The Numbers Game: How To Live Mindfully In The Digital Age

By Dylan Ward

Stop Chasing Targets, Setting Unachievable Goals, And Start Living In The Moment. Really Living.  

 

Are you tired of constantly setting goals and feeling empty when you hit them or defeated when you don't? Then, this book is for you!

 

Let's face it, numbers rule our lives, and it's not making us any happier

The Numbers Game looks at key areas of our daily lives where number-based goals creep in and have a negative impact, sometimes without us even noticing.
Learn why chasing moving targets leads to emptiness, failure, and low self-worth.

 

This book will help you to:

-Put an end to the cycle of setting number-based goals which leave you feeling empty

-Stop comparing yourself to others and measuring your success based on how different it looks from theirs

-Tune into your current feelings and mood, and harness the power of being present

-Help you to acknowledge where you are and how much progress you've made

-Recognise where you want to be and how to get there without setting unrealistic goals or expectations

 

Pick up The Numbers Game and learn simple but effective techniques to start living your best and most present life today!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dylan Ward
• Release date: Sep 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223909156

Book preview

Copyright © 2023 by Dylan Ward

All rights reserved

Cover Art © 2023 Dylan Ward using images from depositphotos.com

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

Dylan Ward asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Dylan Ward has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents page

Introduction

1. The Problem With Numbers   4

2. Why Are We Obsessed With Numbers?  7

3. My Story        15

4. The Importance Of Not Hitting The Number 24

5. Numbers Versus Metrics    29

Part 1: Comparison

6. The Problem Of Comparison   33

7. School And Education    36

8. Age And The Passing Of Time   49

9. Social Media      59

Part 2: Business

10. The Problem Of Money    69

11. Business and Profits     74

12. Personal Productivity    87

13. Monetary Wealth     100

––––––––

Part 3: Health

14. The Health Problem     124

15. Diet And Weight     128

16. Exercise        145

17. Sleep         160

Part 4: Leisure

18. The Leisure Problem     174

19. Games, Books And Movies   178

20. Hobbies And Skills     195

21. Free Time       210

Part 5: Solutions

22. Moving Forward Without     219

Counting The Steps

Further Reading Recommendations 240

Acknowledgements    242

About The Author    243

INTRODUCTION

1. The Problem With Numbers 

A good decision is based on knowledge, not numbers. - Plato.

We live in a society built upon numbers. In a time when we can track everything. How many hours of quality sleep we had the night before. How many steps we take daily. Calories we consume. Time we spend on various screens. Up-to-the-minute stock reports. Accurate visualisations of exactly how much attention and interaction your latest social media post gained. Everything down to what your heart is doing right this minute.[1]

We can measure literally anything. We can acquire, analyse and utilise data on everything, all at the touch of a button. We have all the information humanity has ever amassed, all available wirelessly on a tiny device we carry with us all day. Thanks to technology, we have measurable data sets, figures and numbers previous generations could only dream of.

This includes the promised solution to almost every problem which has ever existed, if advertisements are to be believed.

Then why are we all so unhappy?[2]

The quick answer, and I’ll put it right here at the start of the book, is that we were never meant to live like this. In short; you can’t measure happiness.

The biggest problem with numbers is that if something can be measured, it can be improved. Endlessly. Technological advances have created a tyranny of non-stop numerical growth.

You can build upon the numbers till your dying days, and never really realise that was the metric which needed to be measured which was unmeasurable: how are you spending your time?  What are you spending your time doing? It’s a thing we all have a limited amount of but rarely think about. Or, if we do, we try to push the thought of our finite existence way into the back of our minds.

In this book, I want to make the case that numbers are ruining our lives. They have ruined mine several times.

This book is the story of how I got rid of tracking numbers and started living.

My sincere hope is that my journey might inspire you to do the same or something similar, and you can start living. Really living.

2. Why Are We Obsessed With Numbers?

Numbers have been with us since the beginning. From basic tally marks used to count cattle or tribe members at the very dawn of man to Roman numerals, then to the addition of zero and the current system we use, which originated in the Arab regions.[3]

Numbers serve so many purposes it would be hard to conceive of a world without them. Fundamental things tied to our identity use them, from our birthdays to our passport numbers, tax numbers, medical numbers and more.

They’re a vital component for trade, cultural exchange, medicine, technology and anything you can think of which may be quantified or measured.

They’re even baked into our language. We use phrases such as, ‘give one hundred per cent,’ ‘count your chickens,’ or ‘wait a minute,’ so often we don’t consider the actual number we’re referring to.

There’s a magic to numbers, too. Three and seven often occur in fairy tales to signify something important or otherworldly.[4] Our horoscopes are linked to numbers, either the more familiar western version or the Chinese animal sign, which is connected to the year of our birth.

Numbers are older than language and may even exist independently of it.[5] All of this is to say that numbers are pretty fundamental to our existence. Our obsession with them? That’s a more recent problem.

For a vast period in human history, you would be content with enough food and no significant medical issues. The invention of money, and later the industrial period, in particular, gave rise to the idea of numbers being important.

Times such as sunrise and sunset suddenly had actual concrete numbers. Crop yields had specific weights. Then came wages, hours worked, testing in schools, and finally, we find ourselves living in a time where everything can be measured, right down to the atomic level or all the way out into deep space.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this. Having numbers, either fixed or moveable, helps us to understand things. To comprehend them in a way which makes sense to our brains.

Children can understand numbers from a very young age, and there’s evidence even bees and fish understand the concept of different numbers and quantities. It’s no surprise that our human brains can take this idea and run with it to an extreme degree.

Pattern Recognition

The human brain is a pattern recognition machine.[6] It sees things where there are none and can miss other things or dismiss them as random because they don’t appear to make sense.

We can see examples of this phenomenon occurring everywhere. From visual cues such as seeing faces in clouds to audio ones where if we are told we can hear certain words to a song, either new nonsensical lyrics or backward recordings, the new words are now as clear as the original.[7] Sometimes even more. Celine Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’ will forever be the ‘hot dogs go on,’ and I can only hear the words ‘Starbucks lovers’ in Taylor Swift’s Blank Space.

These visual and aural tricks are pretty fun, along with various impossible objects that mathematics can generate for us to marvel at. On their own, they’re harmless and provide us with a sense of wonder. Connection. A human experience which we can relate to.

Music is merely a series of connected ‘patterns’ that the human ear can recognise. The chaos of a diminished chord or the harmonious nature of a beautifully played arpeggio hit our ears differently, and our brains can register and react to both. Depending on our preferences, musical background and a million other things, we either enjoy or dislike the sounds we hear. But both are a sequence. A pattern.

Language recognition is another pattern. You can read and comprehend these words via a very intricate learning system. These letters make this sound and mean this, these another. It’s all wonderfully complex and wonderfully beautiful. So where’s the problem?

The problem occurs when our organisational, pattern-seeking brain gets out of hand. It wants to impose its will on everything we do. Especially progress. Goals. Life.

Many aspects of progress don’t look like the clear, straight line we see in office presentations and scientific books. More often than not, they’re chaotic. Messy. All over the place like jagged rocks. Dizzyingly high peaks and devastatingly low valleys. Learning music is one example; getting in shape or exercising is another. Both will see a general improvement over time, but there will be periods lasting days, weeks or even months where it doesn’t look or feel like it.[8]

Sure, we might be able to draw a line of best fit and see that the numbers are improving, but sometimes we have to zoom far away to see the whole picture. That’s just something we’re not great at. Not when chasing something with a fixed numerical end goal.

We want to see the numbers go up or down. We want to see it with a regularity we can track. Monthly. Weekly. Daily. Hourly. Or, if you’re like me and self-employed as a writer, you might check your sales figures once every ten minutes.

When I worked in a casino, it mystified me to watch customers perch at the end of the roulette table, not gambling or playing but noting every number which came up. Hoping to find a ‘system.’ A foolproof way to win. A pattern. Some sense of order in the chaos and random. One could argue that every addict is addicted to numbers. Whether it’s the amount of a certain substance, money or something else, the quantity is the thing which becomes the issue in the end.

Working at a casino at a young age provided an excellent insight into how difficult a time humans have dealing with random. Processing it. Making it make sense. It just doesn’t compute for us.

We look to religion, patterns, and symbolism and find significance everywhere to explain one very simple but true fact: most of what happens is entirely arbitrary and totally beyond your control. When we believe otherwise, we enter the ‘blame game.’

When something goes wrong, and the numbers go the wrong way, we tend to catastrophise. We give up entirely if we gain a pound or two when trying to lose weight. Quit a new exercise regimen when we miss a few days. Stop learning a new skill if too many days have elapsed since we last tried our hand at it.

Then we wonder why it happened. Why did we fail? Do we blame ourselves or something else? Do we give up entirely because ‘what’s the point?’

I know this all-or-nothing focus on the goal is something I struggle with quite a bit. It’s what prompted me to write this book. To remind me that maybe the numbers are exactly where they’re supposed to be. That I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.

Sure, I can improve, but much of what I need to improve upon can’t be measured. And if it can, it’s possible that it’s not in a way I can conventionally observe and record.

3. My Story

Hi. Former numbers addict here. If there was a way to make the thing you were doing trackable, I was tracking it. I tracked the time I spent doing various activities, both professional and recreational. From writing to piano