Art Sin Confession: Numerical Obsession

The Numbers - What Do They Mean? 

There are many sins an artist can commit. This is my first confession, and my hope is that it can aid fellow creatives by recognising these obstacles and overcoming them. Art sins are very broad and come in many shapes and forms, and can relate to any aspect of a creative career, from the art itself to managing and handling the business. They range from unhealthy mental attitudes to harmful practices. As with real sin, committing an art sin isn’t going to make you spontaneously combust into flames as red claws drag you through the crust of the earth, but rather, if unattended and untreated, they can lead to burnout and eventually land you in a creative hellscape of your own making. 

The art sin we’re confessing to and discussing today is numerical obsession. It’s compulsively measuring personal and creative success in numbers and statistics. It’s becoming blinded by digits and chasing higher digital scores; it’s a burdensome and fruitless chase. It’s a tiresome affair where your only measure of improvement and growth is entirely tied to numerical values, something which is both abstract and not real. These numbers fool us and make us believe that they are some sort of objective truth, intricately connected to our performance in life. The more likes, shares and the more numbers we can achieve, the better we are. While the most obvious might be the numbers on social media, this numerical obsession stretches far beyond the reaches of the digital. 

For me personally, it’s more tied to the amount of work completed. I think in terms of completing X amount of paintings in a set amount of time, or like these blog posts, that once I’ve written 100 of them, I will have done my work. It’s gamified, achievement hunting, which doesn’t really reflect the reality or quality of creative work. Not even mathematics and economics are entirely number-driven, but so often we believe that everything has to be counted and tallied up to give us a score on the test that is life. We want success to be measurable, so that if we sell X amount of this, write Y amount of that or have Z amount of shows, then we will have achieved what we set out to do. There may be some pros to this, and it can certainly help with discipline and staying focused, but there are also a lot of negatives to be wary of. This post will focus on the negatives and what can happen when we try to turn the prose of life into a list of meaningless numbers. 

Statistic Slavery and Obsessively Counting

We can count our days, and we want our lives to count - to really amount to something, but in reality, it’s not as simple as tallying up a score of good and bad deeds. Our days are numbered, and so is our work, but if we obsess over counting the seconds, we spend more time counting than anything else. The clock keeps ticking, and the numbers pass, and the quality of our lives is not determined by the number of things we’ve done but by which we’ve truly lived them and immersed ourselves in those experiences. Numerical obsession is dangerous because it gives us a false sense of achievement. 

Too often have I been content with having achieved numerical goals, and too often have I neglected the quality and the process of the achievement itself. What is the difference between a hundred days passed and one day lived? Isn't the smaller and more insignificant far more valuable? The value of something isn’t always more, and it isn’t always moving the beads on the abacus, which is the true potential of the tool. 

Self-imposed limitations can be a powerful thing, but they can also be a destroyer of quality and earnestness. Consider the essays of your school years. Did the page limitations imposed on you always ensure that you wrote better, that your dissection of the subject was more complete? Or did it often lead to superfluous and bloated wording, adding nothing to the conversation itself? When trying to reach numerical goals, this becomes the number one priority of the work. The quality and the substance of the writing take second place, because at the end of the day, the writing will be dismissed if it doesn’t reach a certain numerical criterion. What if there is nothing more to add? What if it’s been discussed to the lengths that the subject allows, and what if the truth in its entirety is but a short and simple sentence? Is it not an injustice to add to it? Is it not just falsehoods and deceitful trickery that are piled onto the matter? As much as we can blame this statistical slavery on external sources, ultimately it’s self-imposed, and the cage which holds us is of our own making. 

This numerical evaluation is deeply rooted in corporate and sales culture, where it represents the measured value of a section or even an employee of a company. There are always numerical goals to hit and numbers to count, to ensure that certain aspects of the operation are meeting its objectives. This, of course, isn’t always reflective of the value an employee brings to a company, and even worse, it is when we blindly adopt this philosophy into the arts. This enslavement to numerical data can cause a false sense of improvement. 

While consistency is important to improvement, I’ve found in my own work that when I only chase numbers like doing 12 paintings a year, I often concede to lesser work. I worry and fear about not doing enough, and instead of creating and painting from a place of genuine passion, I force myself to produce tangible numbers. Don’t get me wrong, you have to force yourself to do the work because listlessness is a little devil that always seeks to lead you to procrastination. However, when chasing numbers, it’s easy to think in terms of numbers rather than the quality of work. What is better, one good painting in which you’ve poured your entire soul or 100 soulless works? It’s easy to become blind and think your work is more important if there’s more of it. When it comes to numerical obsession: quantity over quality is the name of the game. Another danger is discouragement.

When you set lofty numerical goals for yourself, it’s easy to demand too much of yourself, and in order to meet those goals, you sometimes leave quality out of the equation to just hit the right number. Worse yet is if you set an unattainable number, or if you don’t even set a numerical goal. When you don’t have a numerical goal, but you chase the numbers, then higher is the only end goal, and there’s always a moving of the goalposts. This pointless chase is endless, and you’re in a constant chase for more. You end up stressing yourself regardless of how much you produce because there’s always a higher number than the one you hit. The worst kind of numerical obsession is the one without clear goals and rules, where the numbers are just aimlessly floating above your head as you try to make sense of them. Higher is always better, always more and more, never less, never dropping, dropping is the death of numbers, and the zero never becomes the hero. 

While numerical obsession is still something I struggle with in my art and creative work, there are some reminders I give myself to try and overcome this kind of statistical way of thinking about my work.

Setting the Numbers Free

There is good to gain from numbers, and keeping track isn’t always bad. It’s when we lose sight and get lost and become number-blind that we suffer the real consequences from numerical obsession, and it’s just that when it becomes a problem, when it becomes an obsession. There are three important things I remind myself of to not get too focused on numerical values.

1. Setting Reachable Goals

There’s a lot of mental anguish and torture you can cause yourself if you don’t have attainable goals, and if numbers don’t serve a purpose, they’re just pointless and endless. Setting reachable goals for yourself allows you to track your progress towards a goal, and instead of just wanting more and more, you can actually finish a task rather than thinking about how much better it would be if you would just do more. Then you can feel a sense of accomplishment for reaching that 100 hundred pages goal rather than feeling bad for not having written 200 pages.

2. Focusing on Quality over Quantity

It’s important to remember that the quantity doesn’t determine the quality of the work. If you’ve done one painting which you’re really happy with, it’s worth more than 100 paintings you didn’t enjoy making and that you’re unhappy with. I constantly have to remind myself of this, and that taking the time to do something is worth it. It’s easy to lose track of things when you’re obsessing over numbers. Instead of enjoying the process of writing this post, it’s easy to just keep track of the number of words in it. It goes for anything in life, and it’s important not to get number-blind. 

3. Removing Abstractions

This one is particularly important when it comes to digital numbers. Numbers can be very abstract things, and when they disconnect from reality, they become unrealistic and can delude us. An example I like is to try and visualise any given amount of likes/follows into a room of people. While a few hundred isn’t a lot on the internet, a room of more than a hundred people who like something you’ve done is a significant number of people. Converting a digital number into real life brings a new perspective to it.

Like writing 200 pages in Word might not seem like a lot, but bring it to reality, and it’s a book’s worth. Another important one, which is detrimental to a lot of people’s personal economy, is the abstraction of currency. It’s easy to overspend when it’s just numbers on a screen, but if you have physical cash in your wallet, you both know what you have and how much goes into what. There are many more examples of removing abstractions of numbers that make them more tangible and real.

Final Countdown

Success isn’t always measurable, and when we fall victim to numerical obsession, it can hinder our creative work and cause a great deal of mental torture. Becoming number-blind, endlessly chasing higher numbers, or closely linking our personal worth with digits is foolish and unnecessary. The good things that keeping track and counting our progress can provide are all lost to the negatives we impose on ourselves when we obsess over numbers. 

Obsessively counting how much work we’ve done isn’t always indicative of the work itself, and it’s easy for us to begin focusing on quantity over quality. Our goals become unattainable as we only strive for more likes, more follows, and to constantly outdo ourselves. It’s an eternal chasing of our own tails, and no matter how much tempo we gain, we never catch up to it. 

The numbers can give us a false sense of progress, and sometimes the artificial limitations we impose on ourselves only serve to worsen the quality of our work. When we inflate our work with nothingness to reach arbitrary goals instead of actual substance, then our work also suffers at the hands of this statistical slavery. There are things we can do, however, to not go blind in this numerical storm. Three reminders I give myself are:

1. Setting Reachable Goals
2. Focusing on Quality over Quantity
3. Removing Abstractions

These three tricks and more are all helpful in lessening the control numbers can play in our lives. It’s an art sin to be obsessed with numbers because they cause more harm than good, and that’s the way with unhealthy obsessions. This has been my first art sin confession. There will be more, but I won’t keep a number or track of them, for my own sake.