Number Numb

People forget about the concept of quality in lieu of quantity all the time. In real world practice, I see people counting and measuring with numeric metrics to measure units if life.

Lets take the 30th birthday. Why do we care? Because our system is based on units of ten. Being thirty doesn’t mean anything.

People measure the minutes of their commute. I’m sitting on the T (Boston subway) writing down thoughts for a blog post on my phone using the WordPress app. Do you care about how long or how stressful your commute is?

I’ve always thought that people can put too much faith in numbers without qualifying what those numbers might mean. I love the questions ‘what’ and ‘why’, and will always ask these more than ‘how much’ and ‘how many’.