The quiet coup of measurement
I noticed it while watching something I had half-forgotten. A show I put on because it was there, not because I really cared. When it ended, the app immediately offered me three more, all described in the same careful, bloodless language.
I realized I could not explain what I had just watched, only that time had passed. I guess that’s what it feels like when metrics replace meaning. The numbers keep moving, but the experience thins out.
Success is no longer whether something lingers in your mind or changes how you see things. It is whether it kept you from leaving. Whether it filled the interval. Whether it satisfied the model.
At first, metrics are supposed to help. They are tools, not values. But over time, they become targets, and then they quietly become gods.
Decisions are made in the service of what can be measured, not what can be felt. A story becomes “content.” A moment becomes “engagement.” Anything that resists quantification, depth, ambiguity, and silence gets treated as inefficiency. The system does not hate meaning. It just does not know what to do with it.
The tension is that meaning lives in the thing itself, not in the dashboard above it.
You cannot spreadsheet the feeling of being moved. You cannot A/B test wonder. But once a system rewards numbers instead of judgment, people adapt. They learn how to hit the metric even if the underlying thing grows hollow.
From the inside, this can feel like competence. From the outside, it feels like emptiness.
Eventually, the numbers start to float free of reality. They rise even as satisfaction falls. And because the system can point to its charts, it insists everything is working.
The problem, if there is one, must be you. But it is not you. It is what happens when measurement forgets its place.
Meaning does not disappear all at once. It recedes. Quietly. Until one day you realize you have been watching something for a long time without quite knowing why.