We need a name for this disease, and it may already have one, because it’s been rampant for decades. It is the need to attach a specific number to a phenomenon that is not a single parameter, that encompasses a diversity of causes and consequences, and then treat the phenomenon as something that can be ranked, or min-maxed, or just generally be reduced to one number. And then it gets treated competitively! The most familiar example is IQ, taking a complex multivariate property like intelligence, and reducing it to this one single number, and then regarding the highest score as the best, without even considering the best…what? The best mathematician, the best musician, the best conversationalist, the best humanitarian, the best poet? It’s a sickness. We spend way too much time obsessing over the quantification of our existence.

Another example is sports and athletic performance. How much do you bench? How fast do you run 100 meters? What’s your freethrow percentage, your RBI, your golf handicap? These are all valid contributions to your performance at a game, but they don’t capture the totality of that performance, despite being easy to print on the back of a collectible sports card. In particular, they don’t come close to representing the value of that human being’s life.

It’s disturbing when someone focuses so much on the statistics of their existence that they miss the broader view of what that life is about. Case in point: Bryan Johnson, the weird millionaire who is obsessed with fine tuning every aspect of his physiology to maximize his longevity. His life is a constant whirl of pill-popping, exercise regimes, blood testing, and pointless measurement, all to a goal that he won’t get any closer to with his endless tweaking. Watching Johnson on his ridiculous hamster wheel of a life is entertaining, in a sad kind of way.

The latest news is that Johnson has a girlfriend, and he has immediately started scoring her.

Bryan Johnson, the world’s most dedicated oversharer, is in love. The 48-year-old got famous for documenting his strict diet and elaborate regimen of supplements—many of which he also sells—as well as exotic therapies including an injection of “young Swedish” stem cells, all in the pursuit of not dying, ever. And after he got a girlfriend, he told his public more than they’d ever want to know. “Just gave Kate oral sex. Goodnight everyone,” he tweeted this spring. Alas, there was more: “This is her vaginal microbiome report. 100/100 score. Top 1% of all vaginas.”

What followed was a report from a vaginal microbiome test, confirming the elite status of Kate Tolo’s. This, Johnson claimed, was a critical marker of Tolo’s overall health. (He soon began referring to his girlfriend’s genitals as “Kate’s 1%.”) Tolo then leapt into the comments, reassuring followers that she was totally fine with the world knowing that the bugs in her vagina are the very best bugs.

Wait. My first thought was about how you score a microbiome. Is this a thing? It turns out that it is.

In the simplest terms, a microbiome score is a metric designed to summarize the state of the microbial ecosystem living in your gut. It is a data-reduction tool. Instead of listing the relative proportions of hundreds of different bacterial species, a testing company uses a single number or a small set of numbers to represent the overall health and balance of your gut flora. This is analogous to a Body Mass Index (BMI) score: it condenses complex data into a single, comparable figure.

These scores are not universally standardized across the industry. Each testing company uses its own proprietary algorithm to calculate them. A “score” is meant to be a starting point, a way for you to quickly gauge whether your gut ecosystem appears healthy (often called “high diversity” or “good balance”) or potentially imbalanced (sometimes termed “dysbiosis”). However, you must distinguish between a summary score and the raw data. The raw data—the specific bacteria found and their levels—provides the most detailed and actionable information for a healthcare professional.

So it’s a scheme for reducing hundreds of numbers to one number, and different companies (that’s telling — it’s a profit-making tool) have different schemes, and it’s just as valid as BMI…which we already know is seriously flawed.

How was the sex, Bryan? What do you love about your girlfriend? He replies with a simplistic calculation of the distribution of bacteria on her body. I think you’re missing the point, Bryan.

I hope for Kate’s sake that she can keep her bacteria in tip-top shape. Would Bryan shame her if she were only in the top 5%? A yeast infection would be a devastating crisis in their relationship.