Issue #134 Are Your Metrics Making You Miserable?

Mountain biking is one of my favorite things in the world to do.

There is a trail close to my house called Jumping Jacks. It is a black diamond jump trail; built specifically for people who enjoy the sensation of getting airborne on a mountain bike.

There are big sweeping berms, a step-down, a step-up, multiple table tops, and a couple of gap jumps. The whole thing is essentially a curated sequence of moments where the ground disappears beneath you and for a second or two, you are weightless.

I have ridden it probably a hundred times and it never gets old. The joy of it has nothing to do with time and everything to do with feel; the compression in the berm at speed, the timing of your approach off the face of a jump, the clean satisfying sensation of stomping a gap jump exactly right. It is a short trail but full of fun features that demand your full attention, which is also what makes it totally restorative. Your mind cannot be anywhere else when you are riding it.

Then someone turned it into a Strava segment.

For those who do not know, Strava is a fitness app that tracks your rides and runs via GPS. It also allows users to create segments; specific stretches of trail or road where your time is recorded and ranked. At the top of each segment sits a coveted title: King of the Mountain.

I have been a Strava user for many years, and by accident, I discovered I was the King of the Mountain on Jumping Jacks, and I was quietly pleased about it.

Then someone took my crown.

At first, I was not bothered. But then something inside of me slowly shifted and I started to make meaning out of it. So I decided to go back and reclaim it.

I did.

Then I lost it again.

I went back. Won it. Lost it. Went back again.

What I did not notice at first is what was slowly happening to me. A trail that I had ridden for the pure joy of it, had suddenly become something different.

Instead of arriving at the trailhead and thinking about the ride, I was thinking about my time. I was no longer reading the terrain for pleasure; I was attacking it for metrics. Every corner became a calculation and every pedal stroke became a negotiation so I could rank on a digital leaderboard that had zero impact on my well being.

There is a saying I have heard more than once: play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Somewhere along the way, I entered a game I never truly cared about because someone else told me what winning looked like. In doing so, I turned something I deeply loved into a contest for validation; and in the pursuit of winning, it slowly drained the joy from doing the thing that had once made me feel alive.

The Tool That Flipped

Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian media theorist who spent his career thinking about how technology shapes human behaviour. One of his more provocative ideas was that every technology, when pushed far enough, eventually reverses into the opposite of what it was designed to do.  He called it the principle of reversal.

The examples are everywhere once you start looking.

Cars were designed for speed and to give people freedom of movement. At scale, in every major city in the world, the opposite is true as they produce gridlock. Social media was designed to help people stay connected. Studies now point that heavy users feel more lonely and as a result have a greater sense of emptiness.  Fitness apps were designed to help people move more, train smarter, and feel better in their bodies until the leader board showed up forcing people into comparison.

This is exactly how Strava started to affect me and McLuhan would not have been surprised. The tool did exactly what tools do when taken to their extreme. It reversed. The thing designed to serve the experience became the thing that consumed it.

Here is what I have come to believe sits at the heart of a truly thriving life. It comes down to three pillars:

1. How we continue to progress, grow and develop ourselves.
2. How we use our time, talent, and resources to create genuine value.
3. How we can use the first 2 to help deepen our connection with ourselves, with the people we love, and with our Creator.

These are the metrics that actually matter, and are the areas where real flourishing happens.

A tool that helps you build any of those three pillars is worth keeping, while a tool that quietly erodes them deserves a harder look.

What Strava did to Jumping Jacks was subtle but telling. It took something designed to support my health and made it “unhealthy”; it replaced the experience of riding with the experience of being ranked. The connection it offered was not a deeper one; it was a comparative one; and I know all too well from personal experience that when you compare, you despair.

Humans are wired to move toward a better future; to grow, to improve, to become. That instinct is good. But progress and how we choose to measure it is often exactly where we lose the plot.

Stephen Covey gave us a simple but powerful framework for thinking about how we prioritize our life. He divided the demands on our attention into four quadrants: things that are urgent and important, things that are important but not urgent, things that are urgent but not important, and things that are neither. His central insight was that most of us spend the majority of our lives reacting to the urgent, regardless of whether it actually matters, while the things that are truly important; our health, our relationships, our growth, our faith; quietly get deferred to some future version of our life that never quite arrives.

However the life we actually want is built almost entirely in the important but not urgent quadrant. It is built through consistent investment in our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health. It is built through intentional time with the people who matter most. It is built through the kind of slow, patient inner work that will never show up as a notification.

Which is exactly what Strava is not.

What Strava does brilliantly is manufacture urgency around things that are not important. A ping. A displaced crown. A stranger's faster time on a trail you love. None of it matters and yet all of it demands a response; pulling you out of the important and into the urgent, transforming something that was fun into something frenetic, frustrated, flustered (and frankly uttering other F-words)

When we outsource our sense of forward motion to a metric someone else created, we stop asking the harder and more honest question: am I actually moving towards creating the life I want?

We trade the important for the urgent, the meaningful for the measurable, and joy of the experience for meaningless data. And we do it so gradually that we barely notice it is happening until we are standing at the top of a trail we enjoy, thinking about a leaderboard instead of the love of the ride.

The Comparison That Costs You

Eleanor Roosevelt once said that comparison is the thief of joy.

I have heard and recited that quote a number of times, and I think I only understood it at a surface level until my unhealthy obsession with the Jumping Jacks trail.

It surfaced as a feeling, from reviewing a ranking on a leaderboard in an app for a few minutes after my ride. It was the result of a comparison to a stranger I had never ridden with; an alias whose real name I did not know, of an age I was unaware of, whose bike I had no insight into, and whose fitness level had no relationship to mine.

And yet it was enough. Enough to take something I loved and start to turn it into something I was beginning to resent.

To be clear, metrics are not the enemy. We need metrics. The right data, tracking the right things, in the right context, is one of the most powerful tools we have for making meaningful progress. The problem is not measurement itself; it is that we live in a world where everything has been measured, scored, ranked, and optimized whether we asked for it or not.

The hours online. The way you sleep. The steps you take. The rides you log. Everything has been quietly turned into a contest, a competition, a comparison, and an endless invitation to constantly improve your score.

The cumulative effect of living inside that many metrics is not motivation; it is anxiety and exhaustion. It has also led to a creeping sense of meaninglessness that is made worse by the fact that none of these scores are connected to anything that actually matters; to real relationships, to genuine personal growth, to a life that feels like it is going somewhere worth going.

Where our attention goes, energy flows and if we give our attention to the wrong things we literally start to waste and deplete our precious life energy. Attention fixated on a metric, inevitably begins to create anxiety about that metric and in the process it changes the nature of the experience itself.

What began as play beccomes performance. What began as enjoyment becomes evaluation. And it isn’t just performance that’s being measured and evaluated, it also gives us a measure of our self-worth.

Over time, the activity loses its intrinsic value because our focus is no longer on the experience but on measuring it. And once the experience has been stripped away, all that remains is the scorecard.

At that point, you are no longer fully participating in the activity. You are conducting a data collection exercise, using your body and your effort as inputs in a game designed to optimize numbers. In the process, you are not only gaming the system…you are allowing the system to game you.

The Question Worth Asking

I still ride Jumping Jacks. I ride it regularly. I love it the same way I always did.

I ride it without Strava running.

I am not anti-technology. I am pro-experience. I want tools that serve the life I am trying to build, not tools that quietly distract me while turning me into a lesser version of myself in service of someone else’s agenda.

The deeper question McLuhan invites us to ask is not simply, What can this technology do? The better question is, What will it eventually do if we allow it to operate without limits?

Every tool serves a purpose, but every tool also has a tendency to overshoot. It solves the original problem so efficiently that, over time, it begins creating the very problem it was meant to eliminate.

A scalpel can heal or harm. The difference is not the blade, it is the intention and awareness of the person holding it.

The same is true of technology.

A tool that enriches your life is one you pick up deliberately and put down just as easily. A tool that undermines your life is one that follows you everywhere, turning attention into fixation, fixation into obsession, and a once-enjoyable journey into a never-ending performance review.

So this week, pause and ask yourself:

Which tools are genuinely serving what I value, and which have quietly replaced it?

Where have I allowed a metric to define an experience that deserved to stand on its own?

What would change if I put one data source down and simply showed up for the thing itself?

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