THIS LIFE: BY ANDREA MARA

I CHECKED THE PHOTO I had uploaded to Facebook – 26 likes. Nice! My happiness barometer moved up a notch, and I quickly reminded myself that allowing social media to have any link to selfesteem or joy is profoundly unhealthy and patently ridiculous. But also maddeningly compulsive.

As soon as you can put a number on anything, it starts to mean more – and usually more than it should. It becomes a means of comparison – comparing with a score or a result of your own, or that of a competitor, or the next photo in your newsfeed.

It’s not new of course – we’ve been putting numbers on everything and anything all our lives – social media is just a new and ubiquitous dimension.

In primary school, we compared very important things like age (back when being the oldest was the best thing and not the worst thing), and how many pancakes we had eaten on Pancake Tuesday and how many Easter Eggs we had been given on Easter Sunday. Gifts of cash meant that First Communion was monetised and measurable, and we were too young to know that talking about it at school was a little bit crass.

All of this was perhaps good training for the ultimate points race that was the Leaving Cert – the end result being a lifelong number by which we are forever judged, should we choose to disclose it. ‘She got 600 points in the Leaving!’ is a single sentence reference that provides a huge amount of information about an individual. In Ireland, it’s a marker for life.

This continues into the workplace – salary offered, sales targets met, burgers flipped, tips counted, clients lost, deals won. And it spills over into social lives too: how many drinks, how many rounds, phone numbers swapped or dates made. And to hobbies – people have golf handicaps and karate belts and piano grades and Candy Crush levels. Every runner has a personal best for a 5k run or a half marathon, and a conversation between running fans might involve a ‘what time did you do it in?’ question.

The mutual exchange of personal bests immediately labels both participants, for better or for worse. Putting a number on our achievements is an easy-to-use comparison tool, and can be a huge source of motivation. And demotivation if the number becomes the only focus.

Becoming a parent brings a whole new series of numbers to play – the age of the baby in days, then weeks, then months. The number of hours the baby slept today. The number of times the baby woke up last night.

The weight of the baby in lbs and ozs and wait, what’s that in kilos? The number of feeds. The duration of the feeds. The endless comparisons. It isn’t terribly interesting for anyone listening, but it’s a process that parents go through, a need to count, to compare, to reassure.

Numbers are something to hang on to, during a time when control has been swept away in a tsunami of sleeplessness and confusion and a learning curve steeper than Leaving Cert maths. And like everything else, fixating on the numbers is counter-productive, but sometimes, especially the first time, it’s all you have to keep you going.

And now the internet brings a whole new level of counting. My Runkeeper app tells me how my run compares to last week’s, and sends me passiveaggressive reminders if I take a break. My email inbox whispers to me that I have 3,509 unread emails (true story) and when I was buying tickets to a comedy gig recently, fumbling to find my credit card, a no-nonsense timer told me I had only 4 minutes 59 seconds left to complete the transaction. No pressure.

So much of what we do today, particularly online, is driven by numbers. As soon as we see a number, we want to do something with it – achieve it or surpass it or stare at it and wonder how we can change it.

And of course, Facebook and Twitter and Instagram know this. The ‘like’ button isn’t there because Facebook is a warm and fuzzy corporation. If they put it there purely to make the world a better place, there’d be no counter.

But there is a counter, and now that 26 people have liked my photo, I can feel good.

Or perhaps I should just turn off my phone and go spend some time with my kids – doing something that really counts.