Proxy Addiction

In May, my girlfriend and I spent a week at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. Amy is a significant author in the relationship space, and she was invited to teach a four-day workshop called Pathways to Partnership. I had just ended a long-term client engagement and I was in the perfect headspace for a little relaxation in the hot springs, so I tagged along. While I was pruning myself in the sulfur springs overlooking the Pacific Ocean, she was healing decades of trauma and rewriting the rules of healthy dating for thirty or so participants.

One evening, just after dinner, we caught a sunset worth remembering. It was the kind of sunset that makes you stop mid-conversation, the Pacific horizon painted in colors that seem too saturated to be real. One of our friends who had just gone through a heartwrenching breakup was there attending Amy's sessions. She had joined us for dinner and walked with us across the grounds to get a closer look at the ocean. She noticed a hula hoop almost strategically placed by the western fence and picked it up. Soon, all of us were twirling and laughing under the setting sun when Amy stopped. She looked me dead in the eyes and exclaimed, "This is a core memory!"

In psychology, core memories refer to emotionally significant events that shape our personality and sense of self. It's not a clinical term, but rather a concept popularized by the movie "Inside Out" and supported by well-known neuroscientists like Charan Ranganath. Amy takes it seriously as a life philosophy. She had us breathe in deeply to collect the smells of lavender and rosemary from the nearby garden, listen to the hum of honey bees finishing their work for the day, feel the grass between our toes, all while taking in the sight of the sun painting silhouettes across the craggy rocks of the Pacific horizon. Later that evening, as we lay in bed, she had me replay the memory, reliving what it was like just hours earlier to increase the likelihood that the memory would be encoded.

Amy will forget more than most of us will ever know about building positive memories, but she has instilled at least this one important tool in me. She understands that the most important moments in life don't just happen to us. We create them. We are architects of our own memories. It comes into play when she is coaching clients, too. She reminds them that dwelling on complaints about their partner undermines the relationship's long-term viability. If they paid as much attention to replaying positive moments, she tells them, the stories and memories they create become investments in their future success as a couple.

Amy knows the tricks to building long-lasting relationships.

This stands in stark contrast to that client I was advising recently, who was so obsessed with the minutia of his measurements that he forgot what business he was actually in.

He was brilliant, technically speaking. A seasoned marketer. His dashboard was a work of art: conversion funnels, cohort analyses, customer acquisition costs broken down by channel, demographic, and time of day. I should know. I built it. He could tell you the exact percentage point impact of changing button colors or the correlation between email open rates and lifetime value. He lived in his data, breathed it, and made every decision based on what the numbers told him.

But while he was optimizing click-through rates, he was bleeding customers. While he was A/B testing emojis, his team was burning out. While he was measuring engagement metrics, he was pruning away his market share. The data told him everything except the one thing that mattered: why he kept paying more and more for new customers while returning customers were churning.

I watched him micromanage spreadsheets while acquisition costs skyrocketed. When I suggested that maybe we should be treating this incomplete data as directional instead of doctrinal, he balked. He had confused his instrument panel with the destination, mistaking measurements for the desired outcomes themselves.

This is what I call proxy addiction. Our obsession with measuring stand-ins for the things we actually care about, until we forget what we were trying to achieve in the first place. We optimize for metrics instead of outcomes, data points instead of human experience, efficiency instead of meaning.

My client wasn't an anomaly. This addiction has infected every corner of our lives. Schools optimize for test scores instead of retention and critical thinking. Hospitals optimize for patient throughput instead of long-term outcomes. Social media platforms optimize for short-term engagement instead of meaningful connection. We've built a world that measures everything and misunderstands how much value it is actually adding.

The irony is profound: in our quest to make life more measurable, we've made it less human. In our rush to quantify experience, we've engineered away the very experiences worth having.

Some companies are beginning to recognize this.

Netflix doesn't just measure viewing time. They track whether you finish a series, understanding that completion suggests emotional investment, not just passive consumption.

Airbnb obsesses over specific details in reviews rather than star ratings, knowing that stories like "Maria left fresh flowers and knew exactly where to get the best coffee" predict future bookings better than numerical scores.

Apple Stores prioritize whether customers learned something on their visit, not transactions per hour, recognizing that moments of discovery drive loyalty more than sales pressure.

But even these examples are still just proxies, two degrees removed from the raw experience they're trying to capture. They're getting closer to measuring what matters, but they're still trying to quantify the unquantifiable. This is proxy addiction.

Because here's the thing about core memories, about meaningful moments, about the experiences that shape us: they resist measurement not because they're soft or unimportant, but because they're emergent properties of complex systems. They arise from conditions we create, not outcomes we track.

Disney has instilled this in their park experiences. They've engineered Disney World not for predictable satisfaction scores, but for unpredictable magic. Cast members are trained to create spontaneous interactions: impromptu character appearances, playful banter with kids, unexpected acts of kindness. Some attractions feature randomized sequences, so no two experiences are identical. They're not optimizing for efficiency; they're designing for stories families will tell for decades.

Last weekend, Amy and I ventured to our favorite panini spot on the edge of downtown. When we arrived, well within normal operating hours, we learned they had run out of all but one menu item. Prosciutto, not my preference, but all they had left. I was annoyed. I had rearranged my entire day around this meal. But Philip, the owner, offered us the one panini he had left, on the house, which Amy graciously accepted. Though I was still disappointed, we were both impressed by Philip's generosity. Then, as we were leaving, he ran to catch up to us with two macaroons and another profuse apology. That gesture shifted my perspective. I had to abandon my grudge and promised to return, just earlier in the day next time.

This is what we lose when we optimize only for metrics: serendipity, surprise, the unexpected moments that can't be planned or measured but somehow stick with us forever. In our rush to engineer predictable experiences, we eliminate the very unpredictability that makes experiences memorable and build loyalty.

Amy calls attention to these moments because she understands how important they are in building the foundation of our romantic relationship. She knows that twenty years from now, we won't remember our screen time or our step counts or what we checked off on our to-do list. We'll remember the sunset at Esalen, the feeling of hula hoops in our hands and grass under our feet, the way our friends looked silhouetted against the Pacific sky.

Amy designs for moments that no dashboard could capture. She's learned what Disney knows and what my data-obsessed client missed: you can't measure meaningfulness, but you can create the conditions where it emerges.