We live in a world of scoreboards. Portfolio balances, followers, likes, weight, steps, rankings, body counts, grades, sales, home values, dating matches—even the accomplishments of our children can become ways of answering a deceptively simple question: “How am I doing?” The problem begins when we mistake the scoreboard for the thing it imperfectly measures—and, eventually, mistake the score for ourselves.

A few years ago, I became entangled in one of the most pervasive influences on human behavior—second only, perhaps, to evolution: the stock market.

My entry into this world wasn’t entirely by choice. I inherited a significant amount of stock. Surprisingly, instead of immediately buying a Porsche, a motorcycle, or even a new drum kit, I made the mature decision to hold onto the portfolio. I saw it as an opportunity to learn about investing and the dynamics of the stock market.

I imagine this sounds pragmatic, very adult. In retrospect, however, I might as well have inherited a bag of heroin and the rigging to go with it.

The timing didn’t help. I entered during a booming bull market. Experiencing four out of five trading days in the green can change a person in subtle ways. On profitable days the reinforcement is immediate and intense. I didn’t have to build anything that day. I didn’t have to become wiser. I could simply open an app and discover that I had made money.

Green felt oh-so good.

Red did not.

And somewhere along the way, checking the portfolio began to mean more than finding out what my investments were worth.

We Find Scoreboards

Human beings evolved in intensely social environments in which resources, rank, belonging, desirability, competence, and reputation actually mattered. Being attentive to opportunities and threats—and to where we stood in relation to other people—had consequences.

Jeez, it almost sounds like a competition. Survival of the fittest: most likes wins. Best branding survives. Portfolio in the green.

Which is, of course, not what “survival of the fittest” means. But perhaps our eagerness to misunderstand it that way tells us something.

Modern life hasn’t eliminated those sensitivities. It’s just become extraordinarily good at quantifying them.

We can now ask, “How am I doing?” and receive a number.

The stock market may be an unusually pure example. A portfolio provides a constantly changing, astonishingly precise-looking measure of success. The number goes up and something in us says: “We’re good.”

“We’re smart.” Maybe even: “We knew what we were doing.”

Perhaps we can buy a Porsche.

The next day the same portfolio drops 4 percent and suddenly the verdict changes.

Nothing about us necessarily changed overnight.

But the score did.

I’ll be driving a Corolla for a while longer.

When the Score Becomes the Thing

The trouble with scoreboards is that they measure something real.

Money matters. Health matters. Professional success matters. Being liked and included matters. The success of our children matters to us. There is nothing inherently pathological about wanting any of these things—or paying attention to them.

But a measurement is not the thing it measures.

A rising portfolio can become a placeholder for financial competence. Followers can become a placeholder for social importance. Weight can become a measure of attractiveness or discipline. Client count can become professional worth. Dating matches can become desirability.

Eventually we can construct an identity around the activity itself.

I own stocks. I follow the market. I know which semiconductor company is doing what. Maybe I’m not simply someone who owns stocks anymore. Now I’m an investor.

Or perhaps I’m plotting my escape with all the fuck-you money I’m going to make from NVDA stock.

Either way, the scoreboard has begun doing considerably more psychological work than simply keeping score.

Checking Is Not Understanding

There is another peculiar feature of all this scoreboard-checking.

It can feel like activity.

Check the portfolio.

Check again.

Read the headline.

Check NVDA.

Market opens. Check.

Market closes. Check.

And yet none of this necessarily produces greater understanding of what we’re checking.

The same may be true of other scoreboards. We can repeatedly check reactions to something we’ve posted without learning much about why we need the reaction. We can monitor weight without understanding our relationship with food or our body. We can watch professional metrics without becoming better at the work itself.

And the proxy can sometimes provide enough of what we’re looking for that we keep returning to it.

Consider social media. Relationships formed there can certainly become real relationships. But becoming good at making “friends” online isn’t necessarily the same as becoming good at making friends face to face. The proxy can temporarily satisfy some of the very real human hunger for connection, belonging, and recognition without necessarily giving us practice at awkward introductions, reading another person in the room, tolerating silence, risking rejection, or repairing a misunderstanding.

The hunger may remain undernourished.

So we return to the place we’ve learned to feed it.

Something similar can happen with investing. Checking the market can provide a proxy sense of participation without necessarily making us better investors.

Checking gives us information, but it can also give us something much more immediately gratifying: reassurance.

And reassurance wears off.

So we check again.

The More We Look, the More There Is to React To

At some point in my education as an investor, I came across a concept in behavioral economics that sounded uncomfortably familiar: myopic loss aversion.

The idea combines two tendencies. We are particularly sensitive to losses, and even long-term investors can evaluate their investments over relatively short periods of time. Put the two together and something peculiar happens: an investment intended to play out over years can be experienced as a succession of victories and defeats occurring over days, hours, or, given a smartphone and sufficient enthusiasm, minutes.

My investment thesis might be that a company will grow substantially over the next five years.

At 9:35, it’s down 1.2 percent.

At 10:17, it’s down 2.4 percent.

At 11:03, PWR is getting hammered.

At 1:20, NVDA has recovered.

I have not necessarily received four meaningful pieces of information about the businesses I own.

I have, however, had four emotional experiences.

More information is not necessarily more understanding. Sometimes it is simply more occasions to react.

And reacting can begin to feel suspiciously like doing something.

Which brings us to some research I rather wish I hadn’t found.

Economists Brad Barber and Terrance Odean examined the trading records of 66,465 households with brokerage accounts from 1991 through 1996. The households that traded most actively earned an average annual return of 11.4 percent, compared with 17.9 percent for the market and 16.4 percent for the average household in the study.

Their explanation wasn’t that these investors were unintelligent. One important culprit was overconfidence: believing too strongly in the accuracy or usefulness of our own judgments can encourage us to act more often than the evidence warrants.

So there is a progression available to us:

Check.

Feel.

Check.

Feel.

Eventually: Do something.

Sell it.

Buy something else.

Get back in.

Get back out.

Perhaps the market is no longer merely a scoreboard. Now it’s a machine that keeps presenting us with opportunities to respond to the score.

The irony is that repeatedly observing something does not necessarily give us agency over it. And repeatedly acting on what we observe doesn’t necessarily give us agency either.

Sometimes it just gives us more transactions.

Competence and Reassurance Are Not the Same Thing

There is another way to acquire confidence.

Learn.

If I want to invest, I can learn what I own. I can learn how markets behave. I can understand that volatility is normal. I can develop a method, decide what risks I am willing to take, recognize when I’m behaving impulsively, and become better at distinguishing a change in price from a change in the underlying thing I bought.

None of that allows me to control the stock market.

It gives me greater control over my participation in it.

And that distinction extends beyond investing. We can become more competent at friendship rather than simply counting friends; more competent at a skill rather than depending upon recognition of it; more thoughtful about how we parent rather than using our children’s accomplishments as the grade.

Competence is an internal source of agency. The score is an external source of reassurance.

We have considerably more control over developing a skill than being recognized for it; over how we treat people than whether everyone likes us; over how we parent than what our children eventually accomplish; over caring for our bodies than whether they conform to a particular number.

Sweep your side of the street.

The Future We’re Constantly Checking

There may be another reason we keep looking.

Sometimes the number isn’t only telling us how we’re doing now. It represents the life we imagine the number will eventually buy.

Enough money and I’ll be safe.

Enough money and I’ll be free.

Enough money and I can stop doing what I don’t want to do.

Enough money and no one gets to tell me what to do.

Fuck-you money.

In this way, the portfolio can become a constantly updated probability meter for an imagined future life.

Which creates a fairly absurd possibility.

You’re at dinner: check the portfolio.

Walking the dog: check NVDA, PWR, GEV.

Between clients: check.

On vacation: what’s the Nasdaq doing?

You have twenty minutes with nothing you have to do, so you check whether you’re accumulating enough money to someday have more time in which you have nothing you have to do.

We can sacrifice pieces of the life we’re supposedly investing in by repeatedly checking whether our investments will someday allow us to enjoy our lives.

The Score Is Information, Not Identity

The answer isn’t to stop looking at the scoreboard. Some scoreboards contain useful information, and pretending otherwise isn’t agency either.

The question is what we’re asking the score to tell us.

Am I looking because there is something I need to know or do?

Am I trying to understand something?

Or am I asking the number to reassure me that I am competent, successful, secure, desirable, or getting closer to the person I imagine I will someday become?

We find scoreboards.

We mistake the scoreboard for the thing it imperfectly measures.

Then, if we’re not careful, we mistake the score for ourselves.

Understanding the difference doesn’t mean we stop investing, striving, measuring, competing, or caring about outcomes. It means developing more agency over the things that actually belong to us—and a little more humility about the things that don’t.

After all, it’s your life, and you want to enjoy it for as long as possible.

That’s the reason you’re investing.