Confessions of a Datachondriac
I check the weather app twice before leaving the house. I check the stock market every few hours even when I have no intention of acting on it. I check my health data several times a day. After forty years in the data business I should know better. I do know better. And still I check. If you're honest with yourself, you might be a Datachondriac too.
I have a problem. I check the data too much.
Not in the healthy way. Not the "informed decision-maker consulting relevant information" way. In the way a hypochondriac checks WebMD. Compulsively. Anxiously. Looking for certainty that data can never actually provide.
I check the weather app twice before leaving the house, as if the forecast might shift dramatically between the first look and the second. I check the stock market every few hours even on days when I have no intention of doing anything about what I find. I check my health data several times a day, heart rate, sleep score, steps, as if the number might tell me something my body hasn't already figured out on its own.
I am a Data-Chondriac. Say it like hypochondriac, with data up front. Data-CON-driac. Once you hear it you will not be able to stop noticing it in yourself and everyone around you.
My colleague Aviana Rubin and I coined the term because we needed a name for what we were seeing, in ourselves and in everyone around us. The compulsive consultation. The inability to trust your own senses. The belief that somewhere out there, a number exists that will make the decision for you.
If you are honest with yourself, you might be one too.
Let me give you two examples from my own life that I am not entirely proud of.
There is a restaurant near my house in Austin I have eaten at four times. Never once left thinking I needed to go back. Last month I found myself on Yelp reading reviews before deciding whether to try it again. The reviews were mixed. So was my experience. I already knew what I thought. I went anyway and ordered the same thing I always ordered.
Last year I hired an editor for a book. He had been on Shark Tank. Twenty-five years of work I could read, watch, and verify. A reference so strong I trusted it immediately. I got off the first call satisfied and ready to move forward. Then I went back online. I read his reviews. His blogs. His speeches. I watched his Shark Tank appearance. I kept going, further back, deeper in, looking for the thing that would finally make me certain. Two hours later I knew his professional life going back a quarter century and I was no more settled than I had been after that first call. The data was all there. The certainty never arrived. Because the certainty was never going to come from the data. It was never there to find.
The symptoms are easy to spot. You cannot make a small decision without looking something up first. You feel anxious when you don't have your phone because what if you need to check something? You trust the rating more than your own experience, even when the experience was good.
The condition has a cause, and it is not entirely your fault. Every app, every platform, every recommendation engine, and now every AI assistant sends the same message: we know better than you do. Check with us first. Don't rely on your own judgment. AI has made this worse in a specific way. It answers so fluently and so confidently that the temptation to defer to it rather than think for yourself has never been stronger. The machine sounds certain. Certainty is comforting. And so we check.
After forty years in the data business, including taking a data company public, I should be the last person with this problem. I know how these numbers are made. I know how easily they mislead. I know that the confidence they project is often theater.
And still I check.
The cure is not refusing to look things up. That is not realistic and it is not even desirable. The cure is noticing when the checking has become compulsive rather than useful. When you are looking for reassurance instead of information. When the data is a security blanket instead of a tool.
Here is a small experiment I have been running on myself. Once a day I make a decision, something low stakes, without consulting any data at all. Which route to drive. What to have for lunch. Whether to take a jacket.
The first few times felt genuinely uncomfortable. Like walking outside without my phone. A low-grade anxiety that something might go wrong and I would not have the information to prevent it.
But then something interesting happened. I started noticing things again. The actual sky instead of the weather icon. The smell was from a restaurant I had never tried. The feeling in my body that already knew whether I needed a jacket.
I am not cured. I still check too much. But I have started to catch myself mid-reach, to ask whether I actually need the data or just want the comfort.
The information is always there if I need it. The question is whether I still trust myself when I don't look.
That is the muscle a Data-Chondriac needs to rebuild. Not rejection of data. Not rejection of AI. Just a little more faith in the instrument you were born with.
Your own mind.
The Great Zandini Sees:
“The most expensive data you will ever consume is the data you checked instead of trusting yourself.”