We live in a reign of quantity, according to the French Perennialist philosopher René Guénon. This process has increased during every decade ever since and reached a point where even social media figures are more important than the quality of people’s work.
My 5 points about quality and quantity are:
1. We live in a world which is largely about quantity and numbers, such as the current economic system, people’s earnings, and the amount of followers and likes on social media.
2. Quality and quantity are connected, such as in sports, in which the players of the highest quality earn the most and get most fans.
However, this is not always the case, even among celebrities. Psy’s “Gangnam style” is of poor quality but still his video has about 20 times more views than other K-pop performers who offer products of higher quality, such as EXO and Girls’ Generation.
For common people, the quality of their performances do seldom matter and do rarely translate into quantitative ROI (Return On Investment).
3. Both quality and quantity matters. If one aims for to get some kind of credit for what one has accomplished, then one must care about the numbers at least with regard to some things that have been published. Other people will judge you by the amount of readers, followers, likes, views, etcetera, and will not take you seriously if you do not manage to get that at some point.
4. Sometimes quantity does not matter due to being bad ROI. One example might be Instagram, which has so many users who have surpassed 10 000 followers, that larger numbers are required if those ought to be translated into money. Thus it might be a waste of time to use particular strategies to gain more followers and reach a peak of about, let’s say, 5-15 000 followers. The exception would be if someone does something on social media that is directly linked to one’s occupation, but for most people it does not matter that much besides from being narcissistic supply and to feed the ego.
The opposite case is to be for instance a scholar, who puts in a lot of effort to write a Ph.D. dissertation of high quality but does not get much back in terms of neither readers nor money. That is also pretty bad ROI, although in a very different way.
5. It is often important to find a balance between quality and quantity, but it depends on context. For instance to find a balance between the quality of one’s main occupation and one’s paycheck, or the amount of friends and acquintances a person has.
Friends of higher quality, who can suffer real support and value are more important than larger number of friends of lesser value. However, it is good to have a not too small pool of friends since people tend to lose friends as they become older.
In terms of serious romantic relationships, the quality of one’s partner is all that matters whereas in a dating situation both quality and quantity matter.
