This chapter critically examines why impact measuring is not working within the UK’s cultural sector. It highlights how impact measuring distorts priorities, threatens the sector’s long-term sustainability, pushes it towards homogenisation and short-termism, and risks undermining the vibrancy and experimentation of the cultural sector itself. Drawing on 15 years of insider experience as an impact officer and evaluator in museums, heritage projects, and arts-based research at universities, it argues that impact assessment, rooted in neoliberal and managerialist agendas, has evolved into something else—something that lends legitimacy to advocacy and accountability. Impact measuring is inherently flawed, relying on the assumption that impact can be measured objectively—a deeply flawed premise that is often dismissed or ignored. Instead, impact has evolved into a performative, bureaucratic exercise that leads to a cycle of superficial reports and resource waste and has a detrimental effect on the cultural outputs themselves. It is a tool that incentivises impact inflation, marginalises experimental work, and reinforces a technocratic, impact-driven bureaucracy. The chapter advocates for a shift: resources should be invested in how we interact with cultural outputs to become a valuable resource for the cultural producers themselves, with advocacy kept as a separate process. More importantly, the focus should be on supporting the originality and integrity of cultural work—values that, throughout history, have had the most meaningful impact. Ultimately, it calls for a shift away from superficial metrics towards supporting the true, long-term potential of arts and culture to influence society.