How many people have you slept with?

Seems like a personal question, yeah? Well it's not (just) me being nosey – and you don't even have to answer (infact I'd recommend you keep it secret!) – it's just one small part of a bigger question; why do we feel the need to quantify everything?

Y'see, I came to the realisation this week that we need to measure and quantify almost every aspect of daily life. We use social networks to measure how popular we are as we count up the 'likes' and comments, retweets and mentions, friends and followers...we measure our professional success on the number of new clothes or shoes or watches we buy every weekend and how much money we spent gives us the only real 'demonstration' of true quality...how much fun we had on a night out is obviously entirely relational to the number of shots we had...and a potentially direct product of shots of course is sex...and yes, even sex is on our list of quantification!! How long sex lasts tells us how good it was and how many people we've had sex with shows how good we must be...and what do you want to do after sex? No, not cuddle! Sleep...and yup, you guessed it – now we’re even measuring sleep! Not just in the number of hours we've snoozed for, but we use things like the sleep cycle app to give us a graph of how well we've slept and we get given a score on our sleep quality...which, although interesting, is also slightly baffling right? Forget whether we feel rested or not, we need to be told we slept well, so if 'sleep cycle' says '49% sleep quality' then cancel breakfast and head back to bed!

And I think about these things.

And they all seem to be symptomatic of a society bewildered by its own insecurities to the point where we feel the need to seek validation for everything...everything!

And I'm guilty as you...like this post – I will judge how good, bad, valuable or interesting this piece of writing (and in turn judge myself as a (wannabe) writer)) based on the number of views it gets, or more so on the number of 'likes' and comments it gets on Facebook...why? I don’t know. Will having 0 likes force me into retiring my digital pen? (unfortunately for you) No. Will having 300 likes propel me into the stratosphere of the writing elite? Hardly. Yet this post will still live and die by the 'like' button. You are Caesar, and I wait expectantly for the 'thumbs up'

Will this change anytime soon? No. If anything, I can see everyday life becoming increasingly numerical, and while I’m not saying this is a good or a bad thing, maybe in the meantime we can start looking into the sentiment behind things over and above the quantity...y'know?

Ah I dunno...maybe this makes sense, maybe it doesn’t…I didn't make any promises...just remember to 'like' it on Facebook, OK??

Just a thought...