Feb 5, 2025–How would you live your life differently if you didn’t now what time it was?
Or what day?
Or what year?
Or how old you were?
This is not an idle question.
I don’t think we realize how much of our lives are controlled by numbers.
For some reason, humans are obsessed with assigning a number to every variable. It probably has something to do with our need for measuring and comparing. Who ran faster? Who scored more points? Which mountain is tallest?
Think about your typical day.
The alarm goes off–time to get up.
How cold is it outside? What’s the temperature?
What’s the wind speed? Can I burn trash?
Start the coffee–measure the grounds and set the timer.
Fry the eggs after setting the temperature. Set the toaster oven timer for the biscuits. Use the meat thermometer to make sure the links are cooked.
Those are all useful uses for numbers. After all, we don’t want to get trichinosis from raw pork. But what is with our obsessive need to pinpoint our place in the time-space continuum? It seems more suspect when juxtaposed with how our ancestors lived. Their sun rose, they walked out of the cave and started clubbing nutria and inventing fire.
We modern beings on the other hand need to know to the microsecond the time, the day, the date, the year, where we are in relation to our circuit around the sun and when the lunar new year begins.
Then there is the temperature, relative humidity, number of lightning strikes within a 2-mile radius.
How far can we go? Literally, I’m asking.
It’s 20 miles to town.
Our last vacation we drove 2300 miles.
Our elevation is 1700 feet.
She walked 10,000 steps yesterday.
He ran 99 yards and threw for another 150.
Sports are the most number laden. When you look at a playing field is laid out to precise parameters. There are books filled with data from every sport, from la crosse to curling. Records are listed, down to the thousandth of a second.
I can go on and on. Music is based on mathematical relationships between tones. The first exercise at any orchestra rehearsal is determining how many beats per second satisfies “allegro.”
There are two ways to look at this numbering compulsion.
First and probably the one we accept, is that our universe and very existence is ruled and defined by mathematics. Some say the secret of life is embedded deeply inside the value of pi. Every part of life can be converted into digital measurements. Artificial Intelligence is just the inevitable outcome of reducing all knowledge to binary on/off that runs our computers.
But the second conclusion is just as intriguing.
What if, I ask you, you lived your next day without recourse to numbers or any impulse to measure it? What if, for one day, you “forgot” what day it is, what time it is, how cold it is, or how old you are? Would you go about your tasks any differently? How so?
What would you sacrifice? What would you gain?
And could you explain it without using numbers?
XXX
Phil Houseal counts words for Full House PR. Contact him at phil@fullhouseproductions.net, www.FullHousePR.com.