Imperfect

numbers as play

Mantis' I am not normal about upvotes (or likes, or favourites) and Matt Bee's Bye, The Numbers! inspired me to write on maintaining healthy relationships with upvotes and other numbers.

I view constantly refreshing and hypothesizing about published work as a relationship to rehabilitate. Applied methods like hiding upvote counts to lower self-imposed pressure, based on a voluntary response to project performance, might help you out. I think a better solution is finding better measurements for your worth as a person than said performance. Caring about what you put effort to can be done in a healthy manner.

For how badly you can beat yourself over numbers, you can acknowledge their inherent good and accumulative nature. Attention is attention, no matter what emoji or sentiment you use to signify it. More and more upvote counters show that you continue to play the game whether they are hidden, stuck at 1, or both. If you keep the process alive, which itself is a number, you can continue to win.

I consider checking my published posts for upvotes once in a while fun. Incrementing numbers can be cool to witness, particularly when I hold no expectations that they must go up. Sometimes posts of mine, such as echo chamber thoughts, make it to the Trending page on the waves of local discourse or similar luck. Yet, most of my creations strike out and will continue to do so. Finding peace with that can be a rite of passage.

I find others' offerings to become your first reader venerable. However, you can assume the role if you don't already. With each draft, I hear myself out and accept myself before publishing. After publishing a post, I view the initial upvote a token of appreciation for having read and revised it to a good enough state, if not satisfaction. Seeing the upvote system as a mere bonus that either stays or goes up helps me be at ease with one. That, in turn, trains me to be at ease with more.

Even so, the amount or number of upvotes any of my posts get isn't all that I'm looking for. For example: let's say I could trade my total upvote count for an equal amount of emails from bloggers or readers like you. I would accept that trade offer in a heartbeat. You may consider other numbers even more worth your while such as guestbook comments, instant messages, social media replies, etc.

You don't have to stop your imagination at digital forms of communication either. There are all kinds of numbers to explore, as I hint at in numbers game:

What does it mean to play the numbers game with numbers suitable for my growth? The trustworthy connections you make, the warm love you share, and the beautiful people you help are few of many gifts I can view numerically. Their many beneficial qualities, results, and byproducts follow the same principle. The higher all those numbers go, the more resilient the subjects become.

As far as the most important number goes, that is your survival. There is immense value not only in how long you last, but how long you outlast everyone around you. Both expose you to the good and the bad, while teaching many lessons along the way. competition is cooperative with gracious competitors lending out their hand to their defeated opponents, inviting them to continue practicing and playing in perpetuity.

I think of numbers similar to phones, games, and other so-called "distractions". Once people start understanding their overall win conditions and get what they want out of life, these all transform from totems of distraction to talismans of fun. This paradigm, to me, applies to upvotes and similar mechanisms too. The outsized negative attention people give them makes me think they are that beneficial when engaged within a flourishing context. It's even better in that we don't have to worry about pitfalls from downvotes being improperly treated as dislike buttons.

At the end of the day, you hold the ultimate responsibility over your ego. The tools and numbers around you can be interfaced in ways as dynamic as the many selves within you. Harness them well.

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