The Tyranny of Numbers

Our days are numbered

Waterfall of numbers (paid license via istockphoto)

We live chained by a gilded necklace of numerical beads. Some are pearls, some are clay, some made of gold and quartz and lapis lazuli, and others covered in mud and slime and mold. For they are all our creation and our perception, our doing and our undoing, our liberator and our executioner, our truth teller and our fake news pundit. Our god and our demon.

We don’t live and die by the sword anymore. We live and die by the numbers.

All that we do, all that we think, all that we say and all that we feel, is measured, counted, quantified, analyzed, surveyed and weighed, conditioned and assessed, distilled, deconstructed, and decomposed into numbers. Figures. Data.

Numbers unlock the mysteries of music, the cadence of language, the physics of flight, the secrets of stars and the evolution of species. They measure our fitness and weight and the sex appeal of our bodies, they feed us recipes, mix our paints, tune our guitars, tailor our suits, split our stocks and drive our cars. They’ve given us writing, trade, and agriculture, the rigor of science, the symmetry of the arts, and the purity of religion. Yet where before numbers uplifted us and brought us civilization-shaping achievements, innovations and discoveries, they have also learned to decay, decant, and destroy. And we’re the ones who taught them.

Imagine your world without numbers. Everything would collapse.

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Consider this number.

An elegant form in black most of us will recognize, composed of tiny pixels arranged in a specific pattern on your screen—much like all of the letters and images you see every day.

What does this number mean? It is the Number One, of course.

But what does it mean?

The first whole number above zero.¹ But why is One valued as something greater than Zero, when we all want more zeroes before the decimal points in our bank accounts

The number denoting unity. But how can One denote unity when you need at least two people to unite with each other

Being a single unit or thing. But where does One end and the next One begin

Being the same in kind or quality. But if we are all of the same race, why do some despise others based on the color of their skin

In the sense of some, or in the sense of only. You are the one I wish to marry one day

If One has multiple meanings, is it truly singular? Is it truly the One?

It is One and it is All.

One. Uno. Un. Aon. Jedna. Unus. Ενας. واحد. Maya. Huk. Yksi. یکی . एकम्‌. Egy. ʻEkahi. Kotahi. Tasi. एक. Bir. Tokko. Satu. つ. Eyodwa. Нэг. بىرى. Eins. אחד. Один. 一.²

One, expressed in seven thousand languages by eight billion tongues

One writer whose books have inspired millions

One ring to rule them all

One orange slice left in your fruit bowl

One football player kneeling during the national anthem

One pop star singing through the rain

One vengeful war snuffing out 31,227 37,182 lives³

One sociopathic grifter felon running for president

One more pill to take

One late-night phone call

One wrong move

One livable planet in the known galaxy

One is a trillion moments in a billion people’s lives

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But what if we put a “$” in front, like this:

We now have the graphical representation of one U.S. dollar. What is the meaning of a dollar? That depends on whether it carries a capital letter or not. The U.S. Dollar speaks for the world’s mightiest and most aggressively capitalist economy. It struts down the red carpet of worldwide adulation, waving magnificently through the piercing flash of lightbulbs. It has massacred entire populations, brought cultures and traditions to their knees, negotiated trade agreements always in its favor, laundered truckloads of illicit chemical substances, and pushed its fat thumb on the levers of what should have been free and democratic elections. How painfully à propos, that blood-red carpet.

A dollar is nothing but a worn piece of paper that can buy you something. Just a few of these pieces of paper can procure a bag of cherries at the farmer’s market, buy you a bus ticket, or leave a tip in a jar at an ice cream shop. You’ll need a few more to take home a shiny new iPhone, pull up at your new suburban house in a Lucid, or to travel the world for a year. Would you like to print a few of these papers yourself? After all, it’s just paper with a pretty design and fancy security markings. Oh but you know that is a crime, to print your own money. You need to engage in an officially approved economic activity to obtain the dollars you seek: a corporate job, your own business, an art exhibit, a rock album, or a movie. You could try training to be an athlete, a sports car driver or maybe go into law, medicine, or politics—and if that fails, maybe a lemonade stand. Just remember that those in power can take your dollars and do whatever they want, but you can’t print your own. You can never print your own.

The Dollar endows the dollar with value based on a socioeconomic contract we all subscribe to. We all agree $1 carries financial value—but that value fluctuates with the yogic contortions of the market and its wind-whipped supply-demand curves. A dollar feels great if it’s a discounted price for a chocolate croissant that would normally run you $4. Not so great if it’s the income for a person in a developing country.

A dollar bill in the hand of a celebrity carries the same value as a dollar bill in the hand of an unhoused person. Same value, but not the same meaning.

I will never forget the day I made my first dollar. We had just arrived in America. I was nine years old, a little Czech girl living in a tenement house in a rundown neighborhood in a shabby town in the middle of Connecticut. An apartment building so run down we had no refrigerator—my mother put the milk out on the ledge in the wintertime to keep it cold. No clue how she managed in warmer months (thankfully we did not stay there long). I was the first one in my family to start making money. There was an old lady in the apartment on the bottom floor who needed help taking out her garbage. She paid me $0.25 each time. A quarter. A small round piece of metal with an eagle stamped on the back. Or two dimes and one nickel. One day, her adult daughter was visiting, and she was the one who paid me that day. My heart sank a little when I saw the coin she had placed in my hand: a single dime. Welcome to the labor market, the dime said. A few days later, I sat on the mattress I shared with my baby sister, and I gathered up all of my nickels and dimes and quarters and I counted. One dollar.

That day, I held the American dream in my hands.

Today, I barely notice the thousands of dollars that pass through my virtual hands. Rent. Utilities. Food. Clothes. Travel. Movie tickets. Client revenue and vendor bills. Most of it is digital now. But I remember that first dollar.

When is the last time you held a real coin in your hand, and felt its material, physical existence? When is the last time you found a dollar bill in the street?

The other day, walking to the farmers’ market, I came upon a $5 bill crumpled up on the sidewalk. Someone had dropped it on the way back from the market. I’ve found a $20 bill on a beach, in the sand, having inexplicably survived the waves and the wind. My daughter once found a $50 bill in a bush outside a ski shop. All three bills have long since been put back into circulation, for that is where they belong. Like blood in a living organism, money needs to flow if the organism is to remain healthy and thrive. Pooling too much capital in too few hands causes stagnation, and eventually results in a socioeconomic aneurysm.

None of us truly own money any more than we own land, animals, or other people. It’s all a socioeconomic contract we agree to and abide by.

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Now let’s put an “M” after our big, proud Number One, like this:

This means One Million. But one million what?

One million US dollars

One million refugees

One million people born in the last hour

One million gallons of crude oil spilled into the Caribbean Sea

One million love songs

One million houses sold this year

One million flights a day

One million chicken eggs laid

One million daisy petals plucked he loves me he loves me not

One million methamphetamine pills produced

One million shoes swept away in tsunamis

One million daily active users

One Million Eau de Toilette for Men

One million shares of Warren Buffet’s favorite stock

One hundred+ million books ever published

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One million no longer impresses in today’s world, does it. We are now in much greater willful awe of the letter B, and more so still, the letter T:

One billion US dollars

One billion climate refugees

One billion more people today than in 2011⁴

One billion snow crabs dead of starvation

One billion pieces of art scraped into training sets

One billion raindrops in a summer storm

One billion cars on the road

One billion kilometers from the rings of Saturn to the Sun

One trillion dollars in market cap

One trillion particles of microplastics

One trillion barrels of oil

One trillion footprints in the sands

These massive numbers stand far away from us. The bigger they grow, the more meaning they lose. No woman can birth a million children. No one can sing a billion songs. No farmer can plant a trillion seeds.

And yet, Nature steamrolls over our self-important numbers every day.

One times three trillion trees

One times twenty quadrillion ants on the Earth⁵

One times ten quintillion insects

One times three hundred quintillion gallons of water on our planet⁶

One times seven point five sextillion grains of sand

One times two hundred sextillion stars in the sky

One septillion stars in the universe

One Googolplex hidden in a wormhole

But let’s not put so much pressure on poor Number One. It’s part of the eminent binary foundation that upholds the basis of all computing systems and speaks the primary language of digital technology. For all things Digital, from your keyboard to your smartphone, Zero and One are the Most Noble Numbers. Their extended family includes Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, and Nine. These ten symbols form the foundation for a massive, intricately integrated system of systems that runs the human world.

Rational or irrational; cardinal, ordinal, and nominal; fractional, whole, and natural; prime and imaginary; even and odd and everything nice… a number is never alone in our world. We are forever qualifying and quantifying, crunching and calculating, assessing and analyzing, cataloguing and categorizing, adding multiplying subtracting or dividing, extracting root canals from squares, imagining numbers that shouldn’t be, slicing numbers into impossible fractions, pressing them into graphs and projections and balance sheets, whether they like it or not. Most of all, we like to pair our numbers… with symbols. Like a fine craft chocolate with wine, a number is always paired with a symbol, to tell us its story and to…

To tell us how to feel, what to think, when to act, what to do.

It’s 30 minutes past show time and the star’s still in her dressing room she’s too famous for anyone to complain

I’m running ten minutes late now they’ll know how disorganized my life is

Our company’s effective tax rate is just 11% we pay less tax than our putz employees but make millions in profits

My tax rate is 35% I’m filthy rich

His doctor says he’s got 7 months left to live but he’s 93 and he lived a good life

The baby was just 7 months old when the bombs killed his entire family

Did you see they bought a new house for $2.1 million they must be rich why aren’t you making more

Warren Buffett still lives in his 1958 house he bought for $31,500 that’s something to aspire to look how frugal he is

I’m so excited I got 25 likes on my Substack post that means at least twice that many people read it without reacting I wonder what they thought

I’m so depressed I only got 2500 views on my TikTok because my BFF always gets millions on hers how does she do it

I work 80 hours a week I don’t have time for vacations wow so that’s what it takes to be a top exec

Make sure you get your 8 hours of sleep every night I also need to fit in an hour of cardio every day luckily I have all my apps to track it all

The candidate’s polling really low, just 20% he’s a loser don’t vote for him

He lost the popular vote by 2.8 million votes but won the Electoral College with 304 votes our system is rigged! no it’s not you sore losers! let’s just do away with the College

The numbers rule us.

Speed limits. Grades. Time of day. Height. Weight. Bust size. Shoe and shirt and waist size. Heart rate. Date of birth. Age. Salary. Social Security number. Serial numbers. VINs. EINs. Invoices. Utility prices. Rent. Recipe measurements. Taxes. Stocks. Net worth. Books to read. Job applications ahead of you. Likes and shares and comments and views. Frequent flyer miles. Minutes to wait on hold. Medical bills. Insurance premiums. Pairs of shoes in your closet and cars in your garage. Steps in a day. Tennis and soccer and football and basketball scores.

TIME is MONEY and MONEY is TIME

But that’s only so because they both bow down to the NUMBERS

Try living without your numbers for a day and see what happens

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Thank you for the twelve minutes of your one thousand four hundred and forty minutes the Earth blesses us all with every full turn of her body, that you spent reading this essay. If it inspired you, warmed your heart, or made you think, frown, or throw something across the room, there’s plenty more here at The Muse to produce all kinds of ah-ha and oh no moments…

If the monthly cadence doesn’t resonate, I’m always down for a coffee (or hot chocolate)

[direct link here if the giphy thingie doesn’t work]

1. Definition of “one” by Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary. Accessed online on January 5, 2024, at https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/one. Yes, that’s how long ago I started working on this essay.

2. Languages in order of appearance: English, Italian/Spanish, French, Gaelic, Czech, Latin, Greek, Arabic, Aymara, Quechua, Finnish, Persian, Sanskrit, Hungarian, Hawai’ian, Maori, Samoan, Nepali, Turkish, Oromo, Indonesian, Japanese, Zulu, Mongolian, Uyghur, German, Hebrew, Russian, Chinese.

3. “Israel-Gaza war in maps and charts: Live tracker,” by AJLabs in AlJazeera. Accessed online at https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-tracker on June 6, 2024.

4. This is just mind-blowing: https://ourworldindata.org/population-growth-over-time

5. A quadrillion is 10¹⁵. So there are, according to scientific estimates—because who is going to go count every damn ant on the planet—20,000,000,000,000,000 ants on Earth, representing a total biomass of 12 megatons, which “exceeds the combined biomass of wild birds and mammals and equals 20% of human biomass.” Let that percolate through your brain for a moment. It nearly exploded mine. Source: Schultheiss, Patrick; Nooten, Sabine S.; Wang, Runxi; Guénard, Benoit, “The abundance, biomass, and distribution of ants on Earth,” PNAS, September 19, 2022. Accessed online on June 7, 2024 at https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2201550119.

6. An easier way to think of it is in cubic miles: our planet holds 332,519,000 cubic miles of water, according to NOAA. That’s still brain-breaking, I know.