Beyond Measure. Rachel Z. Arndt
uncertainty caused by bias, environment, and self-reflection. I was those numbers, and no more. But without interpretation, could those numbers mean much, if anything at all?
Finally, the last nap, which went like all the other naps: asleep in three or four minutes; stage 1 sleep the whole time but a sleep still full of dreams, dreams of school rooms too small to sit in, of an accidental gun purchase, of parents cloned and turned evil, of playing a 4/4 beat on the drums; sleeves bunched up when I woke, Infinite Jest on the bed next to me; a cleared-throat alarm clock through the intercom that, like me, turned mechanical by the separation of sound and body—her body, her voice; my body, my data.
Then body and voice came together and the woman was in my room a quick knock later. How’d you sleep? she asked.
Just fine, I said.
Good, she said, and began peeling away the rest of my electrodes, easing them out of their glue beds, out of my hair—her fingers broad but delicate. Some women like to wash their hair twice, she said, and I wondered about those women who didn’t, and all the men.
When I got home, I washed my hair twice, and like some women, I put a small dollop of cream in it for smoothing. Yes, I could be relative to other people, not just to myself. Or I could tell myself I might be. Really, I was alone—alone taking my first pill in two weeks, alone waiting for my data to arrive and to tell me whether I’d changed over those in-between-studies years, because for measurements to change, the source must too. Otherwise, how can we ever trust numbers in the first place? And there, alone, I hoped desperately that I’d stayed exactly the same, because even a solid diagnosis can make measurements worthwhile and trustworthy, can make them suggest something within gone wrong. But the lack of a name, or a name that stands in for a lack, would mean I was somehow incapable of producing meaningful measurements. What’s the point of data if they don’t provide certainty, if they don’t stabilize? It wasn’t, in fact, better to rule something out. I wanted the numbers to say “narcolepsy,” because narcolepsy came from somewhere. Narcolepsy was the result of specific data. Narcolepsy was meaning. Idiopathic hypersomnia wasn’t even recognized by my word-processing program. It was a failure of quantification—measurement’s inability to verify or to repeat—and if what ailed me was uncertain and unverifiable, and if what ailed me came from numbers I produced, then I was uncertain and unverifiable too.
Waiting for my hair to dry, I stared at myself in the mirror. My dress’ defined waist and back zipper made me feel like I’d accomplished something. But had I? I stared a little more, let my gaze grow unfocused as the sun setting cut a last triangle of light across my mirror. Had I?
The word nootropic comes from the Greek for “mind” and “turning.” To turn the mind—to move it over itself, like turning over an engine, spinning the parts alive—is to look inward. Or it is at least to believe that the solution comes from within, not from those around us. What solution? The specifics don’t matter; what matters is that there is a solution—something being done—that creates the problem: not being productive or efficient enough. To solve this problem, which is less a personal problem and more a symptom of society, we might try to work with others, all those workers we’re networked to; we might try to change daily demands, not to make them easier, necessarily, but to change value from quantitative to qualitative. Or we might try a nootropic, an individual, personal solution to a collective unease with the way things are.
To take a nootropic (pills called Alpha Brain or Sprint or Ciltep) is to separate oneself from the world in order to stand out in it. To take a nootropic is to demand measurement: We measure ourselves so we can compare who we are now not with other people but with previous and future versions of ourselves. Improvement, then, via nootropics and the like, becomes a necessarily solitary pursuit, with each person using the tools of the internet—apps, trackers, &c.—to keep herself separate from the rest of the internet. To take a nootropic is to insist on the self, alone and lonely, as the source of and solution to the problems of the day.
INSTRUCTIONS
1. Feel inadequate. Feel that you’re not getting enough done. Feel that other people have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps when you’re still in your socks.
2. Go online to choose a collection of drugs—a “stack,” in nootropics parlance—that appeals to the dual responsibility to be productive and to be independently so.
3. Wait for the shipment to arrive, tracking it obsessively in between visits to Facebook and pings from an app that asks, “What are you doing right now?”
4. Collect two days’ worth of work and one day to do it.
5. Set your app to quiz you at two-hour intervals, frequent enough to collect sufficient data, infrequent enough for your productivity to thrive.
6. Take a pill. Sit down at your computer.
7. Wait for the pill to kick in, to tickle the brain into action. Feel neurotransmitter activity increasing and decreasing according to the manufacturer’s promises, because if there is no change, then what you’re doing—taking a pill—is a waste of time and effort; it’s inefficient.
8. Start typing. Start annotating the pill with PowerPoint slides and Excel spreadsheets. Thank Microsoft, thank the nootropics manufacturer, thank yourself.
9. Don’t talk to other people—they may get in the way of your optimized state. If you must talk, listen to yourself: Hear your words flowing as they do for a nootropics-juiced Joe Rogan.
10. Track your output. Later, you can use these numbers as further justification for the pill. You can remind yourself, in moments of weakness, that it was not other people who got you to that “heightened state”—it was you (and some chemicals).
11. Go online to prove how focused you are.
12. Sign off. You don’t need other people to give context to your efficiency; you already have context: what you were before the nootropics kicked in, what you will become when the nootropics wear off.
That lady is ripped! a dude says to his friend as I stream by on my bike. That lady is ripped, I repeat in my head—that lady is me. Freewheel whirring in downhill coast, wind against my arms during one of the last sleeveless days of fall, I arc toward the gym, its rows and rows of machines aligned by muscle and routine, that need to do something because it’s what you’ve always done—tie the shoes the same way, use the same locker, start on the same machine—that is the heart of the gym ritual.
Walking through the locker room to the locker room door, I tighten my ripped tricep next to the mirror, glance sideways to catch the curve of muscle and then relax as I continue past the woman drying her hair under a hand dryer; the woman sitting naked in front of a mirror, putting on eyeliner; the swimmer dripping her way from pool to shower.
Just outside the door gleam two vending machines: one filled with candy, the other with soda on one half and on the other Gatorade. The drink is supposed to replace what’s lost in sweat, but at the gym, the drink of choice isn’t a replacement but a supplement: protein shakes, grainy greenish-brown sludge men drink from glorified sippy cups they jiggle up and down in between reps.
I walk to the second of three floors, as I always do, to do what I do every time I go to the gym: lift weights, and before that, use the elliptical for twenty-five minutes. Or is it go on the elliptical? Or run on? Word choice depends on the relationship with the machine, whether you consider it to have pedals or paddles or platforms, whether you can pretend that the deliberate forward thrusts, which actually keep you in place distancewise, bear any resemblance to jogging (when really that resemblance is already owned by the treadmill).
A personal trainer on the stairs tells the couple trailing him that keeping a notebook is key—it’s for your own personal knowledge, he says, and so you can add more reps.