What the score turns you into

Every setting we walk into comes with a way of keeping score, whether or not anyone says it out loud.

When the score is unclear, people get anxious. A first dinner with a partner's family. A new neighbourhood where nobody explains who greets whom first. A gathering where the host says to bring something, and every guest privately wonders whether a cake will look lazy and a full tray will look like showing off. Nothing is being counted, and yet everyone is trying not to lose.

When the score is perfectly clear, something else happens. A courier who is measured to the minute for every drop-off stops looking up. He stops holding the door for the old man in the building and stops asking the guard which entrance is quicker. Every one of those small courtesies costs seconds, and seconds are the only thing anyone is counting. Give a person a stopwatch for long enough and the person starts to work like one.

So the two failures pull in opposite directions. Vague scores make us insecure and eager to fit in. Hard, mechanical scores make us efficient and a little less human. Neither is neutral, and neither stays outside us. We take the score in and it rearranges what we pay attention to.

That is why it matters which scorecards we accept, for ourselves and for the people around us. Follower counts, grades, ratings out of five, the number of rooms in a house. Each one is a quiet set of instructions about what to notice and what to let go.

Most of us did not choose the score we are playing for. We could still choose to put it down.