I have to live inside the grading system, and yet I don’t want to just grade in an unthinking way. So I just tried the following experiment. It’s ChatGPT era, like total chaos in the university. No one knows what to do. And the last time I taught technology ethics and political philosophy, I walked in and I was like, “I don’t know what to do about ChatGPT. So here’s what we’re going to do. We are going to go through a process. We’re going to read a bunch about the impact of automation on us. We’re going to read a bunch about what education is for. We’re going to read a bunch about AI. And then you’re all going to design the assignment and grading structure of the class, argue it out and then vote, and then we’re just going to do what you pick.”

And they did something super interesting with it. They made the grades about in-class workshops that we built together, in which they had to construct in-groups analyses and argue it out. And it worked really well. But it was a reformulation of the scoring system. It wasn’t me just telling them what to do. And that kind of thing is possible. I’m not sure it’s possible at the largest scale, but it’s possible for some of us.

Thompson: Do you consider yourself a fan of Nietzsche?

Nguyen: Complicated views. Complicated views.

Thompson: You don’t mention Nietzsche in your book. But reading it, I thought of you as a kinder, softer, less authoritarian Nietzsche. Nietzsche rejected the ethics of Judeo-Christianity because he thought it offered a system of values that separated people from our instinct. It made us kind, not for the sake of kindness, but for the sake of getting into heaven. He despised external forces of morality and invited people to reject those traditions and get in touch with their own instincts—our own Dionysian impulses—and to create a life and a system of values that was true to us and not just true to whatever system enforced itself on us. In short: Don’t be who Christianity wants you to be; don’t be the person whom external systems of values want you to be; be the kind of person that is most authentic and even playful and artful that you can possibly muster.

And in a way, what you are doing here is saying let’s have more art, let’s have more play, let’s have more instinct. Let’s have a class whose grading is determined by the instincts of the class and not by the administration that I happen to be employed by. Don’t be played by the metrics and the games that you find yourself sort of fallen into. Develop your own sense of what is valuable and play that game that you choose

Nguyen: Let me give you four answers.

One: Suits, our philosopher of games, said imagine utopia where technology has solved all our practical problems. What would we do with our time? We would play games or we would be bored out of our minds. So games must be the meaning of life. Suits is an Aristotle scholar. What’s underneath this is Aristotle’s view that meaning in life comes from activity, not just outcomes.

Two: Here’s a story of maybe the best teaching moment of my life. I was teaching introduction to philosophy, and I taught Suits and I told this argument about Suits and the meaning of life. And one of my students—pre-med, super productive—said that the idea that games are the meaning of life was the most repellent, disgusting, lazy thing she’d ever heard. Fast forward a month. At the end of class, we’re doing review session. We’re talking about Aristotle—who had this idea that meaningfulness comes from rich, difficult activity; and Kant—who gave us the idea that meaning comes from whatever you freely choose. And this student who hated Suits said, “love Aristotle so much, I love Kant so much—is there any way to synthesize the two of them?” And I was like: Yeah, what if one synthesis is that the meaning in life comes from difficult activity that you voluntarily chose yourself. Is that a theory we have? And then she screamed “fuck no!” from the back of class, and the rest of class collapsed into laughter. Because that’s Suits! That’s Suits’ view! It’s a fusion of Aristotle and Kant and existentialism. The meaning of life comes from activities, but they’re the activities that suit you, and they’re the ones you choose.

Three: This is a connection I’ve never made before, but here we go. My favorite thing that was cut from the book, because people decided it was too gross, was my research on pickup artist culture. Pickup artists are people that compete for sexual success. It’s literally called scoring. They don’t compete for good relationships. They compete for numbers: sexual encounters, or the fastest speed from meeting someone to sexual encounter. A sociologist named Eric Hendricks said that one of the things he found when he embedded in pickup artist culture to research them was that a common refrain in pickup artist culture was that you had to stop caring about pleasure or happiness, because these would just get in the way of scoring higher. I had thought that pickup artists were evil but enjoying themselves. But it turns out that something much more insane and inhumane has happened. They’ve cut off their connection to pleasure and happiness in order to score higher on a meter.

One more story. A philosopher of food, Megan Dean, does a lot of research about understanding things like food culture and anorexia. A lot of people who are coming back from anorexia can take a really long time to eat until they feel full. They have forgotten how to hear the signal of being full. They’ve spent so much time oriented towards external calorie counts that they’ve lost contact with the internal sensation and the information of how satisfied they are or how full they are.

This is my long-winded answer to say that a rich, full value system comes in significant part from dialogue with yourself. It comes from listening to weird, subtle, quiet emotions. It comes from signals of boredom or interest and pleasure. Something happens where we become so fixated on the accessible and clear external signal that we lose contact with the kind of rich emotional feedback system within us that might steer us better than those external measures.

Thompson: Beautiful answer. I don’t know that I can summarize it. But because I’m pathologically obsessed with summarizing things I’m going to try anyway. It seems to me like you’re saying that perhaps not the meaning of life, but a meaning of life, is both the individual cultivation of a value system and the day-by-day chosen struggle to live by it. But you need both. You need to be both the author of the value system—the maker of the game, so to speak—and the person who chooses day after day, to play by its rules. Something like that?

Nguyen: Yes.