Against Quantification
I'm tired of counting and logging and tracking.
Hello Internet friends!
I hope you are well & resting & feeling loved. This month, some musings on de-quantifying your life.
I’ve always been a maximalist, a collector, a lover of stuffs! But after a decade of continuous moves and little disposable income to put towards said stuffs, I felt it was time to reconnect to my maximalist roots. Earlier this year, I declared 2025 my year of physical media, and I’m proud to report that I have so far very much committed to the bit: I got myself an external disk drive to burn CDs on my laptop, bought DVDs, printed pictures and got a photo album to display them in, wrote cards and letters to friends, and made many, many collages.
This personal fascination obviously bled into my research interests, and over the past six months, I’ve kept an eye on (& written about) the physical media discourse. I built a little archive of podcast episodes, YouTube essays and other substack posts, encouraging physical media consumption and critiquing convenience culture - the economic and cultural ecosystem of endless choice and immediate availability brought about by streaming. And I get it, streaming has homogenised our tastes to the point of blandness, everything somehow is an ad and/or is designed to sell you something, and despite all the fees we pay, nothing is ever truly ours. But there’s one aspect of our conversation surrounding streaming and physical media that I feel often goes undiscussed (or under-discussed, at least). Streaming alone did not create a culture of convenience, rather, it emerged within the wider context of an already established culture of quantification. A culture in which to experience art is to consume it, and to consume is to aggregate. Everything is quantified and quantifiable: how many books I read, how many movies I watch, how many artists in my library. Even outside of culture, i’m told everything i do just a numbers game*: how many dates i go on, how many jobs i apply to, and so on. So i’m afraid simply moving back to physical media won’t quiet the voice in our mind that sees continuous consumption as the only valid form of cultural enjoyment. To effectively resist a culture of convenience we must also resist our urge to count.
These are some tactics I have developed over the last few months to escape the quantification trap inside my own mind. Tactics to enjoy things in a different way, to reconnect with culture beyond performance - my contribution to an alternative model of cultural consumption in the digital era.
(*please never say that to me ever again, i’m so tired).
1 - Borrow it from the library
Acquiring physical copies of the movies you watch is a great place to start in your de-quantification journey. Because I wanted to reduce my reliance on the Internet for entertainment, that’s where I started. Buying copies of your movies is a good option, but any opportunity I see to talk about my public library system, I’ll take it - and this is one! Maybe this is because I grew up before streaming yet after the last DVD rental place in my town closed, but going to borrow a movie from the library DVD section is one of my favourite activities. This, I found forced me to de-quantify my media habits in two key ways: intentional media consumption and un-traceability (sort of). Browsing movies at the library gives me the thrill of choice I might otherwise get from browsing available titles on streaming platforms, but in complete autonomy and knowing my borrowing habits won’t be used to compile an algorithmically driven “watch next” section. It also feels less overwhelming because I can physically see the amount of choice I have in front of me. Enough choice for a good movie pick, enough constraint for me to make said choice in a reasonable amount of time.
Once I’ve taken the DVD home, I’ve got no other choice but to watch it. There won’t be anything queued up after the credits roll. Whatever I do next is up to me. This can be replicated with other forms of media consumption of course (getting a digital copy of a movie, watching a platforms with no watch next features, movie rental, etc etc… but as I said, any opportunities to talk about my public library is one I’ll take…). I’ve also found it’s a lot easier for me to focus on a movie this way, maybe because I’ve artificially created circumstances to make my viewing exceptional? In a the same way that I am never as focused on a movie as when I go the cinema, when I borrow a title from the library, this is the one title I have for whatever time window my library has allowed for, and that does help me feel a little less overwhelmed and a bit more focused.
When streaming first emerged in the cultural landscape, it’s main selling point was (and still is) choice. Look at how many titles you could pick from! But this, to me, feels less like choice than purposeful overload: an abundance of choice relies on the quantity of media available, not any other qualities it might have. I’ve ended up with so much choice that I pick the first thing the algorithm throws at me, only to be trapped in a loop of algorithmic recommendation. Everything is a ‘because you watched’ and ‘you may also like’, one media calls to another which calls to another which calls to another in an endless loop. You could always be watching more, and I’ve realised this is part of why quantification culture makes me feel so miserable. No matter how much I do, I always feel at a loss, perpetually falling behind.
2 - No more star ratings
A friend of mine logs every movie she watches on letterbox with a single, one sentence review. Sometimes, she’ll like a movie, but never give it a star rating. And yet, her short reviews always say more than any star ratings ever could. After all, what nuance is there in a star rating that cannot be found in the written word?
Ok, I’m going to sound incredibly intense on that one, but those little five stars are a unit of measure designed for the quantification of culture, flattening and homogenising culture to be neatly compared. Moving beyond quantification is a creative necessity because it forces you to center enjoyment and experience: what do you feel and think, on your own scale, on your own time, within your own unique frame of reference? The goal is for your life to make sense to you, not for it to be legible by others. If you look at your last five stars ratings, did all these cultural products elicit the same emotional reaction in you, did they all leave the same mark on your psyche, are they all just interchangeable data points in your viewing history. No! I’ve made myself into such an anti-star rating person now but like …. Free yourself from the tyranny of standardised rating scales! Embrace chaos! Become illegible!
An alternative you may want to consider is to create your own reviewing scale. Design a completely arbitrary ranking system that only makes sense to you, and have fun with it. I like the way the Bechdel Cast and Pale Blue Pod (on their media review episodes) do it, if you want examples.
3 - Join a bookclub
Step three is to tell someone about what you just watched, read or heard. Debrief, make a voice-note, join a bookclub! The goal is to go into details about what you liked and disliked, what worked and didn't, and why, and to feel a sense of community and kinship while you do it. To engage rather than react. Recenter culture as something that is experienced, and shared rather than consumed.
I am partial to a silly little review on the apps (in moderation though) if there’s no one around, and i think doing so can be a great way to reflect on the culture you've experienced on a more personal and intimate level than logging it with no context, buuuuuut i would still invite you to journal about it instead. You create your own archive, and the thoughts you share that way are not at risk of becoming consumer data to be scrapped and analysed by marketing companies (just fyi). Plus I think this is a great way to practice having things just for yourself, and nurture that relationship too.
Other variants may include: write a letter to a friend, personally recommend something to someone you know, ask your bookseller or librarian for guidance on getting a new book. I am also personally trying to start a media journal to make more conscious notes of everything I consume, so there’s that.
4 - Make a collage
Much like physical media, junk journalling is having a moment and honestly ... i think that's good! Start a junk journal, take up scrapbooking, make a zine! Memorialise time passing, remind yourself that things happened to you and that they were good (or at least, that you were alive to experience them anyway). Junk and scraps are reminders of the small things that sparked wonder in your mind. That's worth honouring. I’ve been doing a few spreads of junk journaling in my organiser every months, and I am surprise how much I’ve enjoyed looking back at all the little disjointed collages I made.
There’s a passage in Saving Time where Jenny Odell reflects on her own experience growing up in California, a state with seemingly “no seasons.” Slowly, she comes to unpack how the place she grew up in does, in fact, have seasons, that it moves and evolves with the passing of time just like any other places would, albeit at a subtler pace. We are all always in motion, always changing. If you feel your life is at a standstill I encourage you to take up some type of collaging practice; collect the beautiful things you see and arrange them with no editorial guidelines, no attempt to make them a coherent whole or a beautiful thing. Just keep a record of all the times something moved you, the proof that you are a person in constant motion.
A variant of this is making a photo album, of which I’ve become a big defender (although I get there’s a non-insignificant cost associated). Earlier last year I printed a bunch of my photographs from 2023 through to the end of 2024. So many pictures. I printed images from my solo trip to Spain, from a girls’ trip to Arles and one to Paris, from moments across my year at St Andrews. I had just moved away from the country I had called home for over a decade and felt as if the life I had left behind had been disconnected from me, like it was a strange dream I made up a long time ago. Printing these images, arranging them in the cheap plastic sleeves of my discounted photo album, writing one sentence descriptions of each - not to be dramatic, but it was life-affirming! I had been there! I had lived a life! These beautiful things had happened to me!
Anyway, that’s all for this first six months of making my life more tangible and less quantifiable. I am genuinely curious to hear how other people might try to move beyond quantification, and I am personally going to keep building on this practice, so let me know of your own tactics and what you’d do in my place!
See you next month or whenever i feel like it,
m x