Don't Get Lost in the Numbers

I hate math. In high school, I treated integrals like a personal enemy and logarithms like they had wronged me in a past life. My greatest academic achievement was escaping college math altogether by coming to Amherst College for the open curriculum, a triumph I still think about when I’m lying awake at 3 a.m. trying to remember whether I set alarm number eight, number nine, or that rogue number eleven that only goes off on Tuesdays for reasons I will never know the answer to. Ironically, my favorite teacher in high school was my AP Calculus BC and AP Physics 1 teacher, my GOAT, Mr. Kanuga — whom I honor daily in the 15 minutes between my alarms every morning by having extremely vivid recurring nightmares in which I fail one of his extremely difficult exams for the fourth time (unfortunately, this was just my reality back then, I was bad at math; what can I say?).

But despite my lifelong resistance to numbers — despite the 2,647 unread emails I refuse to acknowledge and the six hours of daily screen time I absolutely pretend is two — they show up everywhere in my life. It turns out you don’t need to like math to be governed by it. You don’t even need to understand it. You just have to live in a world that believes nothing is real until it can be quantified, preferably in a color-coded bar graph. And it’s not just me doing the counting. I’m being counted constantly by everything ever. My phone monitors my screen time. My watch tracks my sleep cycles (last Tuesday, I went to bed at 5 a.m. and only got 5.45 hours of sleep … I do not recommend). Moodle tabulates my grades with the coldness of a medieval scribe (I am scared this semester especially with the attention to grade inflation). My bank app judges me silently with a balance of $37 and 48 cents — the 48 cents somehow more insulting (email me for my Venmo which you can find by Googling The Amherst Student masthead and scrolling down to my role). Fitness apps applaud me for walking to Val and back like I’m a Victorian child escaping a chimney (I made my Apple watch fitness goal really small so I can get some easy gratification … highly recommend). Even Spotify Wrapped reduces my entire emotional landscape (it is quite tempestuous) to 51,608 minutes of sad songs from the same 57 hour long depressing playlist, though lately I’ve been listening to French funk pop and rock of the 2020s (ask me for recs).

If my personal life is ruled by numbers, Amherst takes that impulse and institutionalizes it. Here, everything has a statistic. The school has about 1,914 students, a number so small it feels like we could all fit into one particularly insane group chat where 600 people have notifications muted (i.e., the Outing Club GroupMe). Amherst was founded in 1821, which is impressive until you remember that in 1821 people thought leeches were cutting-edge medical technology. And we have exactly one dining hall, a fact that becomes dystopian the moment the line hits a 15-minute wait and everyone collectively loses the will to live. My walk to Val is seven minutes — five if I’m late, four if I’m embarrassingly late and pretending I’m not, three if there’s a good dinner and I jaywalk across the intersection that takes roughly five minutes to turn to the walk sign.

And then, of course, there’s the school’s price tag: $92,000 a year. A number so astronomically large. Every time I see it, I feel like I should scream, cross myself, and throw my laptop across the room like it’s possessed. But Amherst’s obsession with numbers doesn’t stop at tuition. The entire campus is a miniature economy of measurement — GPAs, credit hours, course caps, class averages, National rankings, endowment growth, acceptance rates calculated to the third decimal place, as though admissions were a chemistry experiment. Even our happiness is quietly tallied through “anonymous” wellness surveys that feel like BuzzFeed quizzes for your mental stability: “Pick a muffin flavor and we’ll tell you what percentage burned out you are!” (Hint: it’s 100%).

In theory, a liberal arts education is supposed to expand your mind, deepen your thinking, open your world. In practice, it becomes a conveyor belt of quantifiable achievement. You don’t just learn — you accumulate: Points, credits, badges, résumé items, LinkedIn-appropriate verbs. The irony is that Amherst celebrates “critical thinking” with evangelical enthusiasm, but students are still reduced to the same metrics the school claims to transcend. Before we ever step on campus, we’re distilled into SAT scores, AP numbers, acceptance probabilities, and whatever dark magic College Board uses to determine “readiness.” Once we arrive, we transform into 7-digit student IDs, library barcodes, and GPA decimals. In a place that works so hard to convince us that we are more than numbers, it’s striking how often we are asked to prove ourselves with numbers. It’s the college equivalent of being told you’re special, unique, one-of-a-kind — and then being ranked against a generation of other people who were also told they were special, unique, and one-of-a-kind.

Leave the Amherst bubble and the numbers don’t disappear — they just get bigger and somehow more absurd. The U.S. is a country practically held together by numbers: 50 states, one president, 100 senators, 435 representatives, nine Supreme Court justices deciding the fate of 330 million people, and one population that collectively pretends to understand how any of this works. A nation where the math never quite ‘maths.’ We have a federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, unchanged for 15 years, as if time itself shrugged and said, “Eh, let them eat ramen.” We have 2 million people incarcerated — the highest number in the world — and, somehow, over 400 million guns floating around like party favors from a Fourth of July no one RSVP-ed to. 47 people were executed in 2025, the highest number in 16 years. Take presidents. We’ve had 45 of them. Out of those: 44 white men. One Black man. Zero universal healthcare system in the U.S. 

Zoom out far enough, and my life’s tiny census — three reusable water bottles (unsure how I have so many), three types of green tea in Val, 11 unread texts, one scratch on my phone screen, four steps from bed to desk — dissolves into a planet-sized spreadsheet. There are eight billion people alive right now, a number so large it barely feels real. Seven hundred million of them live in extreme poverty. 2.2 billion don’t have access to safe drinking water. Since April 2023, 8.6 million people have been displaced internally in Sudan. Possibly one million Uyghurs have been imprisoned and tortured by the People’s Republic of China. 

These numbers are so big they don’t make an impact on you. They exceed the limits of imagination. Your brain can picture one person. Maybe ten. Maybe even a hundred if you really try — in Lipton Lecture Hall, a packed Val at lunch. But millions? Billions? The mind has nowhere to put them. If I told you to picture a million grains of rice, you couldn’t. You might imagine a bowl, maybe a sack, maybe a Costco-level catastrophe of grains spilling across a warehouse floor — but you would still just be picturing “a lot,” not one million distinct grains. At some point, quantity collapses into abstraction. The individual units blur into texture. And when people are reduced to a texture, empathy has nothing solid to latch onto. The number exists, you register it, maybe you even shake your head at it, but it never sets in. It doesn’t sit heavy in your chest. It doesn’t interrupt your afternoon. It dissolves into scale before it has the chance to become grief.

And yet, the world keeps counting. Scientists warn of a projected 3°C rise in global temperature by 2100 if we keep going as we are — a number that sounds nearly insignificant until you remember it translates to disappearing coastlines, collapsing food systems, and entire regions becoming uninhabitable. But because it’s expressed in neat digits and degrees, it reads like a textbook footnote instead of a full-blown apocalypse we’re sprinting toward while scrolling on our phones.

But the problem with global numbers isn’t just their size — it’s the numbness they create. Statistics this large flatten edges, blunt urgency, drain emotion. “700 million people in poverty” doesn’t show a parent skipping meals so their child can eat. “2.2 billion without clean water” doesn’t convey illness, lost opportunities, or hope shriveling “1.5 million displaced” doesn’t capture mothers carrying babies across deserts, families ripped from homes, entire lives reduced to coordinates on a map. “At least 73,000 Palestinians killed” doesn’t reveal names, dreams, birthdays, favorite foods — just a line in a spreadsheet that fits neatly between the number of squirrels I saw yesterday and the cost of an iced chai latte at Share Roasters. When numbers get too big, they stop sounding like people — they start sounding like a game, a spreadsheet, a statistics project nobody signed up for. And yet, somehow, we’re all expected to care.

I’m measuring my life in teaspoons while the world burns the kitchen down. I’m counting lip balms and lost library books while governments debate whether millions of lives lost to war, famine, and displacement count as a “humanitarian crisis” or an “expected projection.” I’m tracking my 10,000 steps while millions walk for water. My spreadsheet of triviality makes me feel like the punchline of some joke.

Numbers let us pretend the system is rational. They imply fairness where there is none. They’re neat, comforting, and spectacularly misleading. The deeper you stare at our planet’s math, the less it makes sense. There is an extreme danger of treating human lives like data points: The scale becomes so vast that empathy can’t keep up. The more zeros we add, the less we seem able to feel. And yet these numbers are not abstractions — they’re evidence. Evidence of suffering, of injustice, of systems failing on a planetary level. Evidence that the world’s math has never been neutral. It’s easy to lose yourself in the counting, to let the enormity of it all turn into background noise. But behind every global statistic is a story, a face, a life. And at some point, we have to remember that numbers don’t just measure the world. They just hide it.

The truth is, numbers aren’t going anywhere. And the point isn’t to reject numbers. A number can tell you how many. But it can’t tell you who. It can measure scale, but it can’t measure significance. It can calculate loss, but it cannot account for absence — the empty chair, the unanswered text, the silence where a voice used to be. If we’re not careful, we start to believe that what cannot be quantified does not count. Kindness doesn’t fit on a resume. Grief isn’t attached to a death toll. Hope that doesn’t show up in quarterly growth.

I still hate math (I panic about tipping … don’t bully me). But I’m trying to remember that noticing is a form of counting too. That attention is its own arithmetic. That saying someone’s name, learning their story, refusing to scroll past — that is a kind of resistance against the spreadsheet. Numbers may structure the world, but they don’t get to define its meaning. And if I’m going to live in a life that keeps counting me, then the least I can do is count carefully in return. Not just the steps and the dollars and the degrees, but the faces and the moments and the things that don’t fit neatly into a cell. Because what matters most has never really added up.