We seem increasingly uncomfortable with things that cannot be ranked.
Restaurants have stars. Drivers have stars. Bodies have likes. Careers have follower counts. Games have achievements for performing the leisure activity correctly. Even sleep can greet you in the morning with a number telling you whether you did unconsciousness well enough.
Measurement is not the enemy. I work in technology. I like telemetry. Systems are easier to understand when they produce useful signals.
But Goodhart’s law keeps lurking in the hallway: when a measure becomes a target, it tends to stop being a good measure.
The interesting question is not whether metrics are bad. It is whether you still remember what they were meant to approximate.
A friendship with no public evidence is still a friendship. A useful thought with twelve readers is still useful. A day that generated no photos still happened.
Perhaps some parts of life become healthier when the dashboard is unavailable.