I opened my phone this morning to find the screen flashing with notifications: a reminder to log my water intake for the day, a congratulatory message for being on a streak after reaching 10,000 steps yesterday, and a prompt from my period-tracking app to rate how well I slept. Before even brushing my teeth, my phone knew things about my body beyond what I knew about them.
When did we all become walking data points?
I think somehow, someway, between health anxiety brought by COVID in 2020, to our general obsession with wellness, tracking became the new normal. We track our steps, our water, our screen time, how our moods are ranging from one to five, and then, as if that weren’t enough, how well we are tracking everything else. It’s tiring, to say the least, but I think we just can’t stop.
The numbers paint a clear picture: the global health and fitness app market is projected to reach $120 billion by 2030, driven largely by our generation’s obsession with quantifying the unquantifiable. We’re not just tracking physical metrics anymore; we’re logging our emotions, our habits, our productivity, even our gratitude. There’s an app for everything, and we’ve downloaded most of them.
But the thing is, I don’t think we are trying to be healthier. I think we’re are trying to feel in control.
The Illusion of Productivity
There is something extremely satisfying about tracking the progression of those small circles on an Apple Watch. Eight glasses of water? Good job. Ten thousand steps? Amazing.. Eight hours of sleep? Or how about six and a half – “Fair,” that app calls it. We are essentially gamifying living. We are treating basic human functions as accomplishments. We are trying to win at life.
The bitter irony here is that, due to our obsessive efforts to track our various life processes, we have become so busy that we no longer live our own life. I have seen many friends interrupt good conversations so that they can input food into MyFitnessPal. Similarly, many have been caught planning walks based upon step-counting rather than destination. I myself have felt stressed about drinking enough water in late November, mid-evening, just so that I can track sufficiently for that given deadline.
But who determined that we need eight glasses of water? And why does it feel like we’ve failed somehow when we do not get them?
The Anxiety of Awareness
Screen time tracking is the cruelest gift our phones have ever provided to us. Every week on Sundays, this nagging message pops up for us: “Your screen time is up 23% this week.” Great. Just what I needed. Nothing says self-care like a weekly reminder of your digital addiction, delivered by the very device enabling it.
But we don’t delete that feature. We gaze at those graphs, our color-coded measurements of “productivity” versus “social networking” versus “entertainment”, and we swear that next week will be different. Well, spoiler alert: next week will be exactly the same. The realization won’t do anything but add guilt to our formula.
And then, god forbid, there are mood tracking apps asking you to rate your moods several times a day, generating nice pretty diagrams about your emotional cycles. In theory, this sounds incredible. In practice? You’re lying in bed feeling lousy but vaguely okay—or something. Then your phone asks you to rate how sad or glad or blissful or miserable you’re feeling, with a yellow smiling face indicating “good.” But seriously, am I feeling good? Am I feeling okay? Or am I feeling like I’m maybe done with all this information?
The Performance of Wellness
Let’s be real: mostly, the reason we track is so we can talk about tracking. There’s social currency in the metrics. Mentioning your 15,000 step day in casual conversation. Sharing your Spotify Wrapped statistics. Posting your reduced screen time like it’s a moral victory.
We’ve turned self-improvement into a spectator sport, and the scoreboard is always visible. And in college in particular, where everyone’s comparing internships and GPAs and coffee orders, tracking gives us another dimension for competition. Your meditation streak versus mine. Your sleep score versus theirs. Even rest has become a performance metric.
So What’s the Actual Point?
The thing I have come to grasp, through two years of obsessively tracking, is that data itself means nothing without us doing something about it. Knowing I spent four hours on Instagram yesterday doesn’t automatically make me spend three hours today.Seeing I only had four glasses of water doesn’t actually hydrate me.Knowledge without action is… noise.
The real question perhaps isn’t why we track everything. The real question perhaps is, “When did we start believing we should?” When did our bodies stop being spaces we occupy and start being spaces we optimize? When did life begin to require a dashboard?”
I’m not advocating for you to delete all your apps tomorrow. But perhaps we could benefit from an occasional moment of putting down the phone and simply existing. Drinking water when we’re thirsty. Exercising because it feels good, not to fill in those fitness circles. Feeling emotions without immediately categorizing them for analysis.
And the reason why the wildest thing about all this tracking? The best moments in life are generally the ones we forget to track.