At NPR, Dave Pell has a great piece (“I Don’t Care if You Read This Article“) about the temptation offered by life in the Internet age — a constant stream of data, stats, responses, likes, retweets, and page views. We measure our success by a complex system of metrics.

Anyone doing work on the Internet — especially writers, bloggers, and content creators — can easily become addicted to these measurements. “I check my stats relentlessly,” Pell writes. “The sad truth is that I spend more time measuring than I spend doing.”

I used to feel an immediate sense of accomplishment when I wrote an article or came up with a joke that I thought was good. Now that feeling is always delayed until I see how the material does. How many views did my article get? Did it get mentioned the requisite number of times on Twitter and Facebook. I need to see the numbers.

And I define myself by those numbers.

I can relate. All of us can.

Pell opens with a story about dining at a restaurant with his young family, and the resulting near fork-stabbing, mid-meal, of his two year-old daughter by his four year-old son. Everyone turned out OK, glorious reconciliation occurred, and it morphed into one of those beautiful moments of love, joy, and gratitude that all parents have enjoyed out of nowhere…but which you can’t really measure. It’s an emotion, etched in memory, and immune to stats. Pell again:

And that’s one of the things I liked most about it. I experienced something. I felt it. That was it. There was nothing to measure or count or rank.

The proudest achievements in life, he writes, can’t be measured.

Good words.

Time to unplug and go have some proud achievements. Have a great weekend.