The Curse of the Perfect Score

On the strange thing that happens to an experience the moment you put a number on it.

There is a specific kind of misery that did not exist twenty years ago. You wake up, you feel fine, you reach for your phone, and a small ring-shaped god informs you that your “recovery” is 47% and your sleep was “poor.” You did not feel poor. You felt fine. You feel worse now. Congratulations — you have been graded.

I want to talk about what happens to a thing once it gets a scoreboard. Because it turns out the answer is: it stops being the thing.

The law nobody asked for

In 1975, a British economist named Charles Goodhart noticed something quietly devastating about how institutions behave. The line usually quoted is: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Set a number, attach a stake to it, and people stop pursuing the underlying goal and start pursuing the number, which are not the same thing, and sometimes point in opposite directions.

The classic examples are bureaucratic. Reward surgeons on survival rates and they decline the risky patients. Pay coders by lines written and you get verbose, terrible code. The measure was supposed to be a window onto the thing. Then everyone started polishing the window. What’s new is that Goodhart used to be a problem for organisations. Now it’s strapped to your finger while you sleep.

Your Bed as the Battleground

Sleep is possibly the worst candidate in the human body for quantification, because it is the one activity that is actively destroyed by trying. You cannot effort your way into unconsciousness. The harder you pursue it, the further it retreats, which is why “just relax” is the cruellest sentence in the English language.

So watch what happens when you give it a number. You go to bed not to sleep but to score well. You lie there at 1 a.m. doing mental math on tomorrow’s readiness. You feel a small private failure when the deep-sleep bar is short.

There’s a clinical name for this now — orthosomnia, coined in a 2017 paper to describe people whose pursuit of perfect tracked sleep was actively giving them insomnia.

The device promised to measure your rest. Instead it gave your rest a target, and the target ate the rest. Pure Goodhart. The window got so much attention nobody looked through it.

The score that ate the thing

Here’s the part that’s been rattling around my head, and it’s from my day job, not my Apple watch.

A credit score is the same trick, thirty years earlier. It was built as a proxy, a compressed guess about whether you’ll repay, assembled from your behaviour. A window onto financial trustworthiness. And the moment it acquired stakes, everyone stopped trying to be financially trustworthy and started trying to move the number. Keep the ancient credit card open even though you never use it. Don’t let utilisation cross 30%. Don’t check too often, don’t apply for too much, don’t close the old account, feed the algorithm what it wants. None of that makes you better with money. It makes you better at the score. The map peeled off the territory and started selling itself as the territory. We even have a tidy phrase for the financial-product version of orthosomnia — people optimising their credit profile while their actual cash flow quietly bleeds out.

Sleep is just arriving where credit has lived for a generation. The number was a description. The number became the goal. The goal replaced the thing it described.

The embarrassing part is that I know exactly how this works and still fall for it. One morning I woke up feeling unusually good, rested, alert, annoyingly cheerful. Then I checked my sleep app. The score was mediocre. Suddenly I found myself re-examining my own experience as if the device had access to a truth I didn’t. Maybe I wasn’t rested. Maybe I was fooling myself. It took an embarrassingly long moment to notice what had happened: I had trusted a dashboard over my own body. The metric hadn’t just measured the experience; it had overwritten it. That’s when it clicked. The score was supposed to be describing my behaviour. Instead, my behaviour had started revolving around the score. The window had become the destination.

Subscribe to Yourself, Monthly

And of course someone is selling the scoreboard.

The most reliable recurring-revenue model in consumer tech right now is fear plus affluence plus an optimisation brain. The people most anxious about decline are also the most willing to pay, monthly, to watch a dashboard of their own decline. Whoop figured this out. Oura’s subscription figured this out. But strip the gadget away and look at what’s actually being sold. Not sleep. Not health. Legibility. The product is a clean, gradeable, sharable version of your own body — your interior life rendered as a number you can have feelings about. And once a part of you is legible and graded, the natural next step is a subscription to improve the grade. Quantify, score, monetise the gap between your score and the one you want. Your body becomes a credit file you’re now invested in repairing.

So what

I’m not going to tell you to throw the ring in a drawer. (For one thing, I won’t, so it would be hypocritical, and for another, the data genuinely is useful right up until the moment it starts being your boss.)

The honest takeaway is smaller and weirder than “tracking bad.” It’s this: measuring something changes your relationship to it, always, and usually before you notice. The number arrives wearing the costume of neutral information: just data, just a mirror, and then quietly rewrites what you’re even trying to do. You set out to sleep well and end up trying to sleep legibly. You set out to be good with money and end up being good with the algorithm that watches your money.

Goodhart noticed it in central banks. It’s now on your finger, in your wallet, and, give it eighteen months, probably in whatever app is about to start scoring your conversations.

So the only question worth leaving you with is the one I can’t answer for myself: once an experience has a scoreboard, is there any way back to just having it?

If you made it this far, thank you for reading. I would tell you to sleep well, but apparently that’s between you and your wearable now.

Until next time,

Drishti

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