Story by Ruby Foudy

Print Managing Editor

I took a clinical psychology course over the summer with some of the most irritating people I have ever met. They were the kind of people trying to prove that they were the smartest in the room, but many of their contributions were not as groundbreaking as hoped. When we were discussing the diagnostic strategies used by clinicians, the girl who sat across from me (one of the worst offenders) shared, “I just don’t think you can reduce people to numbers. Like, we aren’t statistics.”

My original response was something along the line of Yeah, no duh, but the more I thought about it, the less I agreed. While the conversation shifted away from statistics to Cluster B disorders, my thoughts were stuck on the former.

We all may very well be walking statistics. This doesn’t mean I’m particularly happy about it, or that I think people should be viewed as numbers, but rather that they already are. From the moment you exit the womb to the moment your last breath exits your body, you are measured: grouped into trends, graphs, pie charts. Your very existence is part of a percentage that can be easily found in a Google AI overview. (“How many women live in the U.S.?” “Birth statistics in Indonesia” “Depression rates in men” “Death rates in 2026”) Every and any way we can be categorised already exists.

Are we all just 0s and 1s? Everything seems to be determined in numbers. Pain is categorized on a scale from one to 10 at the doctor’s, and physical attractiveness of men is rated on the same scale with my friends at lunch. To be diagnosed with anxiety, you must meet five out of eight symptoms in the DSM. I inhale for four seconds, hold for seven, and exhale for eight. Counting breaths, counting experiences, counting people: numbers used to measure numbers. Maybe everyone is just lines of numerical code.

I like to think that I am somehow an exception to this rule. I tell myself that I am an anomaly; I am too large to be contained in a series of numbers or a single data point. I must acknowledge that this train of thought does not make me an outlier.

Maybe being a statistic isn’t so awful. Sure, it’s nice to believe that my experiences are entirely unique and cannot be measured or compared to those of others, but I have a hard time buying that. If anything, it can be comforting to know that I’m not alone, that my experiences are shared enough for there to even be a statistical category or measurement for them in the first place.