Dreamer's World April 14 2017 - Daily Prompt "Measure"

The Daily Prompt is “Measure”. Another word that attempts to describe out preoccupation and fascination with trying to quantify everything about our lives. We do these things in order to try and make sense of what goes on around us.

Even the phrase “The Measure of a Man” signifies this almost pathological desire to make sense of things in a quantifiable way. We judge a person by what they possess, how big and new is their car? If they don’t have a car it means on some level that they must not be that successful because everyone who is successful has a car, right? The same thing goes for houses and watches and clothes. We are so focused on the things that we can see precisely because we can the “measure” someone against a warped standard of some type to try and fit them into our view of the world as we see it.

“Measure” is useful in science and mathematics, but that is about it. Social sciences like to use statistics, but those can be made to lie about anything. Economics is the biggest corrupter of the word “measure” that exists because they believe that everything can be quantified, and it cannot. Businesses want to use “measure” metrics to judge performance and again I rebel against the concept. Your work and productivity are valuable in so many ways that an arbitrary system can never appreciate.

“Measure” is another one of those words that I view with suspicion because I want to know who determines what the measurements themselves will be.