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I spent last Tuesday feeling weirdly productive. Crushed my inbox. Hit my step count. Posted something that got decent engagement. By 6pm I was exhausted in that hollow way where you can't remember what you actually did, just that the numbers went up.

My wife asked how my day was. I said "Good, I think?" She gave me that look—the one that means you sound like a hostage reading a prepared statement.

And that's when it hit me…

I'd been winning all day. I just couldn't remember agreeing to play.

Here's what I've realized. Most modern misery isn't burnout or anxiety or whatever your therapist is billing your insurance for this month. It's simpler than that. It's winning games you never agreed to play.

We're told the problem is addiction to metrics. That we need to "unplug" or "be present" or download yet another app that will somehow cure our app problem. But that's not quite it.

The real issue? Someone installed a scoreboard in your brain, and you've been playing their game without reading the rules—or asking if you even wanted to compete.

So the fix isn't be less addicted to metrics. The fix is figuring out what scoreboard is secretly running your life, then doing something dumb about it: quit the game entirely, change the scoring to something that actually matters to you, or turn it back into play.

Because here's the thing:

Let me tell you about Yvon Chouinard, who might be the greatest scoreboard saboteur in business history.

In 1972, Chouinard ran a company called Chouinard Equipment. They made climbing gear—specifically pitons, those metal spikes climbers hammer into rock cracks to anchor their ropes. Business was good. Pitons were 70% of the company's revenue. By any normal scoreboard, the play was obvious: sell more pitons.

But Chouinard had a problem. He kept climbing the same routes in Yosemite and noticing that the rock was getting destroyed. The same fragile cracks had to endure repeated hammering, and the disfiguring was severe. The thing that made him money was wrecking the thing he loved.

So he did something insane. He opened his 1972 catalog with a manifesto—co-written with his business partner Tom Frost—that essentially told customers: stop buying the thing that makes us money.

"Mountains are finite," they wrote, "and despite their massive appearance, they are fragile."

Then they introduced an alternative: aluminum chocks that could be wedged by hand instead of hammered. Clean climbing, they called it. Leave no trace.

This is not a marketing pivot. This is looking at your best-selling product and saying "actually, never mind." It's the business equivalent of a restaurant telling diners their signature dish is poisoning the ocean and maybe try the salad.

What happened? Within a few months, the piton business collapsed and chocks sold faster than they could make them. Climbers had been waiting for permission to care about the thing they loved more than their own convenience.

That company eventually became Patagonia. You might have heard of it.

Fast forward fifty years. Chouinard is now 83 years old, and Patagonia is worth about $3 billion. By every conventional scoreboard—revenue, growth, market dominance—he's won. The standard moves at this point are: sell the company, go public, or pass it to your kids and let them figure it out.

Chouinard looked at those options and said no thanks.

"I never wanted to be a businessman," he wrote. "I started as a craftsman, making climbing gear for my friends and myself."

Selling would mean a new owner could change the mission. Going public would mean answering to shareholders who wanted short-term gains. Even passing it to his family felt wrong—he didn't want his kids playing a game he'd spent his whole life trying to escape.

So in September 2022, the Chouinard family did something that made every MBA professor choke on their coffee: they gave the company away.

Not sold. Gave.

They transferred 100% of ownership to two new entities. The Patagonia Purpose Trust holds the voting stock and exists solely to protect the company's values. The Holdfast Collective—a nonprofit fighting climate change—gets all the profits. Every dollar Patagonia makes that isn't reinvested in the business goes directly to saving the planet.

"Earth is now our only shareholder," Chouinard announced. "I am dead serious about saving this planet."

The man looked at the ultimate scoreboard—net worth, billionaire status, dynastic wealth—and said: I'm not playing this game. I'm playing a different one.

And here's the annoying, beautiful part: it worked. Patagonia didn't collapse into a moral puddle. It became more iconic precisely because the scoreboard was different. Turns out people want to buy from companies that aren't trying to maximize extraction from their wallets.

Metricious (meh-TRISH-us): The quality of appearing valuable because it's been measured, regardless of whether the measurement means anything. A portmanteau of "metric" and "meretricious"—which means attractively but superficially appealing, like a gas station sushi roll.

Use it in a sentence: "His LinkedIn profile was impressively metricious—lots of quantified achievements, none of which suggested he'd ever actually helped anyone."

Pick one score you compulsively check. Likes, inbox, streaks, whatever makes your thumb twitch. Now stop checking it for exactly 72 hours. Set a calendar reminder so you don't "accidentally" peek.

Notice what your brain does instead. Panic? Boredom? A weird creative surge? Relief you didn't expect?

That reaction tells you how deeply the score has captured your identity. The stronger the withdrawal, the more you've been playing someone else's game.

Bonus points: Try the Scoreboard Flip. Write "I'm trying to maximize ______." Flip it to "Actually, I want ______." Then pick a new score that points to the real thing—without pretending to be it.

Thanks for getting dumb with me today.

Reply to this email with the metric that's been secretly running your brain. Bonus points if you've already quit a game everyone else is still playing. The best scoreboard sabotage story gets a signed copy of Dumbify and my eternal respect (which, I should note, is not a metric you should optimize for).

Stay curious, stay unscored,
David

P.S. Know someone who's winning a game they never agreed to play? Forward this. Sometimes the smartest move is asking who set up the scoreboard in the first place.