I hate numbers

Over last few days this thought has been lingering in my head. Have you ever wondered what on this earth prompted for people to discover numbers?.

According to me “numerals” have to be the single most dreadful discovery ever made by mankind. If I were to do a countdown of 10 most dangerous discoveries by humans, the “numbers” would top my list. You’re right, even over the most dreaded nuke.

We have this habit of assigning a number to everything, you name it and we give it a number. If someone says I am good at a particular thing, we will go ahead and ask him/her to rate him/herself on a scale of 1 to 10. I mean how does it matter, isn’t it good that he/she is happy to be good at something. what difference does a 7 or a 8 make to her. Only thing it can do, is to break the confidence levels and make them eager to get there, by hook or crook.

Its not like we want our life to be at a CMM level 4, where we want to quantitatively manager every single aspect of human existence. Still people attach measurements and a number to everything. Age, weight, height, waist size, salary, time taken to get to work, distance to the playground, years of marriage, you name it we give it a number.

How cool it would be if we didn’t have numbers, we would have no way to measure anythings, that would make us so much more happier. People would be no longer jealous of how much their colleagues make, no one would feel sad on the number of kg’s they have gained, no one will feel bad at the number of car’s in the neighbour’s shed.

No numbers, would mean, that people do not let their lives hinge on those few numbers, instead would worry about making theirs more holistic. Happiness would be happiness again, it wouldn’t be measurable. Money would be for buying things, and not for checking balances, Size would be for satisfaction and not for comparison, house would turn into homes rather than the number of sq-foots or the count of bed’s and bath’s, there would be no anniversaries but only celebrations.

Ah!, who am I kidding, we are humans, we always will find a reason and then a means to compare, if not numbers, something else it would be.