Inspired by a curiosity to factcheck my own feelings, I’ve been tracking my mood: Far too often a bad day can feel like a permanent state rather than a passing experience. As it turns out, observing the little coloured emojis on my mood chart, one bad day does not, in fact, mean I am doomed to live a blue crying-face life forever. Thank goodness.
Others track themselves in different ways: monitoring daily step counts, tracking sleep cycles and bodily functions, counting calories, logging meals and so on. Digital technologies, wearable devices and an array of platforms make this easier than ever. Many people set reading targets and log books read on Goodreads or films watched on Letterboxd. Some track daily outfits online with the goal of perfecting personal style. Self-tracking is regularly promoted as a way toward self-improvement.
This kind of data-driven self-surveillance can be interesting, useful, and empowering even, for some. Wired writers who created a project called the Quantified Self suggest this comes from a desire to know oneself better. But it’s also kind of weird, right? To approach life as though it’s a mathematical problem to be solved with just a bit more data. It veers too closely to the ideology of a tech bro (yikes). Indeed, the former CEO of Google wrote in his book: “with enough data and the ability to crunch it, virtually any challenge facing humanity today can be solved.” Well, there’s more data around than ever before and challenges are still abound.
We live in a society saturated in surveillance and rampant data extraction. It is now well understood that all of us are subject to a process of ‘datafication’, that various parts of life are routinely transformed into data, ready to be guzzled up and commodified by corporations. Are we adopting the business model of big tech by inflicting the same paradigm upon ourselves? We are already monitored in so many ways; by offering up even more intimate data, we play directly into the hands of companies that benefit from it the most.
The decision to subject yourself to monitoring for personal benefit is closely aligned with the concept of luxury surveillance: Some people pay to track themselves while others are forced to endure it. A person on parole may have surveillance imposed upon them by way of an ankle bracelet, while others fork out hundreds to wear the latest smartwatch. Similarly, some may closely monitor their health out of necessity. The difference is in the power and privilege to make the choice for yourself.
Then there’s the disciplining nature of the thing. I recall in the midst of the pandemic, I drew up a kind of adult star-chart on a whiteboard. Each day I’d tick off tasks such as: get dressed; exercise; read; and so on. Basic habits to make myself feel like a functioning human in the midst of chaos. There can be some satisfaction in seeing the chart fill up with stars, and I did feel better consistently doing the things I know are good for me. It also felt as if I turned into my own boss attempting to control and performance-manage myself into being a productivity machine.
More extreme versions of this are tools designed to break down the day into small, discrete slots of time to be allocated to various jobs: planners that chunk time into as little as 15 minute segments, or software designed to optimise your calendar. This strikes me as reflexive Taylorism – the theory of “scientific management” created by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the late 19th century – only instead of a boss doing it to us, we do it to ourselves. The idea is based on the notion that breaking down actions into minutely-timed segments and measuring efficiency can increase productivity. If you want to control something, the logic goes, the first step is to measure it.
We may be able to track our way to some form of self-optimisation. But should we even want to? I’m not particularly interested in assisting the process of flattening myself into an array of data points, to serve the interests of tech companies by making myself even more machine-readable. I’m not convinced that the best way to understand oneself is through quantification. Of course tracking parts of your life isn’t necessarily wrong or bad, but it seems worthwhile to question the urge to constantly seek to optimise, and to resist internalising the tech industry maxim that more data is always better. Perhaps this is trite – overly romantic – but a big, messy, joyous life isn’t going to be found in a database.
#data #track #happiness #Samantha #Floreani
