What If You're Measuring Your Life Wrong?

We’re told to measure our lives in milestones.
Promotions. Marriages. Square footage.
Passport stamps. Followers. Net worth.
Kids. Homes. Exits.

But what if those are the wrong metrics?

What if the more honest measure of a life is how many people feel safe in your presence?
How often your dog leans into you with a sigh that says: you are home?
How many dinners you’ve cooked while barefoot in the kitchen, playing the same playlist that somehow makes you cry and dance at the same time?
How many times you softened instead of snapping?
How often you caught the light dancing through the trees and let it stop you?

What if the real indicators of success are invisible on a resume, but loud in a room?

How someone exhales when they sit across from you.

How easily children or animals approach.

Whether your presence makes things feel safer, truer, warmer.

I spent my 30s chasing the right things, until I realized they weren’t always my things.
I worked with Fortune 500s, got promotions and contributed to my 401k, lived in the 11962s and 90210s, wore the Choos, perfected PowerPoints until 2 am, pinched and prodded my way to the perfect BMI, color-coded my calendar, and got really good at sounding fine when I wasn’t.

I joked that my life was held together by bobby pins and coffee.

I felt like I was failing at something invisible.
Because I was using the wrong ruler.

The world rewards what it can count.
But what about what can’t be counted?

Not long ago, I started tracking awe instead of analytics.

I began noticing different things: The softening of my shoulders after a real hug. The way the birds gossiping outside my window made my coffee taste better. The soft ache that shows up when you’ve been honest with yourself.

And sometimes, I’d ask myself: Did I feel love today? Did I offer softness when I could have armored up? Did I create even a sliver of space for joy? Did I witness something beautiful that no one else saw… that I just allowed to be beautiful without turning into something Instagrammable?

There’s research to back this up.
Psychologists call it subjective well-being: a phrase for how satisfied and whole you actually feel, no matter what your LinkedIn or your bank account says.
One 80-year Harvard study found that close, meaningful relationships were the single biggest predictor of happiness and health. More than money, IQ, or even genetics.
Another study out of Berkeley showed that micro-moments of awe, like watching birds take flight or hearing a song that gives you chills, actually reduce inflammation in the body and boost long-term well-being.

You don’t need an Oura score to know what feels good in your body.
Peace has a pulse.
Joy leaves a resonance.
You know it when you feel it.
You know it when you’ve gone too long without it.

I used to measure success by how busy I was.
Now I ask: can I feel my own breath?
Can I enjoy my own company?
Can I rest without guilt?
Can I have a whole day with no plans and still feel valuable, like nothing needs to be earned today?
Can I cry for no reason and trust that it’s sacred?
Can I say no without the performance of over-explaining or apologizing for taking up space?

What if the most radical thing we can do is change what we’re counting?

And we don’t need to feel bad about our measurements. We’re living in a culture where companies are measuring the wrong things too. Which ultimately influences us. Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok don’t optimize for joy, connection, or well-being. They track engagement, time on screen, clicks, and shares, which are the very things that keep us anxious, addicted, and disconnected from our bodies.

They are not measuring the right kind of aliveness.

Imagine if platforms were measured by how rested you felt after using them.

How much more connected you felt to yourself.

How clearly you could hear your own intuition.

They would probably go out of business, TBH.

And until that shift happens, we have to become the rebellious architects of our own metrics, rewrite the dashboard, and define success not by the noise we generate, but by the peace we cultivate.

Maybe you don’t need another accolade or app or affirmation.
Maybe you just need a new metric.

Here’s my new model of metrics for a happy and peaceful life:

We live in a world obsessed with achievement.
But what if becoming gentler is the real high-performance metric?
What if wholeness is the ultimate luxury?

Here's a quiet truth I'm learning: the more I drop the need to prove, the more I feel at peace.
The more I let go of performing, the more magnetic I become.
The more I surrender, the more life meets me with grace.

A soft, slow, sacred life might not make headlines —
but it might be the truest, richest one there is.

What if you measured your life by how deeply you open to love?
By how much beauty you noticed?
By how bravely you stayed open?

Maybe the next great success story is the one where you come home to yourself.