My Relationship With Numbers And Obsessive Self-Optimization

When I initially started this blog, it was to document my journey on distancing myself from all kinds of toxic technology. I’m not averse to technology. I never was and never will. However, not all technology was created equal and not everything affects the human psyche the same way. From a very young age, I’ve just had this weird fascination with numbers. Sometimes it was music charts1, other times it was my stream count on songs, now it’s my social media habits and how my blog looks.

With music, I used to focus on stream counts more than actually listening to the music and enjoying it. With my blog, I’m focusing more on how it looks and behaves than actually writing meaningful posts. With learning French, I’m focusing more on keeping my Duolingo streak than looking for effective ways to improve my listening comprehension, pronounciation and dialogue skills. With physical activity, I’m focusing more on closing my rings without actually exercising than looking for a way to be physically active and having fun while doing so. With my health, I care more for my heart rate than what I’m actually feeling. While writing, I focus more on the word count than the content at times. I hate all of this. I want it to stop, but I don’t know how.

Now you might be wondering where all of this is coming from. I read this blog post on one of my favorite blogs — Ava’s Space — titled ”are you surveilling yourself yet?“ and simply felt called out. Ava goes on and on about all the ways we are monitoring ourselves just so we can optimize ourselves and be better. She criticizes this move to hyperindividualism where you take up all the space for yourself, cut people out “because you don’t owe them anything,“2 and aim for being ”the [virtually unattainable] best version of yourself“.

I felt called out in a way I’ve never felt in my digital life. Her post actually made me emotional and stirred up something that I’ve been trying to contain for a while now: I hate these streaks and numbers, but without them I fear that I wouldn’t do anything at all. I would stop doing my Duolingo regularly and possibly start forgetting some of the little French I’ve learned over the past half year. It’s as if I’ve built my entire self worth on immaterial things that don’t really matter with the promise that I would be better, I would do better, if I cared about them, but I’m not actually doing better because of them. If anything, this obsession with irrelevant metrics is killing my motivation and passion for things that I actually enjoy when substracting all the negativity stemming from the semi-commodification of incommensurable attributes.

Social media, tech gadgets and the internet at large have been cancerous to my life. And the irony is not lost on me. But it’s getting increasingly harder to distance myself from the internet. And the terrifying aspect is that I’m not alone in this. It’s gradually becoming a hard requirement to have internet access and be well-versed in computers. And going from having a computer to surfing social media is not a big jump: the same tool you need for work, homework, research, accessing government services and more also happens to be the gateway into the interweb.

I want to quit the numbers game, the constant influx of information and self-optimizations, but I don’t know how. I did a detox in the summer and tried to thoughtfully approach social media, but it seems like there is no thoughtfulness in it all. It’s either you’re in or you’re out. I’ve dabbled with these new social networks with only (at least by default) chronological feeds3 like Mastodon4 and Bluesky5 6 and have extensively documented my experience with them, but they still feature the same flaws in social networks that make me so uneasy: they overstimulate my brain.

Just last week, I had multiple instances of public emotional outbursts based on the news and media I was fed through my timeline. You curate your timeline, but even good people can be a bad influence7. In real life — yes, that thing still exists — you can more promptly “curate“ what you become aware of. It’s not life-threatening to me that Trump and his clique will take over Empire in January. I could choose or signal to people around me that I’d like to focus on something else right now, talk about something different or not talk at all. On social media, I’m hit with the content of the message and the choice of (not) reading it as it is affecting me.

You could argue that I do have a choice, that I could just go offline, touch some grass, see the goddamn sky for a change, but I’ve learned time and time again that I can’t control my impulses of not going online. I’ve tried everything, but this shit is so addicting. I don’t want to go back to recreationally deleting accounts fueled by my OCD as a means of putting barriers in front of returning to these havens of toxicity, because I’ve ended up returning every. single. time.

I would just lose the few connections I’d made between each new account. I’m at a loss and don’t know how to proceed to be honest.

  1. For example charts of how artists/albums/songs are performing on Spotify or Billboard, usually posted on X (formerly Twitter). Such drivers of this nonsense were @chartdata and other pop accounts like @PopBase and @PopCrave. I wasn’t even waging wars on Stan Twitter, I just cared about these numbers for some unknown reason. ↩︎

  2. She also wrote another post, we owe each other, that hold dear as well. ↩︎

  3. I hate this word with every fibre of my being. It sounds like we’re just animals waiting to be fed from the collective mother source. ↩︎

  4. Self-hosting Mastodon ↩︎

  5. Social Media, Centralization, Discovery and Algorithms ↩︎

  6. More Thoughts on Bluesky ↩︎

  7. It’s not their job to regulate my emotional state and this post isn’t about that. It’s about the nature of social media. ↩︎

Digital Life