Spreadsheets? Love 'em. They're useful for all kinds of things: You can track your expenses on them; you can make fun lists on them; you can even use them to keep your address book up to date. But would you organize the value of your friends on them? Writer Milo Yiannopoulos does…and I feel considerably less love for his type of spreadsheet usage. In fact, it kind of makes me go, "Ugh."
In a piece recently penned for The Kernel and currently appearing on Business Insider, Yiannopoulos details his “‘data-driven’ approach to [his] social life.” Yiannopoulos maintains a massive spreadsheet full of information about his friends and business contacts, including everything from how money much they make to how attractive they are (something he calls “Hotness Index”). He firmly asserts that he is not “east London’s answer to Patrick Bateman”; rather, he keeps the document in order to manage “ever-increasing contact list of interesting people I am anxious to introduce to one another, or with whom I want to spend more time.” He’s discovered some interesting trends over time: For example, people who rank in his top two tiers generally tend to be more physically attractive, have high IQs, and line up with his political leanings; when it comes to money, though, there’s no correlation between income and Yiannopoulos’ value of the relationship — “unless there’s been romantic interest.”
I’ll be honest: Something about this story rubs me the wrong way. Does it remind anyone else of the guy who organized all his online dates by spreadsheet? Or the one that sent an astonishingly detailed survey to all the women he went out with? Both those stories triggered my ick reflex in the same way this one does.
In some capacity, I understand Yiannopoulos and his system; spreadsheets can be useful for keeping track of your life, especially if you’re the type of person who likes to keep super busy all the time. I can even understand why organizing your friends into categories like “Party” or dividing them up by income might be useful (e.g., your Game of Thrones marathon buddy may love chilling out on the couch with you, but might not have a great time at that new club opening you’re going to on Friday night; your $50,000-a-year friend probably won’t hang out at the same places your six-figure pals do; and so on). But at the same time, friendship is one of those things that I don’t think can or should necessarily be quantified (see also: education). Boiling everything down to numbers does the real people behind those numbers a disservice. You can’t put a numerical value on the type of friend who will drop everything just to help you through a horrible breakup. Also, why the hell does it matter how pretty your friends are?
I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me. But although Yiannopoulos writes that he thinks systems like his will be the way of the future, I really hope they’re not. People are more than just statistics — or at least, they are in my world.
