Fitness-Ringe und falsche Optimierung

Derek Thompson:

The demise of the nightcap wasn’t the only way the ring changed my life. More profoundly, it altered my relationship to activity. Before a walk, after a workout, or even after a nap, I would check in with the app to see my Readiness, Activity, and Sleep scores. Each day was now compared with—even set in competition against—the previous day or the previous week. The ring pulled me into a feedback loop with a biometric technology that turned my body into a game board through which I could win or lose points.

The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, who writes about the philosophy of games and metrics, has said that the modern world’s blizzard of numbers can obscure our wise yet murky questions about life and replace them with easy and legible goals. For example, someone might become a journalist to uncover important truths but then devote each week’s labor to maximizing page views; or she might get into philosophy to think about the deepest life questions but devote her life to maximizing her h-index. “Metrics are useful because they compress information,” Nguyen told me. “They are dangerous, because they compress information.”

At its best, the ring makes me fitter, happier, and, sure, even more productive. I walk more, lift more, sleep more, and drink less. You will be hard-pressed to find a physician who thinks there’s anything amiss in the previous sentence.

But the same doctor might not see how the obsession with winning the measurable games of health can encroach on the less measurable games of life. The best way to sleep more is to see fewer friends in the evening. The best way to lift more during the week is to eliminate social lunches to protect my midday gym time. To become a measurably enhanced self often means eliminating my less quantifiable sources of meaning and happiness.

The ring improved my life. But its form of self-improvement often pulls me away from other people.

Der ganze Text auf Substack.

Ich bin ein Fan von Zahlen, halte aber wenig von ihnen im Privatleben. Ich möchte selbst spüren, ob ich mehr Bewegung, Schlaf oder eine andere Ernährung brauche. Das ist mein bare minimum, um ein akzeptables Leben überhaupt andenken zu können.