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The sun was shining for the first time in a long time over Hillsdale, Michigan. My legs in need of stretching and blood in need of pumping, I went for a walk with my best friend. We caught up on our days as the birds chirped and a gentle spring breeze moved us along.
Allow me to re-explain.
The temperature was 68 degrees after a week in the 30s (though the windchill made it feel more like 61 degrees). I had only taken 5,456 steps that day and needed to hit my 10,000-step goal. I went for a 30-minute walk and brought my best friend along to distract me from the next 90 or so calories I was intending to burn.
In an age of ubiquitous fitness trackers and health apps, it’s no wonder our relationship with the natural world has become skewed. We are now able to quantify aspects of our lives — like calories, cardiovascular age, sleep efficiency, steps, stress levels, etc. — that our ancestors merely experienced. Oura sold more health tracker rings in 2025 alone than it had in the years since its founding in 2013.
But health isn’t the only thing we obsessively quantify. Grades, money, and even attractiveness all come with numbers. We would find the world a much more pleasant place if we spent more time experiencing it than tallying up what good it might do for us.
When we reduce everyday activities and circumstances to numbers, we relegate the gifts and pleasures of this world to figures that meet or fail our arbitrary standards. But the world wasn’t given to us merely for use. It exists also for our enjoyment, so that we might also look at it and, with our creator, call it “very good.”
Have you ever checked your weather app, despaired, and then stepped outside to say: “Hey it’s nicer than I thought”? Or have you ever experienced the endorphins and energy boost after a solid run? Here’s one. Have you ever eaten a gooey, rich chocolate brownie with ice cream and caramel sauce? What an absolute damper it would be if someone came along with a number to remind you how cold it truly is, how much of a slowpoke you actually are, and how much heavier your indulgent dessert will make you. So why do we do this to ourselves?
I’m not telling you to swear off numbers and counting. It is of course one way we make sense of the world. But I am calling on us, myself included, to be more aware of how much we rate our quality of life with numbers on a scale. They’re part of the picture, sure, but certainly not the whole thing.
Your education at Hillsdale College will hopefully leave you a truth-loving, self-governing human being, not just the 21st in your class with a 3.865 GPA. Your eating and exercise habits should make you a balanced, fit, energetic person able to perform your daily duties, not just a 160-pound. individual with 12% body fat who never exceeds 2,400 calories a day. Your job should be something meaningful that serves others well and brings you satisfaction, not just six figures a year.
Take off your Oura ring, delete your health app, and see how much more in tune you can become with your body and the senses the good Lord gave you. See how much happier you’ll become.
Happiness — now that’s something you can’t quantify.
Adriana Azarian is a senior studying politics.
