Life beyond the grid

It is not that I couldn’t learn Excel. The cells beckoned, formulas blinked like arcane incantations, and macros promised productivity bordering on the divine. But somewhere between the IF and the VLOOKUP, I paused. Something about the spreadsheet—those neat rows and columns, each a little coffin of clarity—that felt like an erasure.

The spreadsheet is not just a tool. It is a worldview. It organises everything—budgets, birthdays, breakups, even morality—into manageable, sortable units. It offers the illusion of control. Beneath that illusion, however, lies a quiet tyranny: the triumph of quantification over intuition, predictability over possibility.

We now live in an era of spreadsheet determinism, where anything that cannot be modelled is treated as unreal. If it cannot be forecast, it is deemed undeserving of existence. For those who do not naturally think in grids and projections, survival itself begins to feel conditional—especially in business environments where modelling is mistaken for intelligence. 

I often imagine a novelist submitting a manuscript, only to be told that the work has ‘low ROI’. I don’t blame Excel for that verdict. I blame the mindset that asks fiction to perform like an asset class.

Futures and options, those glittering derivatives born in the crucible of financial ingenuity, are merely symptoms of this broader malaise. Finance professionals, trained to reduce the world to risk and reward, now occupy positions of disproportionate cultural authority. Their tools quietly become our truths. They speak in volatility curves and Sharpe ratios, and the rest of us are expected to nod, enlightened. But what they model is not life. It is only what can be made legible to a model.

The spreadsheet did not predict the loneliness of remote work. It did not account for the moral fatigue of surviving a pandemic while dashboards tracked ‘efficiency’. It could not flag the slow erosion of meaning in lives where the KPIs looked immaculate. These things fall outside the pivot table, and so they are rendered invisible.

To resist the spreadsheet, then, is not to resist order. It is to resist a singular definition of order. We are not anti-logic; we are anti-reductionist.

There is a deeper distortion at play. When finance, Harvard-polished and Morgan-Stanley-endorsed, becomes the default language of transformation, everything else is dismissed as noise. This is how the world’s largest food company, Nestlé, ends up with a lower market capitalisation (MCap) than Netflix. Swiggy’s algorithm is undoubtedly impressive. But we should hesitate before rating it above the brick-and-mortar enterprises that quietly built the world we inhabit. Market capitalisation, after all, bears no necessary relationship to tangible value, social utility, or productive capacity. When valuations reward quirks in apps more than decades of real investment, one has to ask whether anyone would still choose to build old-style enterprises at all. A fairer valuation grammar may be essential. 

And let us also not forget the general welfare that old-time private and public enterprises once extended to their employees and families. It was a fuller cosmology. It included healthcare, schools, living quarters, libraries, and townships that blurred the line between work and community. They were social ecosystems that were imperfect yet enduring. Labour therein was tethered to a sense of continuity and care.

None of this is to deny the virtues of productivity, upskilling, machining, or the necessary pruning of flab. There is value in making enterprises agile, in questioning inefficiencies, and in refusing nostalgia as an excuse for stagnation. But when welfare is dismissed as excess weight on a balance sheet, something essential is lost.

What gets lost in this transition is not merely a set of benefits or structures. It is a way of imagining value itself in life. Now, the humanities are politely sidelined. Psychology is labelled ‘soft’. Philosophy becomes an indulgence. Governance, art, climate, and education are handed over to consultants armed with spreadsheets.

But you cannot spreadsheet a forest. Or a friendship. Or a revolution (Bitcoin included).

True transformation does not come from optimising inputs. It comes from the untidy persistence of human will, from failure, contradiction, and empathy. These are not values you can enter into a cell. 

And so, I never learnt Excel. Not out of defiance, but as an act of quiet rebellion. It is to remind myself that not all things that count can be counted, and not all things that count need to be.

I remain eternally grateful to my CEO, who once said, without fuss, that I could delegate my Excel work to ‘someone else who knows it’. He added that I should rather focus on my strengths than learn Excel.

Thank you, Sir.

(The writer is a journalist- turned-communications professional based in Bengaluru)