“I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again. I woke at intervals.”
—From An American Childhood, by Annie Dillard
In May 2011, the Quantified Self community held their first international conference. The movement is based on the premise that everything we do is measurable: I am 64 inches tall, and I have lived for 7,771 days. With increased self-tracking, the logic goes, comes increased self-knowledge. Aided by online applications and wearable devices like FitBit, this community hopes to prevent illnesses, increase happiness, and know how much they have changed.
In preparation for this speech, I tried to quantify the changes I’ve seen in myself during my time here. When I began Harvard in the fall of 2010, the longest essay that I’d ever written was seven pages long. I couldn’t run for more than three miles at a time, and I could play zero instruments. In the 1,347 days I’ve spent at this university, I have written a thesis that was 130 pages long, have been able to run eight miles at a time, and have learned one instrument.
The problem with the Quantified Self perspective is that numbers alone can’t tell you much about growth—about the complicated, deeply felt, nuanced experiences that lie in between points A and B. Our stories here are not tales about linear growth, or even about initial failures overcome by subsequent success. Instead, joys and pains have been interspersed, with life shocking us at the moments we’ve least expected it.
I’ve struggled most with the forceful intrusions of Real Life—the times when we’re reminded that this academic Disneyland is still subject to all of the tragedy and fear of the real world. Sometimes we deal with this as a city or school, as we did with the attacks at the Boston Marathon. At other times, as with the suicides, accidents, sexual assaults, and mental crises that have occurred over the past four years, we deal with them in small groups on our own. At the time of those events, and in the weeks that follow them, we learn to turn away from schoolwork and turn towards each other. Our confusion, despair, and doubt knead the substance of our spirits, restructuring the reasons why we live and the way we see the world. We hold each other tighter. We learn to be better friends and scholars.
And then, thankfully, if we are lucky, we are given the time to breathe. Life slips slowly back into the beautifully mundane, and somehow our papers and meetings become important again. We move back into Harvard life, where we are told that the most valuable memories come from late-night dorm conversations and lazy dining hall brunches. I believe this. After the storms of tension and growth we need the quiet happiness of normalcy. This, if anything, is the most accurate pattern of our development here at Harvard: spans of difficulty and struggle that give way to new understanding and peace. The conflict between Real Life and Harvard Life is a false one: we need the combination of both. Serious crises make us appreciate uneventful sunlit afternoons; typical weeks are the times when we form the friendships needed to get us through serious crises. I suspect that even beyond Harvard we will find this dialectic between the terrible and the unnoticeably wonderful, between painful growth and restorative reflection. The best we can do for ourselves is to notice the wonderful, to store up rituals and sources of strength for the trials that almost certainly lie ahead. Four years at Harvard have taught me to pause in reverence and gratitude: for the late night engrossed in writing that 130 page thesis, for the view of Boston while running those 8 miles to Copley and back, for the dusks spent playing that 1 ukulele for friends by the Charles. And that is something that cannot be quantified.
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