“Grown-ups love figures… When you tell them you’ve made a new friend they never ask you any questions about essential matters. They never say to you “What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies? ” Instead they demand “How old is he? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father make? ” Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him.”  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

This quote from The Little Prince made me pause for a moment. I spent at least five minutes sitting quietly and reflecting instead of turning the page and continuing to read. Somehow, sentences arranged on a page often provoke deeper reflection in me than direct advice from friends (perhaps because I can be rather stubborn).

Yet in today’s world, everything seems to be measured. From daily steps and running pace to menstrual cycles, almost every aspect of life now comes with an app designed to track it. Everyday life has gradually transformed into a routine of self-monitoring. The reasons vary: we want to be cautious, stay informed, improve ourselves, or perhaps simply follow the trend of self-quantification. Whatever the reason, this obsession with measuring ourselves reveals something deeper, the extent of our desire to control life. Even things that have not happened yet are things we wish to know in advance.

Self-Quantification and Data Fetishism

Self-quantification is a term that emerged in 2007. It refers to an individual’s interest in the automated collection of personal data. The concept is closely associated with ideas such as self-surveillance, life-logging, and self-measurement. Although these terms have slightly different emphases, they all refer to the practice of collecting, recording, and analyzing data about oneself through digital technologies.

The logic of self-quantification offers a way to transform the complexity and uncertainty of life into the authority of numerical data. The practice has grown significantly, supported by an international Quantified Self community consisting of more than 100 groups across 30 countries and involving approximately 20,000 participants. Founded by Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly, the movement introduced the idea of viewing data as a mirror. Through this lens, self-tracking becomes a tool for self-exploration, reflection, learning, and personal insight. Many participants collect data to improve their sleep quality, mood, health, or other aspects of their lives.

Despite these positive intentions, self-quantification remains inherently reductionist. It simplifies complex human experiences into numbers.

Today, various digital devices and platforms have made data tracking an inseparable part of everyday life. Applications make it easy to count steps, monitor heart rates, measure sleep duration, evaluate productivity, and record consumption habits. These data points are constantly reviewed, creating a cycle in which life itself seems to revolve around measurement. Quantification, graphs, spreadsheets, and metrics are often regarded as objective instruments that do not lie. Their emotional neutrality and mathematical precision are believed to reveal patterns that are clearer, more understandable, and ultimately more manageable. As a result, numbers acquire a special epistemological status, they are treated as a privileged pathway to truth.

The more trust people place in numbers, the less they tend to trust subjective knowledge, bodily intuition, and personal experience. Human life becomes reduced to streams of silent data. At the same time, the mechanisms behind tracking applications often go unquestioned. While we may be able to monitor countless variables, the relationships between them are rarely simple enough to be captured by algorithms alone. More importantly, every act of self-tracking also provides valuable information to the platforms that collect our data. In many ways, we grant others unprecedented access to our everyday routines.

There is a popular saying that “data is the new oil,” reflecting how social interactions increasingly depend on data as a form of exchange. More recently, the term data fetishism has emerged to describe the tendency to treat data as a complete and objective representation of reality. Numbers generated by applications come to be seen as the most accurate reflection of who we are, even though reality is far more complex than what numbers can capture.

What Is Lost When Life Is Understood Through Numbers?

Recently, I met someone who keeps meticulous records of nearly every aspect of his life. He tracks his finances, sleep, work, leisure activities, and social interactions, transforming them into charts and calculations that ultimately estimate how much time he has left to live. Based on his calculations, if his life expectancy is fifty-five years, then he can estimate exactly how many years, months, and days of productive life remain.

According to him, mathematical calculations help him evaluate his life. They allow him to identify activities that consume too much time, determine what should be abandoned, and decide which sacrifices are necessary to achieve a particular level of productivity in pursuit of his dreams.

Looking at his records made me wonder: can life really be understood in its entirety through numbers?

There is no denying that numbers help us see things more clearly and systematically. Yet when life is translated into numerical values, something slowly disappears, the ability to experience and interpret life more deeply.

Life is vast, like a constellation of stars scattered across the universe, filled with endless possibilities. There are conversations that transform the way we see the world, unexpected encounters that alter our paths, and both victories and failures that help us grow. Numbers cannot fully capture the nervous excitement of a first date. They cannot represent the warmth of a mother’s embrace after we lose a competition. They cannot describe the feeling of morning sunlight on a day when we are finally free from obligations. None of these experiences are really about data, metrics, or the ideals of productivity that have been drilled into us since childhood.

I have come to realize that feeling truly alive often emerges through shared experiences: embracing one another, gazing at a blue sky together, or discussing the mysteries of the universe. Perhaps this is where our obsession with numbers goes wrong. Numbers can help us count, compare, and measure, but they can never fully capture meaning.

As The Little Prince suggests, adults are often eager to know a person’s age, income, or achievements, yet they forget to ask the questions that make someone human: What makes them laugh? What do they dream about? What color of sky do they love most?

In the end, life is not a project to be endlessly optimized. It is an experience to be lived. What makes life meaningful is not how much data we manage to collect about ourselves, but how deeply we are present in the moments we experience.