Stairway to hell: How the fitness tracker ruins my life

I’ve never been one for numbers, but since I got a Galaxy Fit for my birthday, I’m obsessed. Why tell you I’m stressed out and sleep poorly when I can show you the cold, hard data that proves my endocrine system is on par with a guinea pig being handled by a sadistic toddler?

Am I really that tired unless I have the data to prove it? Credit: Getty Images

I wake up tired and check my sleep data, which confirms that yes, I should be tired after only five minutes of deep sleep. It’s like checking the weather app on your phone instead of looking out the window to see cyclonic winds flinging your trampoline over the fence. Am I really that tired unless I have the data to prove it?

My heart rate rarely falls within recommended resting rates, prompting my Galaxy Fit to remind me to breathe with a cute, animated flower expanding and folding in on itself. If I suddenly dropped dead, would my soulless smartwatch, sensing a lack of activity, still gently remind me to breathe?

The information is meant to be understood as a big picture; the “quantifiable self” experts would say I’m stressed because my sleep is so rubbish, and my sleep is so rubbish because I’m stressed. Maybe I’m not getting enough daily steps.

I know what I need to do to alleviate stress and sleep better: take deep breaths, learn how to meditate, avoid caffeine, alcohol and screens – basically become a vegan, silent monk who lives in the foothills of a Tibetan mountain range. But are the constant tracking and breathing reminders all that productive?

The thing about quantifying your health is that once you have the data, you have to do something with it, which is fine if you’re Bryan Johnson and blood-transfusions-from-your-son level health-obsessed, or you’re into marathons and drinking your urine. But for the rest of us plebs, tracking your health feels like something you should be doing. If the information is easily available, why wouldn’t you? It’s almost irresponsible not to!

Meghan Markle in With Love, Meghan, invites us to “elevate the ordinary”. Credit: Netflix

Maybe my Galaxy Fit isn’t gathering enough information. Sure, it can tell me what my body’s doing and how I might be feeling, but it can’t quantify other contributing factors to my mental health, such as how successfully my kids wore me down to a frazzled mess with their relentless bickering that day, how the boorish dude on MAFS who needs subtitles makes me lose hope for humanity’s survival, or how, by watching With Love, Meghan I realise I’ve failed to “elevate” the ordinary by greeting my tradie husband on his arrival home from work with a lavender-scented towel to wipe his brow. I need something that quantifies my soul, which I’m sure AI entrepreneur Sam Altman is already working on.

My main issue with all this health tracking is that I’m outsourcing my health to a computer rather than learning to listen to my body. I have a terrible relationship with my body, treating it as an Uber for my brain as I experience the world through news stories, parenting memes and podcasts. Even breathing has become gamified, another score to beat, another notification to respond to. Philosophy professor Eric Schwitzgebel recently pointed to “a striking coincidence that two much-talked-about current works of popular culture – the Apple TV+ series Severance and the film The Substance, starring Demi Moore – both explore the bewildering emotional and philosophical complications of cleaving a second, separate entity off of yourself.”

Sure, he’s not talking about smartwatch use, but he says that “increasingly, we choose to splinter ourselves”, mainly with our heavily curated social media identities. But I would argue that wearable health-tracking devices are splintering our bodies from our minds. They reinforce the notion that we can mediate our entire existence through technology rather than rely on our intelligent biological systems, which have sustained our ancestors until now. We may as well surrender our bodies to the matrix and live in Mark Zuckerberg’s digital reality, with smartwatches reminding us to breathe so we can continue the human race, because the MAFS contestants certainly won’t.

But that’s a bit extreme, I hear you say. It’s just tracking your health! What I really need are reminders to be human, like prompts asking me to check on the elderly neighbours, spend 20 minutes giving the kids my undivided attention, savour a passage of literature, or attack that 1000-piece puzzle.

This would be more useful than wondering what to do about my blood oxygen levels overnight. Information can be good, but only to a point and certainly not as a substitute for being an embodied human whose internal world can never be reduced to a graph. My Galaxy Fit just reminded me to breathe; all this existential catastrophising is getting my heart rate up.

Cherie Gilmour is a freelance writer.

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