When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

– Charles Goodhart

Gross Domestic Product, that acronym splashes across headlines and economic reports, promises to capture “how well we‘re doing” as a society. A surge in the numbers? Boom times. A dip? Recessionary gloom. For most of my life, I’ve treated it like an infallible compass: bigger GDP means progress, prosperity, a world tilting toward the better. But the more I dig into it, the more it reveals itself as a relic from a bygone era—invented in the 1930s for wartime budgeting by Simon Kuznets, who himself cautioned against using it as a blanket measure of welfare. It’s a ledger of transactions, blind to sustainability or human thriving, and its perversities are glaring once you look.

GDP counts rebuilding after a flood as growth, summing the repairs while ignoring the devastation that sparked it. It boosts the economy through media, movers, and separate households, even as lives unravel emotionally. Planned obsolescence in consumer goods like phones that break just in time for the next model fueling a cycle of replacement we hail as innovation, but it’s really a vote for waste over wisdom. And don’t get me started on healthcare! Sicker people rack up bigger bills, registering as “prosperity” while well-being suffers. These aren’t glitches; they’re the system’s design, rewarding activity over endurance, destruction over care. Goodhart’s Law nails it: when a measure becomes the target, it distorts everything around it. We’ve optimized our world for throughput, not depth, and the results are a society that’s richer on paper but fracturing underneath.

This economic blind spot mirrors the personal metrics I’ve been chasing outcomes as the holy grail of a meaningful life. Promotions, productivity scores, social media likes, fitness trackers: they’re all mini-GDPs for the individual, quantifying hustle into validation. I’ve played the game hard, structuring my days around deliverables and deadlines, convinced that stacking wins would lead to fulfillment. A “good quarter” in my career meant more output, bigger networks, quantifiable gains. But here’s the reckoning: these metrics don’t make sense when I zoom out to what truly matters. They erase the unpriced abundance; the free flow of ideas, the quiet efficiencies of repair, the regenerative acts that don’t generate receipts. In an age of AI democratizing knowledge, turning expertise from scarce to shared, GDP (and my personal scorecards) would read that as loss: sectors shrinking, “jobs” vanishing. Yet it’s liberation; freeing us from drudgery to chase what sustains the spirit.

This realization forced a deep self-audit, one that’s upended how I see my own path. For years, I’ve optimized for outcomes, letting them eclipse meaning at every turn. I’d grind through 60-hour weeks, celebrating the close of a project like a GDP spike, only to crash into evenings of exhaustion where connection felt like another task. Relationships? Hahhahahaha. Creativity? Bottled into content pipelines for visibility, not the joy of unhurried exploration. I’ve watched friends dissolve partnerships, their “economic activity” surging with solo apartments and therapy tabs, while the real cost; a shared history frayed; goes unacknowledged. In my own life, impulse buys on gadgets promised upgrades but delivered disposability but starved soul-deep conversations. The data echoes this inner ache: a friendship recession where fewer people have close confidants, mental health struggles climbing despite material plenty, birth rates falling not from want but from a pervasive emptiness. These aren’t just stats; they’re symptoms of a metric that equates motion with mattering.

As I tinkered with old tools instead of buying new ones, rediscovering satisfaction in stewardship, meaning didn’t tally neatly but it nourished. Outcomes had me chasing scarcity: more, faster, higher. Meaning invites abundance: presence, repair, wonder. Traditional metrics? They look nonsensical now, like trying to measure a symphony by decibels alone.

So I’m reorienting, building a private dashboard for what heals rather than what sells. Not hours billed or likes accrued, but moments of genuine attunement: Did I listen without planning my reply? Extend care without tallying reciprocity? Create for the spark, not the share? It’s modest, these stubborn counters of depth over deliverables, resonance over results but they’re a rebellion against a world wired for the wrong wins. Broader change? Daunting, from overhauling economic indicators to rethinking AI’s role in amplifying human potential. But personally, it’s immediate freedom: flying by an inner compass that honors the unmeasurable.

In this shift, a quiet conviction grows: prioritizing meaning doesn’t diminish outcomes; it redefines them on terms that endure. If enough of us choose this, the collective metrics might finally catch up.

What are you optimizing for today?