Society, By The Numbers

I'm a mathematician. I think numbers are nice and quaint and describe the very mysterious world in very concrete ways. On a bad day, I easily trust numbers more than some people. Unfortunately, numbers can also be liars.

From the day they're born, people are assigned numbers. Maybe someone was the first baby born during the new year (#1). Maybe they were a heavy baby (10 lbs). Maybe their mother was in her thirties (Age: 36). As people grow older, their numbers only grow more and more in depth. Layer after layer is added on. When they hit high-school they're assigned a GPA. People start to care about their weight. They sit for standardized test after test, scores piling onto an increasingly meaningless pile. The graduate college and get a salary. Suddenly, age matters. Having kids too young is wrong, but so is having kids too old.

From when they're brought into the world, people are reduced to a string of numbers and flattened to fit on a piece of paper. Some of these numbers are practical. Doctors need to know people's weights, cholesterol levels and ages and a number of other things. Schools need to assign grades and scores. Then, society takes it a step further. We start to judge women based on their dress size. We define success by salary. We say that happiness is in the amount of material goods you have. We tell students that high test scores are the only thing that matters. We live in a society where people will spend hours at a gym trying to achieve the "perfect beach body" instead of pursuing the things they're most passionate about.

Doing this we disregard the teachers, the artists, the selfless, the quirky, and the many others that don't fit into neat boxes. Society needs people outside of its metaphorical box. These people are who help push us forward. They show that affluence is much more than material wealth and intelligence is more than SAT scores. Those of us that are relatively better defined by numbers are terrified by this. We spend a lot of time working towards arbitrary and quantifiable goals- we're told reaching thresholds is the key to happiness. We fail to realize that our numbers can't define passion.

Before we die we're not going to be handed an exit questionnaire asking, "From 1-10 rate your interest in painting", "On a scale of one to five, how passionate do you feel about helping people?", or "On average, how would you rate your experience with volunteering?".

Living life for the numbers keeps us from living life in the moment. There isn't some grand way to quantify life. We should pay attention to the numbers - perhaps even be guided by them- but never ruled.