The street I used to live on in Cambridge is part of a pleasant local history project. On each house's front window is a sticker saying who lived there in the late 19th century. Up and down the street are names of the residents of 1891, and occasionally the building's former function too. Apparently my cramped quarters were once a laundry.
Among the stickers the uniformity of English surnames is today striking: it is unlikely that the same can be found on a street in any major urban area in the land 132 years later.
That it is remarkable to see a full street of English surnames in an English town is in itself peculiar to have to note. When the houses were first built few could imagine the changes that were poised to crash across Pax Britannica's delicate stability in the decades to come.
One more thing that will attract the attention of passers-by on that same street, however, is the occupations of those living there in the late-Victorian era. Coopers lived next to blacksmiths lived next to brewers. They were the homes of ordinary working people, not a row of des-res locations.
Contrastingly, to buy a small terraced house on the street today you need half a million pounds at least. As recently as 1995, they were going for £75,000 (£142,000 adjusted for today's prices). They are certainly out of the reach of the kinds of people who once resided there.
This is, it is assumed, a sign of progress. After all, asset prices have ballooned so rapidly over the intervening decades that society has been numbed with the illusion of economic prosperity. The prices – accounting for inflation – have risen about 400%. Few, however, would contend that we are quadruply happy as a nation.
Fifteen of those 28 years since 1995 have seen zero growth in British workers' productivity. The supposed boom, then, is all a mirage of accounting and quantitative easing – the money machine goes 'BRRRR' as the meme says.
Yet this has, until now, proved enough. So long as we quantify economic success by the numbers of pounds in our bank accounts, we are doing just fine; as long as you already have capital, that is. The young and the poor can go swivel.
For decades, just how many times have we heard that the soul of the UK is worth a few decimal places' worth of economic growth each quarter, and that the contribution of each new soul brought into the country is measured by their addition to GDP alone?
Of course this soulless quantification has not marred our view of simply the economy.
Instead of love, people talk about body counts: the higher the number, the 'better' you have done, despite the evident harms that such a lifestyle can bring. Instead of thinking of what they eat, people are duped into simple calorie counting (for those in doubt, who contends that 100 calories of high fructose corn syrup and 100 calories derived from fresh fruit are one and the same?).
No doubt it is hardly an original observation to note that everything is now digitised, quantified and commodified. Nor is it to say that numbers don't matter. Clearly, for each clinical trial or precise engineering equation they matter perhaps above all else. Yet, as with all things it has its limit. Take, for example, the madness of Covid: a period where numbers were plastered everywhere with little context. Certain figures took on god-like important: the r-number, deaths and vaccination rates.
Those things less quantifiable – our freedom and our mental well-being was so easily cast aside in favour of these false gods. If there isn't a yardstick to measure it by, can it even be said to exist in the eyes of policymakers? Indeterminate harm which may take decades to fully form is no match for hyper-sensationalised statistics of the here and now.
Data will continue to conquer the world, step by step. The power, money and influence it bequeaths will ensure so.
Yet the desire to quantify life is a reflection of man's desire for autonomy. The fitness watch that records each heartbeat and every calorie burnt lends the wearer a sense of control. This has been the spirit behind much human discovery: what was once considered to be in a realm outside of human control has been brought into the sphere of the known.
Unfortunately life's randomness cannot be factored in totally. For every fit-freak there is the chance of a bolt of lightning, or of a rogue tree branch coming hurtling groundwards right in the middle of what promised to be this month's personal best effort. Even a FitBit can't predict that, although an actuary somewhere has probably tried to factor it in somewhere along the line.
What the spirit of man has forgotten is the omnipresence and desirability of things outside of our control. This was a major factor in the society-wide bedwetting witnessed during Covid: having been sold a lie of total mastery, people suddenly found themselves confused and vulnerable.
Much would be alleviated by focusing on the unquantifiable and life-affirming. Family, religion, hobbies all nourish the soul and are sapped by endeavours to turn into raw figures: bizarre and strangely inhuman would be the chap who tries to quantify his love for his children.
Today, we are isolated and quantified, emitting data like water from a dog shaking itself dry. We have the illusion of control, and of prosperity. But given our fall into neuroses of every seeming sort, I find it hard to believe that we are much the happier because of it.
Not that I'd choose to swap with the residents of that street in 1891; they had their own problems to bear and decades of global war around the corner. Let's hope we are more fortunate than they were.
What those people in 1891 had was less expectation inasmuch as they didn't have a measure of happiness or personal achievement that they measured against people they didn't know but were expected to ape. In 1891 your blacksmith knew who he was, what he did and what he expected from his life within the boundaries of his life - he didn't wonder whether he was a woman or whether he was practising the wrong religion or whether his job was emitting climate changing pollutants or whether his children were gay or depressed or autistic. Consequently he could live more in the moment, especially as he could catch a nasty proper virus and die at any moment! So his problems were realistic and related to what was around him - break his arm at work and his kids would go hungry, take a day off work to go to the seaside and lose a day's pay. A totally more "real" sort of stress I feel.
We seem to be confined within a topsy turvy looking glass world: hitherto accepted and acceptable norms and boundaries abolished and censured: national borders, biological and sexual differences, rational debate, freedom of thought ,speech and beliefs and convictions consigned to the woke lost and found, to be replaced by obligatory and superficial symbols and postures: masks, rainbow flags, PRIDE badges, Ukrainian flags, noisy diktats about climate change and the green dystopia which awaits us, open borders, hashtags, sexploitation of young children as ideology and frankly repellent indoctrination replace education as we used to know it, a growing list of unacceptable phobias.
Will we ever regain sanity, maturity, decency, wisdom and accountability, or will we just sink into the commodified tech world and stop thinking?