Carousel

My team at work had a nice picnic Friday afternoon in Menlo Park. Like any good company picnic, this one featured a series of friendly competitions, one of which was a hula hooping contest (no, I did not participate).

An engineer on the team started playing around with one of the hula hoops lying around and was suddenly reminded of that classic Tiger Electronics toy, Skip-It, which you might fairly regard as an odd combination of a hula hoop and a jumprope.

I never had a Skip-It — there is little question that it was targeted almost exclusively to girls — but I remember the commercial very vividly (and was reminded of it recently when it was featured by Once Upon a Win, one of my favorite sites on the web).

The clinching couplet in this ad comes about halfway through:

But the very best thing of all
There’s a counter on this ball!

I can’t help but be struck by this sentiment. A kid could have hours of fun just playing around with this thing, sharing it with his friends, getting some exercise all the while, but the best thing about it is that it counts how many times you’ve skipped it? Really? Can you imagine if someone sold a tennis racket and claimed that the “best thing of all” about it was that it counted how many times you’d swung it? Or a pen whose primary selling point was that it showed you how many words you’d written?

Perhaps these pitches wouldn’t work very well, but the truth is that we do have an insatiable obsession with measurement. Everything these days has to have a number on it, a trend that appears ever-escalating. How many of us, for example, now assess a Facebook profile by glancing at the friend count on the left side of the screen? What kinds of judgments do we make based on this number?

This isn’t just about competition with others — after all, the ad does say that we should “try to beat [our own] very best score” — though that’s certainly part of it. What’s really going on here, I think, is that mathematics has become only the latest in a long line of tools we humans use to reassure ourselves that we are, in fact, real, and we do, in fact, matter — a weapon, if you will, against our collective existential dread. It seems that we find our possessions, our dreams, even our relationships somehow less tangible if we can’t measure them, can’t put a number on them that expresses their value. Our self-worth, and by extension the worth of everything in our lives, is inextricably tied to our ability to identify metrics we can use to calculate that worth.

Marketers have long understood this subtle truth about the human psyche. What’s especially fascinating is that Madison Avenue has managed to make us believe in the sublime expressiveness of numbers that we don’t even understand. The horsepower of a car’s engine, the clock speed of a computer’s processor, the number of grams of fat in your favorite cookie — these are all numbers which we’ve been conditioned to believe are the be-all, end-all of these products, even though only a tiny fraction of us have the knowledge required to evaluate these numbers intelligently, let alone place them in the context of all these products’ other important  attributes. Yet our desperate yearning for the quantifiable, the concrete, makes us willing dupes in this unending, multibillion-dollar confidence game.

I don’t believe this was always true, nor do I believe it is equally true in all cultures today. There is something uniquely American about the cold tyranny of the mathematical; I’m no expert on global marketing practices, but I have a feeling that there are many parts of the world where numbers are not such a central aspect of successful advertising. Meanwhile, there is something uniquely modern about the unbridled hubris that has us convinced that anything that matters, we can quantify, a sentiment I doubt was broadly considered before the twentieth century.

On the other hand, many of the world’s biggest advertisers seem happy to ignore this phenomenon. Have you ever seen a single number in an ad by Nike (besides this one, which hardly counts)? Coca-Cola? General Electric? Apple?

My guess is that, if you asked the CMO at any of these companies, they’d tell you that, yes, advertising that emphasizes the measurable attributes of a product is very effective, but only because it exploits a base human instinct, a visceral fear that if you can’t count it, it might not be real. Truly successful brand advertising cannot afford to stoop to this level, which is marred by bogus statistics, exaggerated claims, and the unabashed hucksterism of an industry whose worst nightmare is that you will break free from your stupefying slavery to the almighty Number. It must instead appeal to a higher sensibility: the desire not just to be more, but to be better. Not just to have something, but to mean something.

Perhaps the conclusion I’m driving toward is that the Skip-It, childhood nostalgia aside, wasn’t really that great a toy after all. Or at least they should have come up with a better jingle.

A piece of thrice-folded notebook paper fell on the cafeteria table, next to my Arctic Zone lunchbox. I saw nothing on it but my name, written in a way I’d never seen it before; that is, written in the unmistakable penmanship of a middle-school girl, complete with one of those curvy accents with two short lines across its midpoint (come on, you know what I’m talking about).

I looked up. The mysterious delivery was from Kellie, the girl in my world history class who, as far as I could recall, had never really talked to me, except for one slightly awkward conversation about Frosted Cheerios.

Kellie was pretty, cute-despite-her-braces-and-glasses in that way that only a sixth grader can be. I watched, nonplussed, as she sashayed her way between the chairs back to her table, her friend dutifully looking on. She tucked her shoulder-length brown hair behind her ear and smiled at me. We said nothing.

The cries of adolescent glee began, as my friends around the table realized what they were witnessing. I picked up the note and slowly unfolded it, stealing another glance in Kellie’s direction and honestly having no clue what I should expect to find; after all, it was the first (and ultimately the only) note I’d ever gotten from a girl. The others began to crowd around behind me.

I’m certain that I read the whole thing, but I unfortunately recall almost none of the content, save for one question:

“How can you worship your idols?”

As I wondered, unprepared for this turn of events, how to interpret the hotness in my neck and ears, my friend Drew began to crow, snatching the letter from my fingers and racing to the front of the cafeteria. He accosted Mrs. Hery, the administrator on duty, with the energy of a boy who clearly couldn’t wait to finally see someone else get in trouble. She took the note from him, read a few lines, and began walking toward our table.

I squirmed in my seat as she approached; I did not like the idea of being involved in a conversation with a dean of students. Mrs. Hery smiled at me and explained that I should just tell people, “hey! I’m fine with what you believe, and I’m fine with what I believe!” Still feeling blitzed, I nodded and said “okay” a few times. She left, and we quickly returned to our routine, chatting about whatever nonsense we thought was hilarious and important at the time. I don’t remember giving what had happened a second thought that day, and I don’t remember these events ever coming up in conversation again.

I have no idea what Mrs. Hery did, if anything, after talking to me — I wonder if she said anything to Kellie, or if she just dropped it — but I’ve always regretted deeply that I didn’t take control of this situation. The response I’ve often daydreamed about would have been to walk over to her table, tear up the note, and drop the pieces in front of her. Even a stern rebuke or a mere honest conversation would be more satisfying in retrospect than my utter inaction.

On the other hand, this was, in some sense, only the most extreme example of a seemingly endless line of challenges to my beliefs during my middle school years. I can’t tell you how many times I was asked to defend a religion I wasn’t even sure I believed in, simply because I was its lone representative in the room. The questions were neverending:
“Why are you vegetarian?”
“Why does your mom have a red dot on her head?”
“Do you think I’m going to come back as a cockroach?”
“If I sneak this pepperoni into your pizza and you eat it, will you come back as a cockroach?”

I of course found it tiresome to deal with these often puerile discussions, but at least people were asking the questions. What made Kellie’s note so frustrating, looking back, was that she had never made even a cursory attempt to learn about my background or my beliefs; she instead preferred to engage in drive-by missionary work, passing judgment without comprehension or even investigation.

(As an aside, I’ve been meaning to write about this for some time, but I was reminded again by a YouTube video that’s making the rounds; it’s obviously staged, but it’s unsettling nonetheless.)

On balance, though, I’m actually glad to have had these experiences. Unchallenged beliefs rarely carry as much weight as those we’ve been asked to explain, and although I wouldn’t call myself particularly religious today, I’d argue that these conversations during my formative years actually made me more attuned to my own culture than I might have been had I eaten lunch in a school cafeteria full of Hindus.

I still can’t help wondering, though, what kind of person Kellie (whom I’m obviously not in touch with) grew up to be. Is she a truly good Christian, or did her adolescent zeal become adult zealotry?

I suppose I’ll never know.