An Ode to the Immeasurable
Recovering the pulse beneath the proxy.
We’d just sat down to breakfast when he said it.
“We’re building our schools around the immeasurables.”
Kunzang delivered the line simply, as though the sentence could hold itself up.
Around us, the cafeteria clattered with a hundred conversations. But as he spoke, the noise receded. We’d wandered into a different kind of room together.
We were strangers on a kind of blind date, introduced by a mutual friend. Kunzang and Kinzang had come from Bhutan seeking partners for a K-12 school and university they’re creating.
I’ve spent decades in conversations about education and entrepreneurship that share a common language: outcomes, metrics, data, scale. It's the water we swim in without even seeing it. But beneath the buzzwords and business plans is an unspoken assumption: If it can’t be counted, it doesn’t count.
Kunzang wasn’t trying to be provocative. He was just being clear about what their schools will cultivate:
Joy
Compassion
Equanimity
Loving-Kindness
In the Buddhist tradition, these shimmering qualities of mind and heart are called the immeasurables. Not because they’re hard to measure, but because they belong to a different ledger. The way infinity isn’t just a bigger number; it’s a entirely different thing.
Hearing the immeasurables named and claimed as the purpose of an education jolted me awake.
What if the learning that matters most is, in fact, immeasurable?
There is a difference between the unknown and the unknowable.
The unknown is merely what we haven’t measured yet.
The ego loves the unknown — it builds telescopes and particle colliders, certain that with enough cleverness, the dark will yield.
The unknowable is something else.
It is not a gap in our knowledge.
It is a country where knowledge itself kneels.
- Nipun Mehta
Humans have become masters of measurement.
We measured distance, and crossed oceans. We measured time, and synchronized civilizations. We measured the genome, and extended our lifespans.
The impulse is beautiful: to understand the world well enough to care for it.
The trouble begins when measurement stops being a tool and becomes a worldview.
Somewhere along the way, What matters? became What can be measured? Then, almost without noticing, we substituted one question for the other.
GDP became prosperity. Money became worth. Grades became learning.
The map replaced the territory.
The proxy replaced the pulse.
My friend Nipun Mehta, who has spent decades building gift-based ecosystems outside the logic of metrics, names the consequence:
The trouble with measurement is not that it fails. It’s that it succeeds so spectacularly we begin to believe everything worth knowing can be known this way.
How could we quantify a kid discovering agency? A teenager learning to trust her inner compass? An adult finding a calling that wasn’t in the job bank?
The immeasurables aren't what we'll get to someday, once we've counted everything else.
They are the thing itself.
Last month I was invited to speak at the Festival of Consciousness alongside Tristan, one of our Fellows at The Flight School.
We’d never met in person, but within moments we felt a flash of recognition. We shared a community. A jeito. A vision of learning unhitched from modern schooling.
At Tristan’s encouragement, we’d spent less time preparing our talking points than preparing to be present.
As we walked onto the stage I admitted I was nervous.
“How we show up matters more than what we say,” he smiled.
He was right.
Tristan didn’t talk about The Flight School.
He embodied it.
In a cavernous hall, there was a steadiness about him that settled the room. Someone said afterward: “He was like an acupressure point for our collective nervous system.”
Tristan described the moment during his Launch Year when the rally cry of his earlier schooling — Become a changemaker! — took an inward turn. In an instant he knew:
Meaningful change had to start with the innermost leap: from fear to trust. Inside himself.
For decades I’ve believed this kind of education was possible. Sitting next to Tristan, I crossed the chasm from believing to knowing.
He hadn't convinced us of anything.
He'd made the immeasurable legible.
He wasn’t a datapoint.
He was the evidence.
People often ask us for metrics about The Flight School’s impact. I understand the impulse. And we’re measuring what we can.
But precision isn’t impact.
The investments that shape a life have infinite returns.
I was with a friend who proudly showed me her new sleep tracker: how long it takes to fall asleep, how deeply she's slept, how rested she should be.
The technology boggled my mind. But something felt off.
"Does it ever get in the way of knowing how you actually feel?" I asked.
She paused.
The next morning she came back, a bit sheepish.
“I woke up feeling fine,” she said, “but the app said I’d slept terribly. It’s like I’m letting the data tell me how I feel.”
Another friend (who happens to be a sleep scientist) told me this modern malady has a name: orthosomnia. The pursuit of perfect sleep that ends up getting in the way of sleep itself.
I wonder how much of modern life has become a kind of orthosomnia.
We've outsourced our sense of whether we're rested, productive, or successful to metrics that were meant to inform our experience, not replace it.
The deeper cost isn't that these proxies measure reality imperfectly.
It's that over time, they erode our capacity to know reality directly.
To trust our lived experience.
To know what we know.
Which turns me to these questions,:
Why do I trade knowing for counting?
What’s the longing beneath the score?
Where is the evidence that can only be felt?
We’ve outsourced our inner knowing for so long it can feel like there’s nothing there to return to.
There is.
The U-turn is scary. It leads us back to a quieter intelligence than the one we’ve been rewarded for.
But if we can recover the pulse beneath the proxy, the future will thank us.
Immeasurably.
I dressed these ideas up forThe New York Times, and they published my letter.
On the problem of conflating grades with learning — and why the learning that matter most can never be reduced to a score.
beautifully woven words that feel like an inner embrace, a hug from the inside where it seems we have layered over our knowing with a kind of wallpaper as we wait for permission to do or be just about anything. monitoring, monitoring, monitoring. surveillance of the self. i love imagining a wholly different way, back to the once was brought forward with the tenderness, compassion, love, kindness, generosity, and safe-keeping of our unique & shared humanity
YAY for Tristan!!! LOVED the picture of you two up there talking about what matters most and the immeasurable loud and clear.