Forget steps. Let’s measure moods.
💛 Today is Loving Day in the U.S., the 57th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down laws banning interracial marriage
Issue #96: distrust your data, The Ice Cream Diaries, and avoiding overthinking
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While I was researching yesterday’s newsletter about attention, I found something in the Medium archive that changed the way I think about what we measure and why.
, law professor at Columbia University and author of The Attention Merchants, published a story a few years ago cataloging “better ways to quantify your life.” Many of us have become ever more obsessed with quantifying life over the last decade — we track our steps, our moods, or the decibels of sounds around us. A story on Medium dives deep into the origins of Fitbit and Apple’s “10,000 steps” benchmark, which I was fascinated to learn began as a marketing campaign to sell pedometers during the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. One theory goes that the company chose 10,000 because the number’s character in kanji (万) looks sort of like a person walking.Instead of the same metrics that come preloaded on most of our phones or watches, Wu takes a different approach. He invents new metrics focused on the quality of our relationships (and by extension, our lives):
- The Seek/Avoid Ratio: On your average day, how much time and effort do you spend trying to reach people as opposed to avoiding people who are trying to talk to you?
- Mutually Preferred Encounter Ratio: How many of your interactions are “mutually preferred” — as in, both of you actively decide to hang out together — as opposed to getting a hold of someone trying to avoid you (or vice versa)?
I like these metrics because they make me think more deeply about my interactions. They’re also collaborative instead of individualistic. So many of the metrics we tend to track, Wu writes, “fail to capture what it really means to live. If your day was ruined by being reamed out by your boss and then dumped by your boyfriend / girlfriend, ‘calories consumed’ may not fully capture that.”
What else we’re reading
- A lesson from , former strategy and operations lead at Uber and Meta: If your data looks too good to be true, it usually is.
- I am obsessed with professional baker ’s year-long series of weekly diaries paired with homemade ice cream flavors. (It’s also an Instagram story.) Apparently, ice cream innovation is how Wenman-Hyde stays sane amidst the grueling schedule of being a baker. Previous flavors: sun-dried tomato, pancake, and “cut grass” aka matcha, wheatgrass, and pandan. Someone please turn The Ice Cream Diaries into a book, or maybe a quirky tragicomedy about a baker who moonlights as an ice-cream maker.
🤔 Your daily dose of practical wisdom: about not overthinking
An interesting tactic for not overthinking things: prioritize more meaningful problems than whatever you tend to obsess over. If you’re fixating on something you know is relatively unimportant, give it “a sense of scale,” writes
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