I happened to observe a man at a café in Kathmandu yesterday. He was dressed in high-end, lightweight gear, the kind engineered for rugged trails.
He had a cup of local coffee in front of him while most of his attention seemed fixed on his watch. The waiters came and went. He was staring intensely at his wrist, while tapping his finger against a smartwatch screen. While I was sipping my coffee, I heard him say in a loud voice, “Yeah, the flight from SF to KTM was brutal, but my deep sleep score is finally back up to 82. I’m tracking my heart rate variability while I walk the stupa this afternoon to see how the altitude affects my baseline.”
I smiled. Not because I thought I was better than him. But because something in it felt familiar.
I feel I have also spent years in that exact frequency. The frequency of a mind that won’t, or perhaps can’t, stop controlling and measuring.
These days, we have normalized controlling and measuring, partly because we have the tools for it. In fact, it is socially sexy to use them.
We, as humans, go to great lengths to manage uncertainty and feel safe. One of the most recent ways to do that is thinking life is a game that can be managed. That it’s about winning and losing. And of course sports and games need stats. When we spend our life navigating numbers, interpreting them, building defenses and attacks, and trying to win, our brain develops and forms a specific architecture. It learns to treat everything, including our own existence, as a project to be managed, or rather a game to be won.
When anything feels uncertain, data becomes a form of safety. If we can track our projects, time, meetings, people, tasks, goals, and many other things, we feel productive. It feels like we are getting somewhere. And without noticing it, the same habit extends further. We start tracking our sleep, our heart rate, our steps, our moods, and many other things. Again, we feel productive. We feel like we are doing something. Like we have a handle on the chaos.
We are not necessarily trying to be self-centered; we are trying to be in control and not waste time doing nothing. Because when we do nothing, the uncertain chaos, the inner one, comes back. And it’s not new. Just the costume is new. We’ve been looking at data for certainty in different packages since probably the dawn of time. Zodiacs, tarot, astrology and such, not in a demeaning way, were like our apps, smartwatches, and smartphones. Tools and technologies for managing uncertainty and feeling safe.
It is a natural, very human instinct. Life gets unpredictable, get a dashboard.
The trouble begins when this architecture turns inward. We start trying to manage our peace the way we manage a project. We look for the hack for presence, the metric for fulfillment, and the baseline for happiness. We approach the inner world with the same frantic energy that we use to survive the outer one. Get the best travel gear, the best yoga mat, the best meditation app, the best carefully curated luxury wellness retreats and so on.
I don’t look at that man and feel bad. I genuinely don’t. I see a version of myself that, at different times, has also tried to measure and accumulate his way out of restlessness. Because we’re taught the best way to navigate a life is to control our surroundings, stay safe, and win. Not realizing that the restlessness and the need for control often grow stronger in response. Even with all the attention and awareness I can muster, I still slip up from time to time.
For me, it took a lot of attention and time, a lot of seemingly quiet, but difficult inner work, to realize what I was searching for wasn’t in the data. And also not just outside. It was in the internal surrender. Surrender to uncertainty and the absurd beauty of life. I still catch myself wanting to measure things, wanting to quantify my peace and surroundings. But I’ve learned to notice it when it happens, sit with the urge and laugh at myself instead of acting on it.
I don’t have the answers for him. Nobody does. Unless we allow them. Anyone who claims to have one is just trying to sell something. He has to figure it out on his own. I just have a quiet compassion to offer. The one he doesn’t know about. A gentle wish that he finds his own way, his own peace.