Perfectly Quantified Dream Girl
I don't need all this data analysis!
Hey! So I wanted to get back into the habit of writing on here. I’m going to send a newsletter every Sunday (hold me to this!). Sometimes it might be something serious, sometimes it might just be my shopping list. Who knows! This week I wanted to share an essay I’ve been working on for a while.
Anyway, all my love,
Freya x
Somewhere along the way of my life, I started to count everything. Every morning, I recollect the number of hours I spent sleeping. If it’s more than seven, I know that I can function. Over breakfast, I check my bank balance to soothe any creeping fears about rent payments. My banking app is all cartoon colours and san serif fonts: that doesn’t stop me from equating the figure it displays with a severe moral status.
As the rest of my day unfolds, I might pick up other numbers – book pages read, emails left unanswered, hours worked – that I use to weigh up how well I’m doing. If I feel agitated, I open an app that tells me how many days until my period starts. Then, before bed, I mull over my steps and my screentime, the two deciding figures that determine whether or not I am on course for success.
I count so I can quantify, and I quantify because I fell for the fantasy that there is an optimal version of myself that can be hacked into existence. It’s an idea that I first came across when I was a teenager hooked on pretty YouTube videos. I watched girls who were not much older than me perform ‘5am Morning Routines’ and ‘Healthy & Productive Days in my Life’ cut to music downloaded from SoundCloud. My pursuit of a life like theirs led me to personal development podcasts and apps that promised to keep track of everything that felt beyond my control. The Pinterest pictures of bullet journals blended with Silicon Valley talk of ‘getting 1% better everyday’.
There’s a variety of schtickmongers on hand to offer you wisdom, depending on your taste – monochrome tech bros, wide-eyed university students, women in matcha-coloured gym sets – but they all sell the same story: you can understand yourself by measuring yourself, and by measuring yourself, you can fix yourself. And hey – it’s all super easy because you have your very own data tracker in the form of your phone.
We spend so much time with technology that we’ve started to talk about each other as if we’re fleshy computers. Health tech companies tell us that we can optimise our energy levels and life expectancy if we measure our blood sugar and fat. Zoe, a personal nutrition project with a bubbly social media presence, even has an app that will give you a ‘personalised food score’.
It’s a tendency that goes beyond the sphere of self-help and wellness. Me and my friends talk about our ‘eras’, borrowing from pop star marketing, as if our lives can be divided up into neatly defined units. I’m pretty sure that the suspicious number of young professionals signing up for half marathons can be traced to the ubiquity of Strava, a fitness app that breaks down any physical activity into stats and graphs. And even reading has become riddled with Goodreads charts and discourse about how many books you should read in a year (too little is bad, but too many is worse – it implies a diet of romances and YA, which is not cool).
There’s records of people tracking little bits of information about their lives throughout history. Women have long tracked their periods with notches on sticks and beads on ropes. Benjamin Franklin kept a prototype habit journal to record his adherence to 13 virtues, adding a mark next to one if he believed he had been at fault. An American man called William Worcester Dudley kept a food diary of everything he ate between 1785 and 1786, while fairytale writer Hans Christian Andersen put a cross in his journals every time he masturbated.
Still, the way we track ourselves now has an altogether different quality to the record-keeping of the past. It’s numerical and it’s pervasive. Our access to technology has made it second-nature – so second-nature, in fact, that it’s easy to forget that this is not a normal human habit. Marketers say that wearable tech and data-tracking apps are helpful tools that serve an already existing urge to measure ourselves in granular detail. Is that really true?
Counting as a way of living used to be an offbeat hobby. It gathered pace in the late 2000s with the formation of the Quantified Self movement on the west coast of America. Two journalists, Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly, started running meetups in the San Francisco Bay Area where devotees would share their measuring methods and personal experiments. The mix of quirky nerdiness and Big Tech backing gave the movement an appeal just outside the mainstream. By 2011, there were QS meetups in more than 20 cities around the world.
One article describes a group of Quantified Selfers at a meeting outside Boston as a group of men, mostly, in their twenties and thirties. Members shared how caffeine impacted their concentration levels, or how wearing orange tinted glasses affected their sleep, all backed up with self-recorded data. At another meeting, one man shared stats on his wife’s menstrual cycle going back 10 years.
A 2013 PBS news segment follows a man named Bob who tracks everything from his blood glucose levels to his ‘productivity rate’. The presenter says that people might find his habits strange and he asks Bob if he thinks that he’s extreme.
‘My goal is to be an optimal human being in every aspect of my life,’ Bob replies.
The media coverage of the movement in the early 2010s spins the QS members as odd, and, in the more sceptical articles, narcissistic. They attracted a lot of magazine feature writers who viewed the group with endearing curiosity: a sweet nerdy pastime for sweet nerdy people. Many of the members, though, weren’t just hobbyists with a lingering teenage love for numbers. They were data scientists, software engineers, and computer programmers, often at powerful companies. Lurking somewhere in the background, too, were financers looking to cash in.
In 2011, a Silicon Valley investor named Tim Chang told the Financial Times that the Quantified Self movement was the ‘geeky early adopter stage’ of something much bigger.
‘Over the next five to 10 years, self-tracking will be critical to wellness,’ Chang said.
‘It will be consumer-led, not prescribed by your doctor or mandated by your insurance company.’
I like to imagine that Chang is currently lounging around in a huge Californian mansion paid for entirely by dividends from his data-tracking wellness investments. Quantified Self meetings became slowly more sporadic, but its demise was not because its devotees lost interest. Instead, the movement no longer needed to define itself as such, because its ideas went mainstream.
Today, daily data collection is effortless. My habitual counting and quantifying doesn’t feel obsessive because I barely need to think about it. The quietness of it, though, is why it makes me feel uneasy.
Big Tech’s data grab is sinister for many reasons. It enables obsessive behaviours, it monetises surveillance, and it profits from misinformation and disorder. I think, too – less paramount than those issues, but still potent – that the datafication of daily life has subtly changed the way I see the world. I can’t speak for all of us, but I want to know: have you too started to contain and categorise your emotions? Do you believe you can counteract uncertainty with 8000 steps a day? Is there a numerical evaluation – income, weight, followers, whatever – paired with every new person that you meet?
Our quantified world wants to believe that we should count the minutes spent daydreaming and rate the quality of our kisses. But life isn’t like that. It’s messy, complicated, and liquid. It can’t all be contained, and our attempts to do so leave us struggling to come to terms with the bits that don’t fit. Optimising one thing leaves other parts lacking, too. All that curiosity channelled into understanding ourselves, as if we are complex equations to be solved, is curiosity that was once directed at the world around us.
I do all this counting because I think that I’m bettering myself, but really, I’m just making it easier for an algorithm to understand me. I want to resist that. I want a life that takes time to explain and I want to let days pass by without any digital evidence that they ever occurred. These are things I’m not quite sure how to do yet – after all, I carry my data-collecting devices with me pretty much everywhere I go, and damn, I don’t want to give that up. I love my phone! I love technology! I even – despite the tone of this essay – love looking at little colourful pie charts from time to time! That’s the difficult thing with modern life, isn’t it: reaping the benefits without it riddling your brain. But I’ll try, and I hope I’ll find colour and meaning beyond my daily stream of data analysis. There’s joy, I know, in the parts of ourselves that we will never understand.