We live in a world obsessed with numbers. How much you earn. How much you weigh. How many calories you burned. How many steps you took before noon. Dashboards everywhere, progress bars for everything, gentle nudges that somehow feel like constant judgment. Even rest has metrics now. Sleep scores. Recovery scores. Productivity streaks.
It’s not that counting is bad. Numbers help us understand patterns. They keep planes in the air and budgets from collapsing. But somewhere along the way, we started measuring the wrong things too often, and trusting those measurements more than how we actually feel.
You can hit every target and still feel empty.
You can miss half of them and feel deeply, quietly content.
That’s the part no app can track.
Counting blessings isn’t about pretending life is perfect or forcing gratitude when things genuinely hurt. It’s not toxic positivity. It’s not denial. It’s a conscious decision to shift attention from what’s being optimized to what’s already meaningful.
It’s noticing that your coffee tasted good this morning.
That someone checked in on you without needing a reason.
That your body carried you through another day, even if it complained along the way.
These things don’t show up on charts. They don’t trend. They don’t unlock badges. But they anchor you.
There’s something quietly rebellious about that.
Because the system rewards comparison. More than yesterday. Less than them. Ahead. Behind. On track. Off track. Counting blessings steps out of that race entirely. It says, “I’m not upgrading my life right now. I’m inhabiting it.”
And strangely, that’s when life starts to feel fuller.
When you stop tallying deficits, you notice abundance in unexpected places. Time with people you love. Work that challenges you. Even the hard moments that taught you something you couldn’t have learned any other way. Not everything is a blessing in the moment, but many things reveal themselves as one later, once the noise settles.
Gratitude doesn’t make you complacent. It makes you grounded. From that place, ambition becomes healthier. You still want to grow, but you’re no longer running from a sense of not-enough. You’re building from a place of already-here.
That changes the pace. And the pressure.
Some days, counting blessings looks poetic and profound. Other days, it’s stubborn and practical. It’s saying, “Today was messy, but I’m still grateful for this one small thing.” That counts too. Especially that.
So yes, track your goals if they help you. Count your steps if they motivate you. Use the tools. Just don’t let them become the scoreboard for your worth or the sole evidence of a life well lived.
Because the most meaningful things often resist measurement.
And choosing to notice them, again and again, in a culture that keeps asking you to count everything else?
That’s a rebellion worth joining.
Kenrick Vaz 