A Rant Against the Round Number

I have had enough of the round number, and I am going to say so on the twenty-third of Confusion, which is the correct and only day to say it.

Look at how they fawn over the round number. The hundredth customer gets a balloon. The tenth anniversary gets a party; the eleventh gets nothing, though it did exactly as much work to arrive. The stock index crosses a number ending in three zeroes and grown adults who manage other people’s retirements clear their throats on television about a “psychologically important level,” as if the market could read, as if the digit had teeth. It does not. It is the same market it was one point lower. You have simply agreed, as a civilization, to flinch at zeroes.

This is Greyface’s finest disguise, and I want you to see it clearly, because it does not look like a curse. The Curse of Greyface, the Principia tells us, was the conviction that the universe is Serious Business and must be brought to heel. We picture it as grimness, as gray suits, as the man who will not laugh. But the curse got smarter. It went to business school. It learned to round.

What the rounding hides

A round number is a decision to stop looking, dressed up as an achievement. We hit our number. Which number? The one that was easy to say out loud. Ten percent. A hundred million. A five-year plan, never a four-year plan, never a seven, though the work does not care what the calendar finds tidy. Every Key Performance Indicator is a fnord with a tie on — a thing inserted into your field of vision precisely so that you will look at it and not at the door it is standing in front of.

The round number says: here is where the story ends, please applaud. But Chaos does not arrive in tens. Chaos arrives in 23, in 17, in the awkward true count nobody can fit on a banner. The real number of things that went wrong this quarter is not a round number. The real number of people who love you is not a round number. The honest tally of anything is jagged, prime-haunted, ending in a digit that ruins the slide. That jaggedness is the texture of the actual, and we have built an entire managerial liturgy to sand it off.

In praise of the number that doesn’t land

So praise 23, which divides by nothing and apologizes to no one. Praise 5, which the Law assures us is behind everything and which has the decency to be too small to brag. Praise the receipt for $43.17, the song that is three minutes and forty-one seconds long, the friendship that lasted nineteen months — numbers that refuse to be milestones and are therefore, every one of them, telling the truth.

The next time someone wants you to celebrate a round number, ask them what got rounded off to make it. Ask where the remainder went. There is always a remainder; that is the one mathematical fact Greyface cannot bureaucratize away, and it is the sliver through which the goddess keeps getting in.

I will not be ending this rant on a round number of paragraphs. Count them if you like. You will not enjoy what you find, which is the entire point.

Hail Eris. Round nothing down.