There’s a popular productivity mantra: “What gets measured gets managed.” Simple, powerful, and wildly misused in today’s world.
You see it everywhere. Want to manage your expenses? Measure every rupee. Want to lose weight? Count every damn calorie (and then hate yourself for that one samosa). Want to declutter your home? Measure your belongings—and realise you somehow own four can openers and the emotional weight of three hundred Tupperware lids without boxes.
But in today’s tech-fueled world, there’s a dangerous cousin of this principle sneaking around:
“What can be measured, will be managed.”
And oh boy, are we managing the hell out of everything.
Let me take you back to my FM Radio days—nostalgia alert. There was once a beautiful, noble creature called a Music Manager. Their whole job was to listen—yes, with actual ears—to every new song, and then decide where it belonged in the sonic universe of a radio station. Is it a peppy number for rush hour? Or a soulful melody for late-night drives? You’d listen, assess its energy, vibe, emotion—feel the song before you file it.
The software back then had the IQ of a garden brick. If you accidentally tagged a lullaby as a party anthem, it would proudly throw that song between Honey Singh and Daler Mehndi like it belonged there. It didn’t. And we all cringed.
But at least someone was listening.
Cut to now: nobody downloads MP3s anymore. Streaming apps measure everything—your mood, your location, your sleeping pattern, and probably the last thing you ate—and decide what you should listen to. There’s no music manager. There’s only data. The algorithm doesn’t listen; it calculates.
Creativity, once a wild, unpredictable forest, has now been fenced into perfectly shaped data gardens.
We’ve come to a point where music is being made to fit the measurement.
1.5 minutes gets more streams? Cool, no more 5-minute ballads.
Female voices getting better traction right now? Great, let’s tweak the story to need a female voice, even if it makes no emotional sense.
Got a catchy hook? Loop it and kill the soul. Numbers, baby. Not nuance.
And in this process, the listener—you, me, all of us—has stopped knowing what we even like. We’re just… consuming.
One byte at a time. (Pun? Hell yeah.)
See, when I personally hate mangoes. (Yes, I said it.) But you serve me mango just because the world has declared it the king of fruits, I’m still going to say nope.
And that’s the problem today—we’re being served mangoes because the algorithm says mango is popular. But no one ever asked you if you liked mango in the first place.
So, the next time you binge-watch, auto-play, stream, scroll, or listen to “top recommendations,” pause for a moment. Ask yourself—
Is this really me? Or is this what the world thinks I should like?
Because what gets measured, gets managed.
But sometimes, what matters can’t be measured at all.
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