The Things That Make Life Meaningful

Data, value, and meaning

We live in a world that runs on numbers, on data.

Data is, of course, important. If someone has a job, they work for a business.

And every business from the non-profit that serves homeless people in your community to a trillion-dollar company in Silicon Valley needs to pay attention to financial data to make sure their bills can be paid.

Sports teams have to pay attention to the data collected by their statisticians and analysts to know which pitcher to put in the game to face the slugging lefty that comes up to bat with the game on the line.

Parents need data to understand how their children perform at school, so they can know if some sort of tutoring or remedial work is necessary to ensure their child doesn’t fall behind the necessary requirements for students their age.

Data has always been important, but it seems that it has maybe never been as influential in decisions as it is today. Much of the reason for that is because novel technologies have been developed that allow us to quantify—or turn into numbers—parts of life that were never able to be quantified before.

I’ve never been much of a “math” guy—I’m more of a words guy—but I have always loved statistics. I struggled in my high school geometry class, but aced the college-level statistics course I took my senior year of high school. So don’t come away from this thinking “Chris thinks data isn’t important.”

I do think data is important, and I love analyzing data to find meaning in the numbers. If collecting data is quantifying reality, I love to do the work of taking data and de-quantifying it, turning it back into meaning that can be acted upon in the real world, outside of a spreadsheet.

But I think we’ve come to care too much about data, perhaps expecting it to be able to deliver more value than it actually can.

I heard someone say recently, “The things that make life meaningful are not so easily measured.”

I am concerned that we become unhealthily interested in that which we can measure solely because we can measure it and not because it is what matters most.

This is especially true in ministry, is it not?

Of course in a for-profit business enterprise that exists to make a profit, what matters most is making a profit, and this is definitionally quantifiable.

But in a ministry or more general non-profit setting that exists for a purpose that may not be so easily quantified, the temptation to invent data that measures “success” is a strong one.

We should not attempt to quantify Christlikeness, for example.

Do you have data to demonstrate the value of your friendships? Your marriage? I hope not.

That the things which matter most cannot be quantified is not a bug—it is a feature.

The ability to quantify and track the effectiveness of various parts of our life is a gift, so long as we can resist the draw to care more about that which we can measure than that we cannot.

We should learn from what we can measure even while we invest in what we cannot measure.