Must we always be counting?

Word counts.  Yes, I know that under certain circumstances they are important.  I know that there are times where you need to have a specific number of words, or a maximum or minimum number of words.  I get that.  I know that.  I've done that.  But there are also times where it shouldn't matter how many words you write so long as you tell the story that you want to tell and are satisfied with the end result.  If you're writing for fun, it shouldn't be about the number of words.  It should be about the story.  (You know, that thing that's been locked up in your head, driving you crazy, that you're trying to communicate to others.)  I guess I'm writing this because at times word count seems to be the main focus, and the actual content of the story is somewhere in the background hanging out and drinking a soda.  I've seen people cheer upon reaching a certain number of words while others lament the fact that they haven't reached it, or that they've had to do some editing and have lost a boatload of the little darlings.  At times there almost seems to be an invisible bar that people set in their minds, and if they drop below that bar, even if they aren't necessarily done with the story they have to tell, they immediately hit the panic button.  (Folks, the only time that you should hit that little button is if your computer crashes and takes with it all of your hard work.  Then you can smash that button to pieces.)  I mean, sure, there is the satisfaction of knowing that you've written that much, and there is the sense of loss when you find yourself deleting a lot of things that you had previously spent so much time on, but if those same things are hurting the good stuff that's staying behind, then they have to go.  You have to bite the bullet and hit delete.  (Besides, if you really cared about that stuff, you would be doing all of the editing in a new copy anyway so that you'd have the old one to look back on fondly, or not so fondly, when you read it again at a later date.)  Trust me on this for I just deleted fifteen of the last eighteen pages of a two hundred page document because things had changed and no longer made sense, and that's not counting the many pages before that that simply had to go.  (Sometimes you just have to cut, especially when you can tell what television program you were watching when you were writing.)  But never fear, for the truth is, that odds are, you'll have other work to do that will help push that count back up into your comfort zone and possibly even surpass it.  Now, all of this is not to say that I think that word counts should be destroyed or abandoned because they do have their place.  I'm just saying that they shouldn't be the be all and end all.  The important thing is to tell the story, and that means telling it right in however many words it takes.  (I'll let you know when I finally figure out how many that is.)