I have been watching a friend struggle with chronic illness for the past several years. Her medical history was daunting before I met her, but as with most chronic health problems, the passage of time has seen further deterioration and complication in her situation.
Medications have side effects and interactions, the pharmacy often doesn’t have the meds she’s prescribed, and even if she were robustly healthy, the sheer volume of case management she has to do would be daunting. The mental health toll of insurance refusing coverage for needed procedures, doctors not returning phone calls, or appointments getting postponed when prescriptions have already run out… it’s a form of torture inflicted on somebody already cursed with chronic pain.
When I think about how did we get here, the answer is simple: We decided that efficient medicine (profitable medicine) was good medicine. We decided that education that meets external objectives was good education. We decided that monetized productivity is a cardinal virtue. I cannot tell you how many apps and programs out there purportedly help authors write books faster and more efficiently.
I touched a few weeks ago on the problem with setting achievable goals (we pretty much doom ourselves to mediocrity), but lately I’m more focused on the harm that comes from over-emphasis on measurable outcomes. When the focus is on measurement–how much profit, how many words written, how many students passed–we lose track of our qualitative experience.
Were all those thousands of words I wrote any good? Did I graduate “successfully” from high school with no friends and a lifelong aversion to reading? Is my company bodaciously profitable only because its policies and products are dishonorably designed and created (looking at you, ChatGPT)? As long as we’re looking at “data,” and “bottom lines,” and “objective numbers” for our sense of a situation, we are distracted from the uh-oh feeling, the sheer joy of a beautifully written scene no matter how short, or the harm done when we teach the curriculum instead of the child.
Measured outcomes pull us away from our internal experience of a situation and yank us into emphasizing an external assessment of what we’re dealing with. That’s how our brains work. If we see that a YouTube video we loved has earned mostly a thumbs down score from previous viewers, we are less likely to give it a thumbs up. Our experience loses validity in the face of “what the numbers say,” even though we know those numbers are probably, even purposely, polluted by trolls and bots.
Accountability is a fine concept in moderation, but not when it pushes honesty, integrity, and joy into the periphery of our perception. You cannot measure those factors, you cannot test their efficiency, and you certainly cannot monetize them convincingly, but I fear to dwell in a world where they no longer guide us as individuals or as a society, because we are instead too mesmerized “by the data.”
How are you doin’ just fine despite any numbers to the contrary? Where in your life do you enjoy an abundance of some unquantifiable wonderfulness? I am wealthy in unstructured time, solitude, quiet, health, access to books I enjoy, meaningful relationships, animal friends… I’m such a tycoon, despite the numbers!
PS: The web store discount for this month is Truly Beloved, priced at $.99 for all of October. I chose this title because Daisy and Penweather’s story is set at a bleak time of year, and heaven knows we’ve all faced, and some of us are facing, more than our share of bleak horizons.
Is there a story about Gwen and Avery and about little Rose?
There is! Douglas, Gwen and Rose’s story should have been the first Lonely Lord published and is the prequel to all the Windhams. Details for “Douglas: Lord of Heartache” are here: https://graceburrowes.com/bookshelf/douglas/
I think my life has been pretty good in spite of my refusing to live up to expectations. Fortunately, I’m old enough that those awful metrics only became an issue toward the end of my career so I didn’t have to deal with them too much. I always hated when I had to set next year’s goals at work since my work has always been driven by what problems arose and needed to be fixed and those could not be predicted or effectively measured in advance. Although I am definitely a numbers/data person (being a computer scientist), I never thought they necessarily provided useful information (frequently in computers, data is the raw numbers and information is the interpretation).
I have never really valued what most of society reveres, and have always happily marched to the beat of my own drummer. Like you, Grace, I am wealthy in unstructured time, solitude, quiet, health, relationships, and access to books I enjoy. I have enough money to get by most of the time. That just means I sometimes have to delay things until I can save up the money–a fact that some people seem to think is un-American. In my 20s and early 30s, I never considered I could afford to buy a house, for instance, but now everybody seems to expect it as a right.
I am getting ready to hunker down as Hurricane Milton barrels right towards Tampa. I didn’t have any problem with Helene but am less optimistic this time. I hope any of you who have or will suffer from these successive storms gets through it all okay.
Karen, I’ve been thinking of you through all of those horribly frightening weather reports about Milton. I hope you and all of those you love are safe. Please let us know when you are able.
Thank you for asking. We had lots of wind and rain (our backyard suddenly had a swimming pool without us having to dig) and lots of short power outages Wed night/Thurs morning, but otherwise okay. Most of my family members, who live closer to the coast, are without electricity, but still otherwise okay. Since they’ve all lived here all or most of their lives, they did make preparations. We are a bit farther north and a bit more inland and we told them to call us if they need anything. One of my sisters and I worked for the University of South Florida before retirement and it was shocking today to see the flooding that occurred near there from the massive amounts of rain, not storm surge. It is not a flood or evacuation zone so surprised everybody. Milton was really something.
For non-Floridians: the post-hurricane “flooding” in towns is because the rainwater doesn’t have anywhere to *go.* Two hurricanes in a row was just too much water. There’s only so much rainwater the ground can soak up. The Florida aquifer throughout the state is only 20 feet down. (You could think of it as an underground river, but it isn’t. It’s also undrinkable. Side note: this is why Florida homes don’t have basements.) So that’s one limitation on drainage.
Street gutters lead to storm drains, but the drain can overwhelm its’ destination. And then rainwater just accumulates aboveground. Nice neighborhoods with homes built around a water retention pond won’t have a problem. They are designed to let the water *slowly* seep back into the ground. Old neighborhoods without good storm drains hit the limits and get flooding. Uh, something I didn’t know as a child – the water is considered contaminated; people shouldn’t play in it.
I’m glad you’re okay. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
I feel good about myself when I solve a work related
problem or solve a home issue.
I am wealthy in friends, books (thank you) my family and my dogs. I enjoy my quiet time reading with the dogs and Gregory and I often watch the sun rise.
Yesterday, I went to a dog club event. It was a great..low key, fun time with friends. A friend hosted at her home and it was a great weather day. I was reminded of how many nice people , generous are in my club
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I have the time and space to relax my mind and body. I have wonderful friends I meet up with regularly to play mah jongg; when for years it has been just pulling myself and my kids through the day ignoring exhaustion, it seems a miracle to have chunks of time set aside to just laugh and play.
Argh! Metrics! The bane of my previous career!
Right now I’m dealing with out of state people who cannot comprehend why a Category 5 hurricane on the horizon & a county shutting down ahead of it could possibly impact my schedule. Or impact my focus as constant bulletins shorten my attention span. Sigh…
At least I’m on the East coast side & don’t have to evacuate. Yay!!
I don’t dare tell them that I view hurricanes as a form of vacation allowing me to curl up next to a window or other light source & read to my heart’s content.
I cherish the days I don’t have to set an alarm clock. That’s enough right now.
Douglas, Lord of Heartache, is one of my favourite Lonely Lods….. and it is a VERY strong field
My treasured time is reading, first, and paper crafts (specifically handmade cards), second. Metrics probably ruined the way I read.
In early parochial grade school, we had a set of small booklets. The first couple of pages were a story of some sort and the back page was a test about the material. There were multiple sections of booklets (pink, green, red, lavender, orange, etc.) of increasing difficulty, until the top section: gold. You read at your own pace for a specified amount of time. If you finished the color section you were on, you went up to the front of the room and picked one in the next color section. It was a huge race to see who would get to the gold section first, over a time span of a number of weeks. Of course, everyone in class noticed who was going up to the front most quickly.
Well, I won because I learned to skim/read and if I didn’t remember the test answers, it was okay to go back through the information. I raced through those stories, rather than enjoy them or, sometimes, completely understand them. I needed to look back more often than I’d like to admit. I now find that if I’m reading something that doesn’t absolutely grab my attention, I revert to skim/reading and can’t tell you what I read a few days later. That metric of who could race to the gold section the fastest has become a life-long habit that sometimes does not serve me well.
The only metric I have for my card making is me. I don’t buy the magazines that “teach” you to make cards (THEIR cards) and I avoid videos unless I’m trying to learn a specific skill. I am positively thrilled that so many people tell me they keep my cards. I like my own metric so much better!
I am rereading your books as I have had a few of the quick books. I adore Georgette Heyer and those that set the scene and use language without the jolt of modern usage in a past period.
Thank you Libby and Kindle for your dictionaries and thank you to the authors who make the dictionary useful. Language as music, an escape as well as a stretch. So appreciated.