On most mornings, I go to the balcony to take in the air of the day, whether rain or shine. I started this ritual as a replacement for being on my phone early in the day. I find it self-conscious, but I have come to love it. Standing out there also allows me to get involved in business that does not concern me.
On one of those days, I watched as my neighbor came out for his usual run but he came back about 5 minutes later. I made a joke about how he has now maxed out human speed and achieved 10km in a few minutes. He laughed and said he’d forgotten his watch.
This essay wouldn’t exist if he hadn’t said the next thing. Running without my watch is like I have not run at all. I spent a lot of that day thinking about how obscene the statement was.
The ordinary world is now gone, and has been replaced with tools of measurement. Not only is every digital activity a data collection exercise, but also are other ordinary things that we do every day: reading, walking, praying, and sleeping. What was once simply living has become, in the hands of industry and in our own hands, a resource to be measured and optimised.
You don’t simply take a walk anymore; you aim to achieve 10000 steps and share it with strangers online who are trying to achieve the same. We understand from Daniel Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist, that 10000 steps a day is not science-backed and came from a marketing campaign. In 1964, a Japanese company released a pedometer and called it the Manpo-kei, which translates as “ten thousand steps meter.” We restructured daily life around a number that was invented to sell a pedometer.
Sleep is proof that this has gone too far. Millions of people now wake up to a score of their REM cycles, heart rate, oxygen levels, restlessness, snoring, etc. This has clinical consequences. In 2017, a clinical researcher, Kelly Baron, named a disorder called orthosomnia, referring to an obsessive pursuit of optimal sleep driven by sleep tracker data. Patients were becoming so preoccupied with improving their sleep data that the preoccupation itself was causing insomnia.
Michel Foucault once described a prison with a watchtower at the centre. The design was such that inmates could be watched at any moment without knowing when. The result was that the inmates eventually started policing themselves. There isn’t a more accurate representation of the current reality: individuals are conducting surveillance on themselves on behalf of tech companies.
Fixation on metrics is a tyranny of the self. In my personal life, tracking has become a source of anxiety. I use MuslimPro, a very popular app in the muslim community. It helps me log my prayers and fasts. For a while, I found it very useful, and perhaps helped to strengthen my faith. But it soon became overwhelming, and I sometimes felt the need to do a prayer just so I could have 5 ticks on the app before the day was over. Some would argue this is effective in keeping me accountable, but it at some point became a mindless logging game, rather than a conscious decision to be in prayer.
We must build the courage to do things and let them disappear, knowing that the efforts we have applied have been recorded by our body and mind; there is no better database.