If you walk into a lumber yard and ask for a Load-Bearing No. 2 grade Douglas fir, you are participating in a system of absolute reliability. The wood is measured by the frequency of its knots, the slope of its grain, and the presence of “shakes” or “checks” which are those longitudinal cracks that occur when a tree decides it can no longer hold itself together.
The wood is not blamed for the drought that stunted its growth in . The lumber grader does not dock points from the 2×4 because the forest was particularly humid on the day of the harvest. The wood is simply an object, measured against a standard, destined for a frame.
Grade No. 1
Grade No. 2
Utility
We have begun to grade human beings as if they were Douglas fir.
The afternoon was, by all objective accounts, a bit of a disaster. The Mediterranean sky, usually a reliable blue that suggests the gods are in a good mood, decided to collapse into a gray, sideways sludge. The rain did not fall so much as it attacked.
In the Gothic Quarter, the gargoyles were doing their job too well, spitting water onto the narrow cobblestones until the street felt like a flume ride. To make matters worse, a local holiday meant the interior of the cathedral was closed to the public, leaving a group of twelve soggy tourists standing under a leaking awning while a man named Gary-there is always a Gary-decided this was the perfect time to explain his own theory on Templar architecture, shouting over the guide.
The guide, let’s call him Leo, did what humans do. He shared his umbrella with a grandmother from Ohio. He told a joke about the rain that he’d told four hundred times, and it landed with the dull thud of a wet sponge. He tried to pivot, taking the group to a hidden courtyard that was mostly dry, but the mood was already a casualty of the atmosphere.
Three days later, Leo sits in a café. He slept on his left arm wrong, and a dull, prickly ache is radiating from his shoulder to his elbow, a reminder that the body is a fragile machine that rebels in the night. He opens his phone. He sees the notification.
★
★
★
★
★
“Leo was a nice guy and clearly knew his stuff, but the tour wasn’t great. It rained the whole time, we couldn’t go inside the church, and some guy in the group wouldn’t stop talking. Disappointing.”
Leo drinks his coffee. It is bitter. He is the one who carries those three stars now. Not the clouds. Not the Archbishop who closed the doors. Not Gary. The rating attaches to Leo’s digital skin like a parasite.
This is the rot at the heart of the modern reputation economy. When a system attributes systemic variation to an individual, the individual stops trying to excel and starts trying to minimize variance. They become a shock absorber for the world’s inconveniences.
Leo has already begun to change. Without consciously deciding to do so, he has started shortening the outdoor segments of his route regardless of what the weather app says. He avoids the more ambitious historical narratives because they require a captive, comfortable audience, and comfort is no longer something he can guarantee.
He is becoming blander. He is becoming a No. 2 grade Douglas fir, sanded down so that there are no knots left for a reviewer to snag their frustration on.
The Creep of the Metric
This is not a problem unique to the travel industry, though it is perhaps most visible there. I spent years as a grief counselor, a profession that supposedly exists outside the realm of “customer satisfaction,” and yet the creep of the metric is everywhere.
I have seen clinical scores used to evaluate doctors based on the “friendliness” of the reception staff or the length of the wait in a room filled with two-year-old copies of National Geographic. The doctor could have saved a life, but if the parking lot was full, the score is a four.
Historically, we understood the difference between the person and the process. In the , Frederick Winslow Taylor-the father of “Scientific Management”-obsessed over the efficiency of steelworkers.
He used a stopwatch to measure how long it took a man to shovel pig iron. But even Taylor, in his cold, mechanical heart, understood that the quality of the iron and the temperature of the forge were variables that belonged to the factory, not the man. If the iron was brittle, you didn’t fire the shoveler. You fixed the furnace.
TODAY, THE FURNACE IS THE ENTIRE WORLD.
And we are all holding stopwatches.
When we rate a Pub crawl Barcelona, we are ostensibly rating the quality of the bars, the generosity of the drink deals, and the charisma of the leader. But in reality, we are rating the chemistry of forty strangers.
If the group is a “vibe,” the guide is a genius. If the group is a collection of jagged edges and sour moods, the guide is a failure. The guide is being asked to manage the entropy of the human spirit for fifteen euros a head.
The Octopus Paradox
The danger of this misattribution is that it kills the “extraordinary.” To be extraordinary is, by definition, to be a variance. It is to take a risk.
If Leo takes his group to a tiny, hole-in-the-wall tapas bar that only has three stools but serves the best octopus in Catalonia, he is taking a massive risk. If the group loves the “authenticity,” he gets five stars. If one person complains that there was nowhere to sit and the smell of fish was “too much,” he gets a two.
Consequently, Leo starts taking everyone to the large, sterile restaurant with the laminated menus and the air conditioning. It is nobody’s favorite place, but it is also nobody’s least favorite place. It is a “four-star” experience by design. It is the architectural equivalent of beige.
We are building a world of beige because we have forgotten how to read the rain.
The rain falls on the cathedral but it is the guide who drowns in the ink of the review.
I think about this often when I’m dealing with people in the middle of a loss. Grief is the ultimate “low-star” experience. It is messy, it is unpredictable, and it is frequently “unsatisfying” for everyone involved. There is no “five-star” way to lose a parent or a partner.
And yet, I see people grading themselves. They feel they are “failing” at mourning because they aren’t hitting the milestones or maintaining the expected decorum. They are applying the logic of the Uber rating to the most profound depths of the human psyche.
“I gave myself a two today. I was short with the pharmacist and I cried in the car.”
“The pharmacist was slow and the car is where you feel safe,” I told her.
But the habit is deep. We have been trained to believe that we are the sole authors of our outcomes. This is the Great Lie of the Accountability Age. We are told that “extreme ownership” is the only path to success, which sounds noble until you realize it means you are responsible for the clouds.
It is a form of secular penance. If the tour was bad, I must have been bad. If the patient didn’t get better, the doctor must have been cold. If the student didn’t pass, the teacher must have been uninspiring.
We ignore the fact that the student didn’t eat breakfast, the patient has a genetic predisposition toward non-recovery, and the tour guide is currently nursing a dead arm and a broken heart.
A New Syntax for Reality
If we want better experiences-real ones, the kind that leave a mark and stay with us long after the tan has faded-we have to stop punishing the people who provide them for the crime of being present when things go wrong.
The Honest Review:
“The guide was brilliant, a five-star human. The weather was a one-star disaster. The monument was a two-star disappointment. Gary was a zero-star nightmare.”
Only then can Leo feel safe enough to take us back to the tiny bar with the three stools. Only then can he stop worrying about the knots in the wood and start looking at the forest again.
The irony is that companies like Tour Me Out actually thrive on the very thing the review system tries to kill: the human element. They run tours in Valencia and Barcelona with local teams who live in those streets. They aren’t resellers; they are the people on the ground.
They know that a pub crawl is a volatile chemical reaction. You can provide the priority entry to Opium or Pacha, you can provide the two selected bars, but you cannot provide the soul of the night. That has to be conjured.
And you cannot conjure soul if you are terrified of a three-star rating from a man named Gary.
I remember a night in Barcelona, , before I became a counselor and before the star-rating had fully colonized our brains. I was on a tour that was, by all technical measures, a failure.
The guide’s bike got a flat tire. It started to drizzle. We ended up sitting under a bridge for waiting for a replacement. But in those forty minutes, the guide told us about his grandfather’s life during the transition to democracy. He talked about the smell of the city in the seventies. He was vulnerable. He was real.
In today’s system, that guide would be terrified of those forty minutes. He would be checking his watch, apologizing profusely, and probably offering a discount to stave off the “Low Value” tag. The flat tire would be a stain on his digital permanent record. But for me, that bridge and those stories were the only part of the trip I actually remember.
The Indifferent Shrug
We are demanding that the humans in front of us act as gods who can command the elements, and when they fail, we crucify them with a thumb-press.
My arm is starting to wake up now. The pins and needles are giving way to a dull throb. It’s a reminder that even the most annoying physical sensations have a cycle. They aren’t a “rating” of my sleep quality; they are just a consequence of gravity and a heavy head.
I will go through my day, and I will likely be a bit slower, a bit more irritable. I hope the people I meet don’t dock me a star for it. I hope they see the weather in my eyes and realize I’m just a man who slept on his arm wrong, trying to guide them through the rain.
Why do we do this? Perhaps because it is easier to judge a person than it is to accept the chaos of the universe. A person has a name and a face. The universe is just a vast, indifferent shrug.
It is much more satisfying to blame Leo than it is to blame the humidity. But in doing so, we are slowly, star by star, turning the Leos of the world into machines. And once the humans are gone, all we’ll have left are the five-star reviews of a world that no longer has any soul left to measure.
Comments are closed