With final exams winding down for students everywhere, there is a final breath of panic in the air as we scramble and pray to get our grades up for the end of the year. Any longing we have to just stop under the pressure is immediately crushed with the mere thought of dropping a decimal on our GPA. The threat of a number on our future is enough to make us sacrifice health, time, and happiness, it’s incredible. This mentality does not just apply to teens and college students, but to everyone. Our collective obsession with numbers has undeniably and irreversibly shaped ad defined our society.
We are often told that it is enough to do what you love to be happy and successful; that is a nice thought and a fortunate reality for those fortunate enough to obtain it. This profession of perfection is usually geared towards those just entering college or leaving it, but the reality is that inspiration is often given up in favor of motivation by fear. This fear comes into play later in the game, but this numbers game in ingrained in us from the very beginning.
From the minute we learn to talk, we begin to understand the importance of numbers in our lives. When you’re just a kid, it’s how many teeth you have lost, how many friends and toys you have. When you’re older, it’s the price of your clothes, how many boys or girls you have drooling over you, and the beginnings of your academic record. In high school, it’s a plunge into GPAs, the number of clubs you lead or follow, SAT and AP (and a bunch of other acronyms) scores, and how many colleges you are accepted to. Adulthood finds you working under the pressure of more numbers than ever: income, credit scores, number of children, number of years/times you've been single, married, or divorced, how much money you’ve saved for emergencies, tuition, and retirement.
The lists above may seem excessive and tedious, but they serve to illustrate the magnitude of the influence numbers have in our lives. We have been told to enjoy the quality of life that we have, but what we are forced to uphold is our quantity of life. In other words, quantities, numbers, prices, and scores have a legacy that cannot be unraveled in our society, as they truly are the base of our civilization.
Here lies the point at which we must separate the economic from the social. Money and trade have their place in society, however the extreme pressures and paranoia that come with the other numbers - the ones that quantify the constructs we constructed to quantify success - have a very negative and increasingly noticeable impact on our collective psyche. Take away the pressure of judgement based on something that we cannot all maintain at a level of perfection, then we take away the ironic shame of being imperfect - a cornerstone of the human condition.
