When Life is Translated into Numbers, What Do We Lose?

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We live in a world obsessed with counting—marks, trophies, likes, shares, gifts, outcomes. Almost everything in life today is documented, measured, and reduced into data. But what happens to those experiences that cannot be captured by numbers - the in-between shades of colour, the fleeting emotions, the depth of relationships, or the quiet beauty of silence? This piece reflects on how the culture of quantification risks erasing the unmeasurable rhythms of life, and why it is often the immeasurable that makes us most human.


If words are windows to the world,
then their edges frame the way we see,
shaping, defining, confining our worlds.

Education teaches us to put life into words:
colours into neat labels - red, blue, green, black.
tastes into categories - sweet, sour, bitter, salty, spicy.
emotions into single terms - love, happiness, sadness, desire.
relationships into roles - father, mother, sister, brother, friend.

And soon, words themselves are reduced to numbers.
Quality is assessed in likes, shares, and “dislikes.”
The worth of a scholar lies in papers counted,
seminars attended, projects completed,
placements secured, outcomes achieved.

Even our most intimate bonds are now measured.
Number of friends on social media.
Days to celebrate mothers, lovers, and friends.
Gifts as tokens of affection - diamonds, gold, platinum.

Counting, always counting.
Trophies, medals, certificates, marks.
Events recorded, data uploaded, achievements tracked.

But what of the things that can’t be counted?
The infinite shades between colours—
reddish, bluish, yellowish hues that escape definition.
The subtle gradations of taste,
the bittersweet, the salty-sour,
the layers of longing in love or hate.
The depth of relationships that have no name.
The quiet beauty of a student’s unmeasurable spark.
The fathomless pull of desire and connection.

When everything must be documented, quantified, and displayed,
we risk losing what truly sustains us—
the rhythm of silences,
the fluidity of emotions,
the untamed flow of relationships,
the countless ways of feeling cosmic energy.

Perhaps the real richness of life
lies not in what can be counted,
but in all that resists the count.

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