Numbers and competition

Those who have known me for a while will recall that I have long had a facility with numbers. When I was very young, it was mostly expressed in memorizing them, first lists (largest cities, longest rivers, batting averages, points per game, multiplication tables, etc.). I avoided them for a couple of decades before wending my way back to finance as a career.

COVID has given us all whole new flocks of numbers to herd, and herd them I do, though as the pandemic has worn on I've learned to manage my exposure to them, because I realized that I was susceptible to their influence, even infectible by them. So I look at them only once a day, in the evening, as part of my shutting down ritual.

But one thing I cannot escape is the tendency to use them as a mode of competition. How are blue states doing vs. red states? How is NC doing vs other states on various metrics? US vs the world (generally I'm looking for somebody else doing almost as bad as us to lessen our shame). Orange County vs. other counties and states. Generally I have to recognize that this is not healthy. I shouldn't want to be beating the rest of the world at COVID, we should all be trying to just beat the damned thing.