We Have Been Measuring the Wrong Miracles
How our obsession with success changed what we believe is worth becoming
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We’ve become obsessed with measuring what people accomplish, while being far less interested in measuring what they become.
We spend enormous amounts of time asking how societies become wealthier, stronger, faster, and more innovative, but we spend very little time asking whether they’re becoming better at producing people anyone would actually want to become.
We’ve been asking who won instead of asking who they became to win.
We treat success as if it describes a person, when it only describes an outcome. Outcomes can tell us what someone has accomplished. They cannot tell us who they became while persuing their goals. Achievement answers one question. Character answers another. Our mistake wasn’t admiring achievement, but mistaking it for evidence of character.
This mistake reveals something deeper about measurements themselves. Every measurement has a limit. A clock measures time. A scale measures weight. A thermometer measures temperature. None of us would expect one instrument to answer another question. Yet that is exactly what we ask success to do. We expect achievement to measure wisdom, wealth to measure worth, and recognition to measure meaning.
Every measurement pretends to be a mirror.
But that is where we make our mistake.
Because measurements do not simply observe reality.
They organize attention.
They tell people where to look.
They tell institutions what to reward.
They tell generations what to chase.
The moment something becomes measurable, it becomes vulnerable to optimization.
And humans are terrifyingly good at optimizing things.
Even things that were never worth pursuing.
The irony is that measurements usually succeed too well. They achieve exactly what we ask them to achieve. People become better at producing the numbers we reward. Systems become better at maximizing the outcomes we track. The only question we forget to ask is whether progress without purpose is still progress.
A school creates exams because it wants to measure learning.
A perfectly reasonable idea.
But once exam scores become the measurement of a school’s success, the measurement begins changing the thing it was supposed to measure. Teachers teach what appears on the exam. Students memorize what will be tested. Schools organize themselves around higher scores.
And slowly, we forget what we were trying to measure.
Not: “Did students become curious, thoughtful, capable human beings?”
But:
“Did the numbers go up?”
The strange thing is that grades usually work exactly as intended. They create clarity. They encourage effort. They make comparison possible. The problem begins when a useful measurement becomes the ultimate goal. Once a score becomes the definition of success, people naturally learn how to increase the score.
The more I think about it, the more I realize we can get used to almost anything. That’s probably our greatest strength. It’s also one of the most terrifying things about us. We get used to noise. We get used to loneliness. We get used to becoming people we once swore we’d never become.
Adaptation doesn’t ask whether something is good, but it asks whether you can keep living inside. And, most of the time, the answer is yes.
That’s what makes measurements so much more dangerous than they look. We treat measurements as if they’re cameras. As if they’re simply recording reality. They aren’t. They’re magnets. Point them at almost anything and, sooner or later, millions of people begin reorganizing their lives around it. The measurement isn’t watching the game, but it’s teaching everyone how to play it.
The deepest danger of measurement is not that it rewards the wrong things, but that it slowly convinces us there are no other things worth rewarding. A world obsessed with what can be counted eventually struggles to recognize the value of anything that cannot be reduced to a number.
It makes me wonder how many beautiful ways of being human simply never got a chance.
The crushing realization is that our civilization can erase entire possibilities without ever touching a single person. It only has to keep pointing in one direction. Follow this. Admire this. Reward that. Repeat. Slowly, every other direction begins feeling strange. Then unrealistic. Then like a life that no longer fits the world around it. One generation chooses the road. The next forgets it was ever a choice.
By then, entire ways of living, loving, raising children, growing old, and understanding one another have disappeared. Nobody destroyed them. Nobody chose to lose them. They simply stopped being imagined, and what we can no longer imagine doesn’t survive for very long.
The most frightening part is that nobody feels like the villain in this story. Everyone is simply adapting. Everyone is trying to survive. Everyone is doing what seems necessary. And somewhere inside all those reasonable choices, the most human parts of us get left behind.
Our culture doesn’t have to destroy entire versions of humanity. It only has to teach people which parts of themselves are worth showing. They learn, little by little, what gets valued and what gets ignored. Until one day they realize they became someone they were never meant to become.
And that is the part that hurts the most. We don’t only lose people when they die. Sometimes we lose them before they ever become possible.
There are people I’ll spend the rest of my life missing even though they never existed.
It feels like grief.
Real grief.
For people I’ve never met.
For people the world will never get to know.
I know how insane that sounds. For conversations nobody ever had. For acts of kindness that never happened. For entire lives that disappeared before anyone even knew they were possible. But I can’t shake it.
I miss the people our grandchildren deserved to meet. The ones who would’ve looked into their eyes instead of over their shoulders. The ones who would’ve loved them before they had done a single impressive thing.
The people I miss don’t have graves.
They’re the people our world needed most, but learned to live without.
I don’t think we only measured the wrong miracles.
I think we accidentally measured some of them out of existence.
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You know, I used to be ashamed that I only realized that I have indigenous roots in my 30s, but in retrospect, the colonial mindsets of everyone around me kept me from that realization. I feel that grief for all the beauty my family never saw about itself, its history.
This is beautiful and absolutely heartfelt!! Normally, this could’ve made me sad, but now I’m feeling that some others might feel EXACTLY like me!! In these crucial societal changes; And I think that you are right; Changing - and remembering - our most important values, as humans, is what the world needs to move forward gracefully; Outside success does not determine character; and we can’t put people we’ve never met on pedestals - no matter what the press says!! - And I think that intrinsically, each one of us is in charge of discovering the very miracles in their own lives; Whether it is in a flower, in healing something, in believing in Love* again, in trusting and having faith, and especially, never comparing someone else’s version of success to any other!! And, perhaps, that we were always conditioned this way, and we are all called to wake up together, with gentle awareness and accepting all of the support we need to call forward!! And never be ashamed of feeling lonely, afraid, and especially sensitive and different - Tganj you!!