It's not something I talk about very often, but I have always been a bit of a ”numbers geek.”
I don't say this as a result of having any particular aptitude for — or interest in — mathematics; far from it... I just find a certain comfort in numbers.
When I was no more than maybe 7 or 8 I started ”recording” a lot of different things in my life. Could be anything from what the high temperature of a particular day was to how many times I was able to dribble a tennis ball before losing it.
Might seem like a very strange thing for a little kid to do, but there was something very comforting about ”keeping track” of things, whether they were in the natural world or the result of my own activities.
In retrospect, I think it had something to do with the fact that everything else in my life was so fluid and constantly changing and unreliable, but writing down the statistics about something relatively mundane that was happening seemed like an anchor point in a world of uncertainty.
Perhaps my fascination with numbers was also related to the fact then I spent an awful lot of time alone because we moved around so much and I seldom had time to make new friends before it was time for us to move again.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that "numbers were my friends" but at least they were something that kept me vaguely entertained when I had hours and hours to eat off the clock and few to no opportunities for any kind of activities.
Of course, the fact that I was naturally given to being an introvert probably made it easier to pick up some relatively meaningless pastime from within my own head. I never felt like I needed external stimulation. And boredom was not really an issue.
As I continued into adulthood and gradually became self-employed, one of the things I noticed about myself was a tendency to keep a variety of records of my activities that extended well beyond the fundamentals needed simply to ensure good bookkeeping.
To this day, I keep very close tabs on my blogging activities here on Hive not so much because I have to for tax purposes but because there is a certain comfort in knowing exactly how I'm doing on a day-to-day basis.
Is it a silly waste of time? Perhaps...
Some might argue that my strange relationship with numbers means I have a an autistic ”Rain Man” type of thing going on, but I'm not so sure about that… although, by many measures, I might be characterized as being ”on the spectrum.”
Sometimes I pause to consider whether my decision to be self-employed was a sub-conscious decision to avoid environments that would have required me to do to many things according to someone else's plan, rather than just my own. After all, my excessive number crunching takes time, but doesn't really result in anything very tangibly useful.
But it does keep me mildly entertained and interested in doing quite a few things I'm involved with.
And that's probably a good thing!
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great rest of your week!
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Created at 2023-04-27 00:34 PST
0812/2067