By Emily

This review was originally posted on our blog.

MyProgress, Automating Self-Destructive Behavior

MyProgress is an online application that lets users track their “stats” and compare their life progress with other users in their demographic. Basically, it ranks you based on finance, knowledge, and soon health, which is under construction. We learned about it from TechCrunch.

How It Works

Starting a MyProgress account is easy, you just need an email address and it’s free. When you log in for the first time you are asked to fill out various stats about yourself: your income, assets, how much time you spend on hobbies, etc. Then MyProgress will calculate your “analytics” to tell you where you rank compared to other users.

Evaluation

We aren’t big fans of MyProgress. We think that you don’t need any help being critical of yourself. Most of us are too good at that already. Comparing yourself to others, especially to potentially imaginary others over the internet, is not healthy and will not increase your happiness or well-being. By making this process high tech and using buzz words like analytics, MyProgress has the potential to turn a self-destructive habit into a an addiction complete with widgets to post on your own website. MyProgress adds legitimacy to the idea that a person’s worth is little more than the sums in their bank account, the degrees on their wall, and job title. This kind of hierarchical thinking makes everyone miserable. Those on top struggle to stay there, those on the bottom lose hope that they’ll ever catch up.

We would encourage our readers not to judge themselves based on arbitrary statistics that measure supposed success. No amount of external validation will make you feel successful if you don’t believe it yourself. Rather than wasting time entering nonsensical statistics like the monetary value of your pets into MyProgress, you could be doing something that makes you happy and helps you grow as a person. MyProgress is betting on our competitive nature and addiction to judging ourselves against others. These are probably not qualities you want to nurture with a clever online tool.

The money you make and the things you own do not determine who you are. Don’t let anyone, let alone a ridiculous algorithm tell you otherwise.