For a long time, I thought I was doing pretty well at being human. Living day to day, not totally sucking at adulting, occasionally calling my mum – you know, normal stuff. But then I started assessing my self-worth in terms of numbers on apps, and let me tell you…it’s been a nightmare.
It started with a Fitbit my sister bought me for Christmas three years ago.
“You’re going to love it,” she said gleefully as she strapped it onto my wrist. “It tracks your steps, sleep – everything!”
“I can’t wait,” I lied, planning on wearing it for about a week before guiltily hiding it in my drawer of shamefully neglected hobbies (present occupants: a ukulele, some watercolour paints, and seven notebooks journals with precisely three pages written in each).
Long story short…I became obsessed. Like embarrassingly so. The first day I hit 10,000 steps, it vibrated against my wrist and I felt this ridiculous surge of accomplishment.
I hadn’t done anything particularly noteworthy that day – walked to the corner shop, took the long way home, paced around my flat while talking on the phone for work – but sitting at my desk that afternoon, reading emails, reminded I’d reached my goal felt like a triumphant victory. Dopamine flooding through my veins. Instant addiction.
Which explained why, when I only clocked 8,743 steps the next day, I felt like such a disappointment to myself. Like I’d failed at….well, walking. An activity that homo sapiens have been excellently doing for approximately 200,000 years without the need for affirmation from a wrist buzzer.
God, imagine telling your ancestors: “Sorry great-great-grandma who had to walk six miles to fetch water from the well every single day, while also carrying your young babies in your arms—I only walked 8,743 steps today and feel hugely inadequate about it.”
…but that’s when things took a turn for the…ugh. Next came sleep tracking. Not sleeping.
Sleeping. Tracking. Suddenly my nightly routine felt like an actual competition in which people were watching me sleep and holding up scorecards at the end.
“6.5 hours, including only 1.2 of deep sleep? Wowee. What dismal form on the REM cycles.
The French judge is unimpressed.”
I’d wake up refreshed, look at my sleep score and then berate myself for feeling so good because obviously I hadn’t slept “efficiently” enough. What does that even mean? Was I unconscious for eight-ish hours?
Isn’t that sleeping successfully by definition? Add to that a period tracker. A water tracker.
Meditation timer. Productivity tracker. Mood journal.
Suddenly every minute action was being recorded and reported back to me, with graphs and stats informing me exactly how shit I was at being the highly optimized wellness guru I felt like I should be striving to be. Oh, and did I mention that then started comparing the data? “Hmm fascinating, it looks like I had a lower productivity score on days when I walked less than 10k steps.
And my mood was lower on days when my sleep efficiency was below 85%. So if I just improve my step score I can sleep better to become more productive to elevate my mood to…. actually why?
What’s the point of feeling good?”
Life became a flurry of frantic data collection, all in aid of measuring how badly I was screwing up at being me. Look, I’m not saying quantifying certain health aspects isn’t useful or amazing especially for those who need it for managing health conditions – trust me, I know there are huge positives to tracking. But for the rest of us?
It’s turned into this arbitrary points-based game of Who’s A Better Human™ that doesn’t actually track anything of value. I’ve never looked back on a moment in my life and thought “wow, I’m so glad my watch told me how many steps it took to get here.” No one dies wondering how high their sleep efficiency was. The things that truly make life worthwhile – connection, love, purpose, joy, caring for others – can’t be tracked.
My fitness pal can’t calculate the value of sitting utterly still for three hours whilst my grieving friend unloaded her heart to me. There is no Wowhead plugin for the worth of cancelling all your productivity plans to just gaze at clouds with your seven-year-old niece. But we force ourselves to quantify it anyway because numbers can be compared.
Numbers can feel actionable. Numbers make us feel like we have some semblance of control. Last month, I realised how bad it’s gotten when I was at a friend’s Ellie’s dinner party and kept unconsciously rocking back and forth in my chair.
Between courses, I’d get up and pace around the table. “Are you okay?” she asked me concerned. “Do you need to wee?”
“No no, I’m fine,” I chuckled.
Embarrassed. “I just need about 1,200 steps to reach my goal for the day.”
She paused, chopsticks half way to her mouth. “You’re pacing around my dining table to reach YOUR daily step goal?”
Fuck.
When she put it like that it sounded utterly insane. But I couldn’t stop. Not anymore.
I’d become so conditioned to tracking everything I did that I forgot how to…just exist. We’ve been sold self-tracking as a means of self-improvement. Insight.
Knowledge. When really, for most of us it’s just become another way to grade our existences and come up short. One night a few weeks ago, I went for a hike up a big hill.
Well, a mountain really but who’s counting? A bunch of mates and I were drinking wine at the top, looking out across the valley when my phone buzzed with an alert from my fitness pal reminding me it was 9pm and I hadn’t drunk enough water that day. I wanted to throw my phone off the mountain.
Earlier that year I’d spent a weekend away with friends in a cabin in the Lake District. No reception, no wifi and I’d left my charger at home so my phone quickly died on the first night. Which oddly enough, so did my Fitbit.
At first I panicked. How would I know if I’d walked enough? Slept well?
Drunk enough water? FUCK WHAT IF I WAS DOING ALL THESE THINGS WRONG AND JUST DIDN’T KNOW IT? !
But by the second day I didn’t care. Maybe it was the moderate amount of wine we were all sensibly drinking each day or finally being out in nature again after months of lockdown but I just…felt okay. At one point, we went on a long hike through glens and over mountains, my friends chatting away about some nonsense while I just soaked it all in.
When we’d got to the top and they turned to compare watches and marvel at our step counts…I realised I hadn’t checked mine the entire walk. Suddenly it hit me just how insane it was that I’d gotten to a point where I cared more about reaching 10k steps than just ENJOYING THE FUCKING VIEW. Was that weird?
Sure. But did it also remind me what it felt like to just be present in my own life? Absolutely.
I came back from that weekend determined to stop asking how many steps I walked each day and start appreciating just the simple fact that I could walk at all. And that’s when I finally took my damn Fitbit off. At first I found myself obsessively looking at my bare wrist where it usually sat.
Feelings of anxiety swimming through me as my brain scrambled to understand why I wasn’t looking at my fitness data. But soon that feeling passed. Gone were the hours where all I could think about was going for a run so I could logout of my fitness app feeling like a lean, mean 💯 machine.
Replaced with the sheer joy of putting one foot in front of another because I fancied a stroll, not because I needed to burn calories. Same goes for eating when I’m hungry, sleeping because my body tells me to. Life feels so damn simple when you stop turning basic biological functions into competitions.
Of course I still find ways to hate myself. I’m just self-loathing with a stripped back, unnecessarily analogue twist. Baby steps, am I right?
We like to think there’s some shortcut to enlightenment. That if we measure enough, track enough, collect enough data on ourselves that we’ll suddenly become self-actualised Buddha monks or something. But what if we’re actually moving farther away from ourselves?
Swallowing each new update only to find more algorithms fed to us about how we could better ourselves. When did we start listening to an algorithm tell us how well we slept more than our own bodies? When did we decide that we needed an app to tell us whether we’ve moved enough throughout the day?
My grandad lived an incredible ninety years. Never once checking his heart rate variability or worrying about how many steps he averaged each day. He just…lived.
Worked hard, played with his kids. Walked to the shops. Gardened.
Inhabited his body rather than lived on top of it. These days I’m trying to remember how to do that again. Some days are better than others.
Yesterday I woke up and caught myself subconsciously counting my steps as I walked to the post office. Motherfucker habits. But every so often, I glance down at my wrist and feel nothing but gratitude.
Gratitude that I can move my body whenever I want. That I’m alive today and able to go for a damn walk because I want to, not because my fitness tracker is judging me. These days I ask myself different questions.
Not: Did I hit my step goal today? But Did I feel happy today? Did I smile at someone I love?
Move my body in a way that felt good? Help someone in need, however small? Questions that can’t be reduced to cold, hard data.
Answers that remind me I’m more than just numbers on a screen. That I’m human.
Flawed, contradictory, beautifully imperfect human.
So if you’re looking for me…I’ll probably just be going for a walk. Not because myfitnesswatch told me I needed to burn off calories, but because the sky is blue today and I want to feel the wind on my skin. Don’t know how far I’ll wander or how many calories I’ll burn or how terrible I’ll feel about not running instead.
Truthfully, I couldn’t give a shit. For the first time in YEARS I’m just going to exist in the moment, and that my friends is, progress enough.
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