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Yes, Your Smartwatch Changes How You Think About Your Health
Why that should make you reconsider wearing one
The New York Times recently ran an op-ed by opinion editor Lindsay Crouse titled, I Ditched My Smart Watch and I Don’t Regret It. It begins with Crouse examining her relationship with her smartwatch — its transformation from helpful marathon partner into dependency-fueling symbiote — and then dives into the ensuing question: are wearable health and fitness trackers really making us more healthy?
As you may have guessed from the title of her piece, Crouse leans toward “no.”
Her argument is that the relentless stat checking the watch induces eventually supplants an intuitive sense of health and fitness. Basically, fitness trackers replace awareness of our physical and mental states with a number — one that many people feel compelled to optimize and compare with others.
I find this to be a pretty compelling take, and anyone who has checked a weather app instead of looking outside can probably appreciate the way a device can alter how we perceive and engage with the world around us.
It’s just, do we have to keep doing this?
This type of article — wherein the writer tells us about some sort of activity or product they became dependent on before realizing maybe it wasn’t so great and attempting to quit — has become its own genre in the digital age. Be it Twitter, smartphones, or social media in general, you can find stories about the struggle to extricate oneself from a particularly sticky bit of technology.
In fact, we are almost certainly going to have a Times article in the next few years about one of their opinion writers becoming addicted to an exceptionally lifelike VR headset. It will be a moving tale of one writer’s descent into a seductive and mesmerizing virtual world. Our hero won’t realize what’s happening until it’s nearly too late, straining relationships and missing deadlines as they fall deeper into virtuality.
Yet before they pass the point of no return they will have a wakeup call — perhaps the confused pleas of a neglected dog or a small child — that will lead them away from their temptations in the virtual desert and back to living a real, authentic…
