On the Anniversary of RENT, How Do We Measure a Life?

Seventeen years ago today, Rent premiered off-Broadway. Regardless of whether you've seen the show or the 2005 movie, you're surely familiar with its most popular and resounding number, "Seasons of Love."

"Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes," the song begins. "How do you measure a year in the life?"

Of course, we've always had ways of quantifying our lives, of using various figures to gauge our happiness and success. Among others: height, weight, grades, test scores, zip code, credit score, frequent flyer miles, income, and the price tag on any number of worldly possessions.

In today's world of technology and social media, we're able—forced?—to enumerate ourselves in dozens of other ways beyond traditional barometers like how much money we have and how many people we've slept with: there are followers, likes, and comments on Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram; favorites, mentions, and retweets on Twitter; Foursquare check-ins and mayor-ships; high scores on various games; and figures from every corner of the cyber universe that are—pun alert—countless. I even recently learned about something called a Klout score, which aggregates one's overall influence on social media platforms. I imagine more and more people will soon becomes familiar with theirs.

After all, this is kind of what computers are for. Literally "computing," calculating and regurgitating statistics. Just about every entity in social media has a number, a counter, a ticker, a graph, or a colored bar that determines its popularity and value. And because we spend so much time and energy invested online and, therefore, in these numbers, we use them to make the same conclusions about our own self-worth. I'm embarrassed to admit how many times I'll reload this very page to check for new likes, shares, comments, or tweets.

As cyberspace seeks to make us more number and less human, we have to consciously separate our self-image and self-esteem from our life's virtual box score. Sometimes we forget that when we die, no one will ask for the Carfax to appraise our life's worth, that our follower count won't appear on our obituary or our Klout score on our tombstone.