Some of the Most Important Things Can’t Be Measured
The things that resist counting are often the ones that count the most.
A few years ago, I was unhappy in my job. My solution was to push for a higher salary and a bigger mandate. Within six months of successfully getting what I wanted, I was miserable in ways I had not anticipated and could not quite quantify. The work itself was challenging. Technically, everything was fine. But something I had not measured, call it alignment, or atmosphere, belief, trust, or the particular texture of the days rolling by, was all wrong in ways no previous analysis of my situation had warned me about. The warnings were probably there. I wasn’t looking for them. I woke up one morning and quit.
Numbers carry real information. They are not worthless. But the implicit promise behind all this measurement is that the right data tells you what you need to know and what to do. Business schools teach that what gets measured gets managed. Fitness trackers log sleep quality in decimal points. Performance reviews convert a year of human effort into a numerical rating.
It is time to question the promise of measurement. You can count your friends on social media, but not how many would help you move. You can quantify your child’s test scores, but not their curiosity. The square footage of your home is knowable. Whether it feels like sanctuary is not.
I’m not making a case against measurement. I’m making one for knowing what it’s good at and what it isn’t. Numbers work well for comparison, for tracking change over time, for catching things that would otherwise slip past you, but they’re poor at capturing texture, quality, or meaning. A marriage counselor can track how many times a couple fights per month. What she can’t track is whether the couple still has warmth for each other underneath the friction, which is probably the variable that actually predicts outcomes.
Metrics are fine. Using them as a substitute for judgment is where things go wrong.
Decades of happiness research have produced a reasonably consistent finding: past a certain income threshold, more money doesn’t make people meaningfully happier. Researchers know this. The data is solid. And yet almost nobody acts on it, because the alternative, optimizing for meaning and absorption in work, offers nothing you can put on a progress bar. We keep chasing the measurable thing, not because we think it will work, but because at least we’ll know how we’re doing.
In personal life, the gap is just as wide. How do you measure how loved you are? How much love is in your heart? The quality of a long friendship? Whether your children feel genuinely known by you? You can’t, really. You can gather proxies like how often you call, how much time you spend together, but proxies have a way of becoming the target, which is different from the thing they’re pointing at.
Robert Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, argued that quality is something you recognize before you can define it. You know when a piece of writing has it; you know when a conversation does. The recognition comes before the analysis. That pre-analytic knowing is worth trusting, even though it’s hard to hand to anyone else as evidence.
Make room for the things that resist counting. Pay attention to how you feel in a place, about a person, inside a particular kind of work. Look deeper than what the situation looks like on paper. When the numbers and the gut feeling diverge, take the divergence seriously. One of them knows something the other does not.
The person who knows their own unmeasurables – what environment lets them do their best work, what relationships actually sustain them, what they value that has no market price – has access to real information that no metric provides. Call it a different kind of rigorous.
