Back up, data

In the broad and murky world of fashion faux pas, there is one peeve that digs into my soul more than any other. I see it pop up in photos taken at weddings, on fancy date nights, and at fundraising galas: Someone is outfitted in formal attire, with perfect hair and makeup, and they have a drink held by a thoughtfully poised arm… cuffed by an Apple Watch. 

All that careful coiffing, fitting, and flexing, just for my focus to land on an iMistake. Heaven forbid we fail to log our biometrics for a few brief hours and just enjoy ourselves the old-fashioned way: untracked.

One of the limited free articles the New Yorker granted me this month was a review of conservative pundit Arthur C. Brooks’s new book, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. I should note that I’m a longtime subscriber of The Atlantic, a plenty-flawed publication that does, however, often employ writers I love (Amanda Mull and Caity Weaver, for two). But one of those flaws includes publishing Brooks, who writes an insufferable column on happiness for The Atlantic.

Brooks’s work has always smacked of a self-satisfied “father knows best” attitude, but his post-think tank, post-free-market-loving mind still couldn’t stop itself from designing nonsensical equations for measuring a meaningful life.

He decided that “Happiness = Enjoyment + Satisfaction + Meaning,” Becca Rothfeld notes in her New Yorker review. And “Meaning” is further subdivided into “Coherence + Purpose + Significance.”

“It is perhaps unsurprising that Brooks measures his body-fat percentage with calipers and keeps a dutiful record of his own happiness on a spreadsheet, assigning various elements of his life a number and then a force multiplier reflecting their importance,” Rothfeld writes. “(How do his children feel knowing they command a mere eight out of ten importance points, but his faith and his marriage both rate a nine?)”

For full transparency — and sorry to drop this bombshell into your morning coffee — I should admit that am not a math person. I did perfectly well in algebra and trig because I am good at two things: memorization and showing my work. So no, I am not naturally drawn to calculations like a moth to a glowing TI-83 screen.

But the desire to calculate important things in life — be it happiness, meaning, or love — doesn’t feel relegated to the mathletes or statisticians (NERDS) among us. The fact that Apple Watches are so conspicuous in our formal photos suggests we have some deep desire to offer quantitative proof of how we’re doing. Look at my careful tracking and tell me: Could a girl who gets 10,000 steps a day and is in her follicular phase not be thriving? This is the resting heart rate of a GIRLBOSS!!! (**Leans into a heart attack**)

Calculating a meaningful life is absurd. You can’t measure something with shifting importance from person to person, or even from moment to moment. How do you measure curiosity? How do you weigh a daydream? Do we use the metric or imperial system for estimating whimsy??

After I told my friend Anna that my husband and I were separating years ago, she remarked that she didn’t realize I was unhappy. It was a completely fair comment, but at that time I had no idea how to explain that this wasn’t the measurement involved in my decision. The formula for my ideal partnership had changed entirely, so those old calculations were outdated and moot. Any outward measure of happiness that I was or wasn’t showing didn’t necessarily compute — because they had also become entirely separate math problems.

Maybe the desire to create little Brooks-esque formulas to measure our happiness — or to track our biometrics for status updates otherwise — comes from a desire to back everything with data. All that data doesn’t necessarily tell us anything, though.

For years now, companies and leaders have squawked about their data-driven strategies. But so often they choose the data that benefits them most: Proving a strategy worked based on web clicks and ignoring bounce rates. Or managers might create ineffective measures of productivity, like emails sent or hours worked (the so-called “butt in seat” metric). Just because something can be tracked doesn’t mean it can’t be used as smoke and mirrors to tell whatever story you’d hoped to narrate.

Brooks’s formulas are clearly based on his life and how he thinks that you, too, should live — as evidenced by his propensity to quote (sometimes disputed!) studies to back his arguments. He already decided what is good and virtuous, then he highlighted his own successes as the data worth tracking.

Cherry picking is such a beautiful activity. Just make sure you’re wearing a fitness tracker to log it.