Your Worth Isn’t Measured by Data: Being Simply Human in a Digital Age

Justin Ryan Boyer, a pastor in Southeastern Pennsylvania, opens with a small memory of getting his first glasses in fourth grade and then describes sitting at a café, taking off his glasses to people-watch. The blurred scene becomes a picture for his worry that we are slowly losing our vision of what it means to be human.

He reflects on his fitness watch, which he finds useful but which also fills his day with data about his body and habits. He asks how constant measuring shapes what we come to value in people. Some of his best moments come when he runs without the watch, when nothing is tracked and nothing needs to be shared. For him, some of the most essential things in life cannot be measured.

Drawing on the Greek word hyperballō, which suggests a goodness beyond calculation, the author argues that God’s kindness, power, and love cannot be controlled or quantified. He quotes Skye Jethani on the danger of wanting measurable outcomes in ministry, and he suggests that human worth, like God’s grace, is a mystery to be received by faith rather than a number to be calculated. Digital tools can help us care for ourselves, he says, but they should not define our humanity. He links this to the temptation in Eden to grasp for knowledge in place of life, and he points to Jesus’s healing of the blind man in Mark 8 as a picture of sight being restored in stages until things come clearly into focus.

The post closes by noting that people long to be recognized and that God is the one who looks for us. Its final invitation is to set aside metrics and to seek God’s face, which the author describes as the most human thing we can do.

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