Not Everything That Counts Can Be Counted
A Meaning Mapping essay on the trap of treating measurement as the only form of truth.
I want to tell you a story about the future.
Thousands of years from now, humanity has survived. We’ve adapted to rising seas, planetary migration, artificial intelligence, and every imaginable social and environmental upheaval. And yet, for all our advancement, something surprising has emerged.
Ninety-seven percent of the population now believes in a concept called Evol.
Evol isn’t a physical material. It can’t be isolated, measured, or directly observed. It doesn’t show up in lab results or economic reports. But 93% of people in one major study said it was very important to one of the biggest decisions of their lives. More important than lifelong commitment, companionship, children, or financial stability.
They’ll sacrifice for it. Die for it. Wars have been fought over it. Entire lives are organized around it. People write songs, novels, and movies about Evol. Teenagers obsess over it. Adults ache for it. Elderly people weep remembering it.
It has no currency, yet it’s considered priceless.
It doesn’t promise long life, and it can’t be insured, but people line up for surgeries to make themselves more worthy of it. They change careers, change cities, even change their bodies to find it.
Evol is so powerful, it has become the central myth of human existence. All without a shred of scientific proof.
Now stop.
Spell “Evol” backwards.
L-O-V-E.
That future I just described? That’s our present. The data is real: 97% of adults in one large survey said they believe in true love, and when Pew asked married adults why they got married, 93% said love was very important, outranking lifelong commitment, companionship, children, and financial stability.
The Measurability Trap
I first encountered this thought experiment a few years ago while working through a question that had been nagging me: what does it actually mean when someone says they only believe in what can be proven?
It’s a common posture. You’ve probably met the person. Maybe you are the person. Clean logic. Evidence-based living. Nothing accepted on faith. It sounds impressive, and I respect the impulse behind it. Rigor matters. Thinking clearly matters. I’m not here to argue against those things.
But L-O-V-E stops the whole project in its tracks.
Because love, by any honest accounting, is unprovable. No peer-reviewed journal has demonstrated that love has meaning. We can scan brain activity, study attachment theory, model evolutionary advantages. But none of that explains why people throw themselves in front of trains for their children, or hold hands with a dying spouse and whisper, “I’m here.”
We don’t call love a religion. But structurally, it functions like one. It provides meaning, shapes behavior, inspires sacrifice, and transcends logic. We call it “love” because that’s more comfortable. But what it really is, at bottom, is belief.
And that’s what I mean by the measurability trap: the assumption that if something can’t be quantified, it doesn’t really count. That the only things worth trusting are the things you can put a number on.
It’s a trap because we all fall into it, even when the most important parts of our lives are screaming otherwise.
When Everything Becomes a Metric
We live in a culture that has turned measurement into a kind of religion. Not the scientific kind of measurement, which is careful and humble. The cultural kind, which is anxious and totalizing.
Happiness gets an index. Relationships get a compatibility score. Your morning routine is “optimized.” Your friendships are sorted by engagement metrics. Your worth as a professional is a number on a performance review, and your worth as a human is, increasingly, a follower count.
There’s nothing wrong with measurement itself. Measurement is how we cure diseases, build bridges, and land spacecraft. The problem starts when we confuse what’s measurable with what matters. When the metric becomes the meaning.
I’ve spent a lot of my career in the tech and product world, and I can tell you: this confusion is not accidental. It’s structural. The systems we’ve built, from social media platforms to corporate performance management, are designed to track what’s trackable. Engagement. Clicks. Time on screen. Revenue per user. These are the things the machine can see. So these are the things that get optimized.
Which leaves the things the machine can’t see.
Trust between a parent and a teenager. The quiet courage it takes to show up at a job that undervalues you. The grief of losing someone you can’t replace. The moment in a conversation when someone finally feels heard.
None of that has a dashboard. None of it shows up in quarterly results. And so, slowly, almost imperceptibly, it starts to fade from our collective field of vision. Not because it’s less real. Because it’s less visible.
The Proof-Only World
Take it to the logical extreme. Imagine a world where only provable things are allowed to matter. Where nothing subjective, abstract, or unmeasurable carries any value.
In that world, no one creates art because beauty can’t be quantified. There’s no need to capture “love” through a legal marriage contract because it’s just “a biochemical state.” Human memory is disregarded because it’s unverifiable. Loyalty is irrelevant, because past actions shouldn’t weigh on future utility.
Art is replaced by entertainment, measured by how many people will pay for it. Marriage is replaced by procreation, orchestrated at the community level for maintenance purposes. Human memory is replaced by surveillance technology. Loyalty is replaced by cost-benefit analysis.
In that world, you’re not a daughter, a friend, a father, a partner. You’re a collection of cells optimized for energy exchange. A data node in a closed loop of chemical inputs and outputs. The warmth in your spouse’s hand? Just heat transfer. The gut feeling before a big decision? Neurological noise.
Would you want to live there?
No poetry. No forgiveness. No “I’m proud of you.” No traditions, no trust, no dreams. Only mechanisms. Only math.
Even the people who claim to live by logic alone would find it unbearable. Because no one can live purely by fact. We don’t want to. We were never meant to. It’s a shallow representation of our actual reality.
When rationalism tries to go solo, when it attempts to strip life down to “just the data,” it turns cold, brittle, and inhuman. It becomes less intelligent, not more, because the essence of being human isn’t just measuring things. It’s understanding them.
The Things That Hold Us Up
There’s a quote often attributed to Einstein: “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” Whether or not he actually said it, the truth stands.
Some of the most important realities in your life have never been measured with an instrument. Dignity. Courage. Trust. Loyalty. Hope. But they have shaped every major decision you’ve ever made.
I’ve been working on a framework for understanding belief, and one of the first things it revealed is this: even the most “rational” life is built on hidden foundations. Unprovable assumptions. Deep commitments to ideas we feel are true, even though they can’t be proven.
Here are a few that pop up often:
Love matters. People should be treated equally. The universe can be understood. Progress is good.
These aren’t scientific facts. They’re normative beliefs, statements about how the world ought to be, not how it objectively is. And yet most modern people hold these ideas with deep conviction, even if they wouldn’t call them “beliefs.”
Take equality. Nature doesn’t care about fairness. Survival of the fittest is not egalitarian. And yet we believe, all of us to varying degrees, that human beings deserve dignity and rights. That no life is inherently worth more than another.
Take understanding. The very foundation of science rests on the belief that the universe is orderly, that its mysteries are, in principle, knowable. But why should we believe that? The cosmos is 13.8 billion years old. We’ve been studying it for thousands of years. And we still don’t know what 95% of it is made of.
These are faith statements. Unprovable. Powerful. Essential.
The Metrics That Eat the Meaning
This isn’t just a philosophical puzzle. It has practical consequences that show up everywhere.
In education, we’ve reduced learning to test scores. The student who can fill in the right bubble gets rewarded. The student who asks the question no one expected gets told to stay on topic. We’ve made the measurable the goal, and the immeasurable (curiosity, wonder, the love of learning) has become a nice-to-have.
In healthcare, the patient is a bundle of data points. Blood pressure, BMI, lab results. All useful. All important. But the patient is also a person who’s afraid, who’s grieving, who needs someone to sit with them for five minutes and say, “I hear you.” There’s no billing code for that.
In relationships, we swipe based on algorithms. Compatibility percentages. Optimized matches. And then we wonder why connection feels so thin. Because connection isn’t a metric. It’s a mystery. It’s the thing that happens when two people show up honestly and let something unpredictable unfold.
We keep trying to measure our way to meaning. And it keeps not working.
Living With What Can’t Be Counted
I’m not suggesting we throw out measurement. Data is a gift. Science is a gift. The ability to observe, test, and refine our understanding of the physical world is one of humanity’s greatest achievements.
But I am suggesting we stop treating measurement as the ceiling. That we make room for the things that matter most precisely because they resist quantification.
This starts with honesty. With admitting that the life you’re actually living, the one that matters to you, is built on things you can’t prove. The belief that your children’s lives have value. The conviction that kindness is better than cruelty. The stubborn hope that tomorrow might be better than today.
These aren’t weaknesses. They’re the framework that holds up everything else.
You don’t have to call yourself religious to be a believer. If you love, if you hope, if you act on values you can’t fully prove, you believe. Maybe not in a deity. But in meaning. In goodness. In something more than survival.
That’s not a flaw in your thinking. That’s what makes you human.
The question isn’t whether you believe. You do. The question is whether you’ve noticed. And whether the beliefs you’re living by are actually the ones you’d choose, if you stopped long enough to look.
Not everything that counts can be counted. But the things that count the most are usually the ones we stopped trying to count long ago.
We just haven’t stopped living by them.