On the Quantifiable Soul

At 3 AM, surrounded by cold coffee and the crushing weight of a deadline, a grant writer wrestles with a bureaucratic form that asks him to do the impossible: measure the social impact of art in spreadsheets and statistics.

‘Please provide a detailed framework for measuring the quantifiable outcomes of the project, including key performance indicators (KPIs) and projected social return on investment (SROI).’

The words swam on the screen. He’d been staring at them for two hours. Quantifiable outcomes. KPIs. SROI. It was the language of business, of machines, of things that could be neatly weighed and measured. How do you measure the gasp of an audience when the lights change? What’s the KPI for a teenager who finally feels understood because of a line in a play? What’s the social return on investment for a moment of shared, breathtaking beauty?

He typed, deleted, typed again.

‘Our primary KPI will be an increase in community engagement, measured by a 15% uptick in attendance from postcodes previously under-represented in our audience data.’

It sounded good. It sounded professional. It was also complete and utter nonsense. A lie. Not because it couldn’t happen, but because it wasn’t the point. It was like describing a cathedral by listing the number of bricks. You missed the whole bloody point.

His mind drifted. He wasn't in his cluttered study anymore. He was back in the theatre, six months ago. They’d staged a small, experimental piece by a new writer. A quiet, devastating play about grief. At the end of one performance, an elderly man in the third row just sat there, long after everyone else had left. He wasn’t crying. He was just… sitting. Still. Eva had been about to go over to him, to see if he was alright, but Samuel had put a hand on her arm. ‘Wait,’ he’d whispered. They stood in the wings for ten minutes, watching this stranger sit in the silence. Finally, the man stood up, put on his coat, and left. He never said a word. But Samuel knew, with a certainty that went deeper than data, that something important had happened in that theatre. Something necessary.

How do you put *that* in a spreadsheet?

---

He got up and went to the kitchen, the floorboards cold beneath his bare feet. He opened the fridge and stared into its humming, brightly-lit interior without seeing anything. The problem was, he was good at this. He was good at speaking this language. He could dress up their art in the sterile vocabulary of the boardroom until it was palatable, digestible, fundable. He could write about ‘leveraging artistic assets for community cohesion’ and ‘facilitating stakeholder dialogue through performance-based methodologies’. He could make their messy, vibrant, unpredictable work sound like a safe and sensible investment.

And he hated himself for it.

He poured a glass of water and drank it standing at the counter, watching the first hint of grey light appear in the sky. The deadline was 9 a.m. He was tired. The words on the screen had started to lose their meaning, dissolving into abstract shapes. He thought about Eva, how she would describe the project. She’d talk about wonder, about connection, about holding a mirror up to the world. She’d use words like ‘heart’ and ‘soul’. Those words weren’t in the application’s glossary of approved terms.

His job was to be the translator. The bridge between their world of chaotic creation and the funders’ world of ordered finance. He was the one who had to turn the soul into something quantifiable.

Back at the desk, he reread what he’d written. It was competent. It was persuasive. It ticked all the boxes. Any committee would read it and nod approvingly. It was also dead. A carefully constructed corpse of an idea. It had none of the fire, none of the passion, none of the desperate, beautiful hope that had made them start this thing in the first place.

He remembered arguing with Eva over the Petrolex deal. He’d been the pragmatist, the realist. He’d been the one arguing that survival was more important than purity. Had he been right? He didn’t know anymore. He just knew that writing this application felt like a different kind of selling out. A slower, quieter, more insidious corrosion.

He stared at the blinking cursor. *Tap. Tap. Tap.* A tiny, digital heartbeat counting down the seconds to the deadline.

What if he just told the truth?

The thought was terrifying. It was unprofessional. It was, frankly, stupid. It would probably get their application thrown straight into the bin. They needed this money. He couldn’t afford to be reckless.

But what if he was? Just this once.

His fingers hovered over the keyboard. He took a deep breath, the air tasting of stale coffee and sleep deprivation. Then, with a decisive click, he highlighted the entire, carefully crafted section. All the KPIs, all the SROIs, all the sensible, fundable lies. And he pressed delete.

The page was blank. The cursor blinked, waiting. He began to type.

‘You ask us to measure the outcome of our project. This is a difficult question, because the thing we are trying to create is not a product. It is a space. We cannot offer you a spreadsheet that captures the value of an elderly man sitting in silence for ten minutes after a play about grief because, for the first time since his wife died, he doesn’t feel alone…’