I live an unquantified life. I don’t wear a pedometer or track my sleep, and when I learned that my top three caloric sources were red wine, hummus, and Nature’s Path Heritage Flakes, I quit logging my meals.
But no matter what, there are still machines tracking my activities. A rummage around my laptop and my browser has recently revealed a few metrics that ever-helpful services have gathered on my behalf. Okay, on their algorithms’ behalf.
These numbers made me grateful that I run a VPN to encrypt my web traffic, that I installed an adblocker to conceal the algorithms’ unsettling ability to know my every desire, and that I only check Facebook twice a week.
Some trackers run in the background of my blog, or live on my phone, like the eerie Apple Health app. But some of these numbers I found just by looking through my calendar, my e-mail programs, and my research database.
So as much as I tried to avoid quantification, here’s a rundown of some numbers, in more-or-less declining order, that reveal some qualities of how I spent my 2019:
- 312,064: Words I’ve written on my computer in apps related to teaching, research, and writing. (Stats from the unobtrusive WordCounter app for Mac.)
- 8,792: Views of this blog, by
- 6,134 unique visitors.
- 2,543: E-mails sent in 2018.
- 66: Words, on average, in each of those e-mails.
- 1,140: PDF documents added to my DEVONthink databases: articles, receipts, essays, tickets, books, statements, and scans of all kinds from my desktop scanner and iPhone app.
- 1,052: Millimetres of legroom in the Mini Cooper I bought in December. It’s stylish, fuel-efficient, and fits me like a Savile Row tailored suit.
- 641.3: Kilometres run in races and in training for the marathon I intended to do in October.
- 30: Kilometers I ran in a race on my birthday, but owing to a knee injury I stopped training shortly thereafter. On to next year, thanks to physiotherapy.
- 297: Pages of paper journals filled with musings and decisions and observations and memories for my eyes only. On topics from cognitive biases, to book collecting, to the fairer sex, to the conviviality of English pubs.
- 183: Sabbatical days, from July to December.
- 181: Students taught before those days, in English 205 (Shakespeare and Film) and 411 (Seventeenth-Century Literature).
- 41: Evening shifts behind the bar at Klein/Harris (December to August). Yes, this year I got a side hustle: my first part-time job in the hospitality industry, to learn cocktail-mixing and many other things.
- 25: Books ordered from Book Depository, because they make it easy to find UK editions, and their shipping is free. I used to congratulate myself for resisting evil conglomerates until I discovered that Amazon owned them. Oops.
- 18: Posts on this blog, including my enthusiasms for A.S. Byatt, the Oxford English Dictionary, and for VHS movies; a conference paper on my sonnet database and another on the sonnets of John Milton; musings on the sonnets of John Donne and on to my 17th-century literature course.
- 12: Orders on the aforementioned evil conglomerate: headphones, sunglasses, a queen-sized mattress, and a Fujifilm Instax Mini 9 Instant Camera in Ice Blue.
- 2: Number of books in those orders, curiously enough.
- 11: Average minutes spent each day on Instagram.
- 161: Images I posted there. Mostly of my travels, but also of books and cats and cocktails.
- 10: Weeks away from Calgary for work (Toronto, Vancouver, Victoria, Utrecht, Cambridge, Oxford) and for pleasure (Paris, Ghent, London).
- 1: Wedding MC’d for my lovely friends Greg and Sarah in Canmore.
- 1: Glorious day at the Calgary Folk Festival.
- 1: Long overdue book proposal completed and sent.
- 1: Quite satisfying SSHRC Insight Grant application submitted.
These numbers measure lots of things. But it’s everything I don’t measure that makes my life livable. Nowhere in these statistics are my books read, yoga poses practiced, kilometres cycled, films watched, people loved, or ounces stirred and shaken.
Maybe next year? Maybe not.
As William Bruce Cameron wrote (and not Mark Twain, no matter how many people on the internet say so) wrote: “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
