exo : blah

A stream of numbers hit a screen and you’re expected to know what they mean

I think about these Maximo Park lyrics a lot.

They often pop into my head on bike rides where I have quite a lot of numbers available to me, most of which I do know what they mean. At the end of the ride further numbers are available to me. Numbers that tell me how hard the ride was, how effective it was, how effective my rides for the last week have been, how my numbers compared to people in my age group. I look and them and it’s fun to see but with many of them comes the implication that the numbers should go up. That they should indicate my rides have been productive. Tim Garmin is all too happy to literally tell me that my recent rides have been unproductive.

Tim Garmin doesn’t understand the point of bike rides.

Number must go up is a curse. Almost every time I see something talking about how a number isn’t going up I think why should it? There is so much harm done in the name of number must go up because it’s insatiable and it’s almost always mistaking the measure for the outcome. It’s easy to see why it’s used because it’s easy. You have a number and you do things and the number goes up and it’s a success, but what then? For more success the number has to go up more but the number contains no concept of what is enough, or too much or at what point the more up is harmful to whatever the initial goal was.

We should be comfortable with enough. We should work out what enough is and once we get to it we should look around for other things where we have not reached enough and work on those. But more than that we should consider what it is to measure a thing and be prepared to admit the measure has become harmful. The number is bad. What use is a number that has gone up if it is at the cost of making the lives of those responsible miserable? What is the point of productive bike rides if every one of them is a slog where all I do is stare at a screen to make sure the numbers are good?