Consider the following comments on data.
We measure ourselves more carefully than ever and seem to know ourselves no better.
Every number I keep about my life is a small confession of what I am afraid to lose.
What gets counted gets cared about, and what cannot be counted slowly disappears.
A life reduced to figures is easier to track and harder to actually live.
We trust the graph of our days more than the memory of having lived them.
Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A reflective thesis is that the habit of turning my life into data has changed not just how I see myself but what I am willing to value, rewarding what can be counted and quietly starving what cannot. Open with a concrete scene, the steps tracked, the hours logged, the small thrill or anxiety of watching a number rise or fall. Then move inward to the tension: measuring myself has genuinely helped, bringing clarity to vague intentions, yet it has also taught me to mistake the metric for the meaning, to feel a walk was wasted if the app forgot to record it. A useful structural move contrasts the parts of my life that improved under measurement with the parts, friendship, wonder, rest, that withered the moment I tried to score them. Caution: avoid the simple reaction that I should throw away the numbers and trust feeling alone, since memory flatters and forgets, and the honest task is to let data inform a life without letting it quietly replace one.