An unfortunate side effect of reading philosopher C. Thi Nguyen’s latest book, The Score, is noticing how much sway metrics hold over you. I say “unfortunate” not because the realization is unwelcome, quite the opposite, but because you’ll find yourself taking account of the numerical scrum in your life. And that exercise gets unnerving fast.

KPIs, BMIs, OKRs, credit scores, savings rates, social media likes, screen time, steps walked, hours worked, hours slept, to-dos done, to-dos still to do, books read, practice hours, blood pressure readings, calories consumed, macronutrient ratios, the list just keeps going. Heck, even those stressed-out smiley faces on your meditation app mask yet one more metric. Some of these are forced on us by our employers or our societies; others we willfully adopt. But whatever the source, there’s no shortage of rates, ratios, and ranges we feel compelled to satisfy.

The problem, Nguyen points out in his book, isn’t necessarily the metrics. Used properly and with care, they are handy tools that allow us to measure all sorts of things and easily communicate information to others. No, the problem arises when what the metrics measure and what really matters to us become unaligned. When numbers become the scoring systems for our lives, they no longer help us achieve our goals or live according to our values. They capture us.

Capturing values in a bottle

To understand how metrics ensnare us, it’s helpful to step back and consider what a metric is. To get a little textbook-y: A metric is a quantitative assessment used to track and compare certain types of information. I highlight quantitative because while it’s a given, it’s also key.

As Nguyen told me, making information quantitative makes it easier to travel between different contexts and people. A GPA instantly tells you something about a student’s performance in school. You don’t even need much detail, let alone a degree in pedagogy. As long as you know the scale (0.0–4.0), you can surmise that a student with a 3.7 GPA outperformed one with a 2.3. The language of numbers is universal like that.

To manage this feat, though, metrics have to ignore life’s qualitative experiences, and it is this nuanced and dynamic space that truly influences our lives. For instance, a student’s GPA can’t tell you what classes they took, what their favorite subjects were, where they struggled, whether they thrived socially, or if they found their teachers friendly and approachable. Metrics shave off this valuable information precisely because these experiences can’t be easily communicated. Sometimes they can’t be efficiently communicated at all. It’s vibes all the way down.

By whittling away the qualitative, the GPA creates a gap between what the metric measures and what actually matters to students. And we risk such an outcome when we use metrics to measure value.

In the opening of his book, Nguyen shares that he chose to pursue philosophy because he was obsessed with those “big, weird old questions” at the heart of the discipline. You know the ones: What is the meaning of life? Is there objective morality? What is the nature of beauty? But after becoming a professor, he quickly grew acquainted with “the ranking indices.”

Like a GPA, these rankings evaluate philosophy departments and journals, using numerical scores for easy comparison. Those scores are based on annual surveys and quantitative criteria, such as average citations. While these rankings have their uses, they have no actual authority. They don’t help professors teach better, and they don’t help philosophers do the business of philosophizing. They also can’t capture the experience of studying in the discipline by embodying the feeling of encountering a life-changing argument or having a classroom lecture reshape how you think about thinking.

Nonetheless, Nguyen says, philosophy professors pay “intense, close, and regular attention to them.” The rankings become surrogates for value, worth, and prestige, and in doing so, they can subtly shift a philosopher’s goals. Instead of examining and teaching the questions that interest them, they focus on writing for prestigious journals and about the popular subjects that will help them climb the leaderboard.

“I would have thought that the group of people who would be most immune to this stuff would be philosophers, but it turns out that philosophers can be captured by clear, simple metrics like anyone,” Nguyen says, admitting to being drawn into this trap himself earlier in his career.

Metrics, metrics every where (and all of life did shrink)

Philosophers aren’t alone here. Rankings influence many disciplines and can mutate values as well as goals, leading academics to such unscholarly behaviors as plagiarizing others’ work, unintentionally manipulating data, or outright falsifying it. And it isn’t just individuals who can have their values captured in the pursuit of a high score. Entire institutions can.

During our conversation, Nguyen cited Engines of Anxiety by Wendy Nelson Espeland and Michael Sauder. In their 2016 book, the sociologists tracked how the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings changed how prospective students applied to colleges.

Before the rankings, students were more likely to look for schools that matched their values. Some would seek out schools that specialized in a certain branch of the law, while others would look to schools that promised high-paying jobs or that promoted social activism. Whatever the case, Nguyen adds, the decisions required “deep deliberation” to decide “what kind of life looked meaningful to them.”

The rankings ironed out this complex and multidimensional decision-making and flattened it into a “single dimension”: Which school was “the best”? Of course, U.S. News can’t know which school will be best for any one student. Its rankings lean heavily on easy-to-package criteria, such as median LSAT scores, bar passage rates, and post-graduation job placement. But because the rankings present their findings with an eye toward winners and losers, students began to shift their preferences toward the schools on the podiums.

In the process, Nyugun writes, students began to outsource their unique needs and “adopt a prefabricated value system.” And to make themselves more appealing to would-be students, law schools followed suit and began prioritizing the ranking’s values as well. The result? Values flattened, losing richness and diversity, and a value monopoly emerged.

“If we depend on metrics to tell us what’s important, then we’re erasing a huge amount of human value and hyper-focusing on a thin slice,” Nguyen says.

Nguyen and I spoke a lot about education because it is a subject near and dear to our hearts, but once you start looking, you can find value capture all over the place. Your FitBit can tell you how many steps you took in a day, but not whether those steps were a pleasant stroll through a local park or a chore on a treadmill. Social media can tell you how many people engage with your posts, but not whether you’re building healthy, meaningful relationships. And how many work tasks are done in workplaces every day to satisfy hand-me-down key results and not for the betterment of either employees or customers?

These metrics were likely adopted to support admirable values — health, relationships, and better workplaces — but over time, our connection with them shifts. They come to serve something other than us — some entity or abstract process — and the value gap widens.

A necessary trade-off

Of course, U.S. News didn’t intend to monopolize the values of a nation’s law students. The original goal was to provide reliable information about these colleges to a public that may lack insider knowledge — say, a first-generation college student with a dream of becoming a lawyer. And while the criteria may not represent universal values, they do signal qualities that many people care about in universities.

Nor are metrics always a bad thing. As Nguyen tells me, we can’t always run on vibes.

Metrics help reduce corruption and bias by opening up organizations and institutions to outside scrutiny. They also make tasks and information easier to exchange. Imagine if every time you hired a new employee or filled a seat on a committee, you had to shape the role to fit that person’s unique values and experiences. Metrics help create continuity and aid people in working together.

“Because they cross contexts, metrics enable a large number of people to coordinate on something easily,” Nguyen says. “They do exactly what they say on the box. They connect people, they make it easy to coordinate, and they make that coordination fungible.”

But despite their usefulness, Nguyen warns that metrics are still limited as promoters of values and goals. When we outsource our values to metrics, we make those values inflexible and flatten the experiences of our lives.

One objection here may be that we simply need better metrics. When I posed this to Nguyen, he pointed out that metrics are designed to “strip off the highly sensitive, nuanced, contextual information [that] requires a lot of experience to understand.” This is the only way metrics become communicable at scale. The limitations aren’t a bug; they are a feature. We have to recognize this fact and learn not to let metrics drive us in ways that don’t support our unique lives.

“I’ve come to think that metrics are incredibly valuable and incredibly costly. The things they’re good at and their costs are inextricable,” Nguyen says. “We’re always going to be involved in some kind of trade-off between these useful, powerful, limited metrics, and these weird, subtler, smaller-scale renditions of value.”

Don’t play someone else’s game

By now, I may have made it sound as though Nguyen’s message is a philosophical shrug — metrics, can’t live with’em, can’t live without’em. That’s not entirely the case. He has a novel proposal for balancing metrics and values: Play more games*.

Games share many similarities with metrics. They come with a set of goals conveyed to players through their scoring systems. Their rules tell you what to do, why to do it, and how to do it. The goal will change depending on the game — whether that’s collecting tokens, moving pieces on a board, stomping Goombas, or putting a ball in a hoop hanging 10 feet above the ground. Also like metrics, these goals are simple, exchangeable, and mostly easy to communicate. (Yes, some games have overly elaborate and complicated rules, but even Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t require a PhD in RPGs to enjoy.)

Where games differ, Nguyen argues, is that games “elevate us, transform us, and make us more fluid and playful.” Their scoring systems don’t capture our values; they clarify them.

Games do this by offering us a playground of experimentation. Every game asks you to adopt a value system along with its goals. To win, you may have to cooperate with a total stranger or utterly destroy your closest friend. You may have to be social, creative, analytical, strategic, or straight-up Machiavellian. You may need to use your mind, your body, or your imagination.

Each game asks us to value something different, and when we take on those values, we learn which appeal to us and which do not. They offer the opportunity to test our agency and self-determination. When Nguyen is rock climbing or fly-fishing, he finds joy by moving his body in coordinated ways or settling into the present moment in nature. When he plays Carcassonne, he values his strategic mind and the sense of competition. Conversely, when he plays The Lord of the Rings board game, he pursues teamwork and cooperation.

And because games are isolated from life, their systems don’t control us the way a real-world metric does. If you enjoy the experience and find it valuable, play again. If you don’t, play something else or modify the game to better align with your values.

“You can house rule poker; you can’t house rule the GPA,” Nguyen says. “And if you don’t like poker, you can play another game. If you don’t like the GPA, you’re screwed.”

By approaching games with this “spirit of reflectiveness,” Nguyen tells me, we can flex our agency and learn to be more deliberate about the scoring systems we let into our lives. Such reflection also shows us how easily scoring systems can seduce us. 

It’s a weird bit of mental magic: Outside of the game of Monopoly, you and most everyone else couldn’t care less about moving pewter pawns around an oversized piece of grey board. But enter that game’s mindset, and suddenly everyone around you has the A-Type personality of a Wall Street executive. Your normally loving grandpa wants nothing more than to send his competition (read: his loved ones) straight to the poorhouse.

“Our systems, our languages, and our metrics are infectious,” Nguyen says. “We’re getting sucked into caring about other things all the time. I think we’re built to do that. Games show how easy it is for us to meld ourselves to different systems.”

Nguyen’s message is ultimately one of discernment. 

“Be careful about which systems you let into your soul,” he said. “It’s not that you shouldn’t let them in. Every time you play a game, you’re letting a system into your soul, but be careful. It’s doing a lot to you when you adopt a metric, when you put on a Fitbit, when you orient yourself to a ranking. It’s changing the texture of your life. Think about whether you actually want that.”*

* Author’s Note: Nguyen borrows his definition of a game from Bernard Suits’ classic The Grasshopper (1978), which describes them as the act of voluntarily taking on “unnecessarily obstacles to make possible the activity of struggling to overcome them.” This definition includes board and video games — it’s in the name — but also sports, hobbies, and various other activities. Sports, distance running, kendama, skateboarding, playing an instrument, and many other activities can all fit under this definition.