FitBit Is Also Work Now, Everything Is Work

I don’t need a little slate bracelet on my wrist to tell me what I already know about my body: it does best with regular exercise, regular meals, and regular sleep. In many ways I crave predictability; knowing that I’ll stretch in the morning and walk in the evening, that I’ll have a bowl of cereal with fruit for breakfast, and that midnight is bedtime.

But I also crave the data points streaming off my FitBit. I know them all already; I don’t need a bracelet to tell me whether I’ve slept enough, after all, but checking in is like re-reading a favorite book. By noon, I’ll have burned a little over 700 calories. If I wake up and it’s a little hard to focus, it means I’ve slept for less than seven hours.

And then Ester sent me a link to this New Inquiry essay by Moira Weigel called “Fitted,” with the comment “I didn’t have to read more than a paragraph or two, I was like, YUP NICOLE.” And I read it, and there it was right at the top:

Activity trackers train users to love lives that are all work.

And my instinctual responses, in order, were: “Wait, this is work? It’s fun! OH NO, now I’m the kind of person who thinks work is fun.”

Fans of FitBit believe that we are essentially productive. The good life divides cleanly. We should strive to leave no remainder untracked.

I’ve been tracking things since I was a very small child. When I was six or seven years old, I made a chart to go on the door of the room that my sister and I shared. It included the day’s to-dos (brush teeth, eat dinner, pick up toys) along with the times at which these items needed to be completed. It wasn’t my FitBit tracker that trained me to do this. Wearing the FitBit is like getting a character mod that makes this work easier.

And yes, I am well aware that I just typed “work.” Which means that, on some level, I do consider this work.

Every means of confession creates a kind of person who confesses. You become who you are by saying what you did. The details make a difference.

I do not share my FitBit data with anyone else. I do post the badges online, because they’re cute and because come on, I just won a badge for doing something I was naturally predisposed to do anyway, but I ignore all friend requests asking me to link my FitBit info with theirs. I’m uninterested in knowing anyone else’s stats (the work of reading other people’s numbers would be actual work) and I don’t want anyone else to know mine. And yes, part of that is because I don’t want people to know when I walk fewer than 10,000 steps per day.

But I am also very much a person who became who she is by saying what she did. My entire output on The Billfold is evidence of that. I am making myself right now. By deciding what is valuable enough to share with you, I also understand more about what I value.

Like confession and therapy, activity trackers promise to improve us by confronting us with who we are when we are not paying attention. The difference is that they produce clarity constantly, in real time.

I recently got a piece of clarity from my FitBit, and it was so delightful that I might have written this entire post just so I could share it with you. See, I was avoiding calorie counting because that’s not a metric that interests me — eat food, not too much, mostly plants or whatever — but I recently started dumping food data into FitBit because of a conversation we were having on The Toast about eating more protein and fewer carbs.

And the thing about FitBit is that if you type your food data in after every meal, you can see a running total of calories consumed and calories burned simultaneously. And when I burn more calories than I consume, I get hungry — and I start to get that hangry feeling at around 500 calories burned over consumption.

That’s not work. That’s liberation. That’s joy. That’s eliminating all of the consuming brain-chatter about “well, is this real hunger or emotional hunger, and am I just hungry because I’m bored, and do I need to have bad feelings about wanting a granola bar at 3 p.m.” That’s taken a piece of work out of my life, and given me a data point instead.

A FitBit has little tolerance for magical thinking. It says: Eating the 0% yogurt rather than 2% yogurt for lunch after sitting at your desk all morning will not make up for your past three days skipping the gym, any more than finding out why that thing Dad said still hurts you will save your new relationship.

Shut up essay stop hitting me in the feels.

A century of advertising taught consumers to think that buying leisure products was a way to access erotic experience. Not only was consuming particular things — say, clothing or cosmetics — supposed to make you sexually attractive. Consuming itself was supposed to be sexy. Sex could attach itself to, and be used to sell, anything — from a car to a hair care product to bottled water. Work was a means to acquire goods whose desirability allowed those who owned them feel desirable by extension.

Today, the exorexic eroticizes work itself. The army of women in Lululemons and Nike Frees who bound purposefully along the sidewalks of more and more American cities proclaim no specific taste, but rather an insatiable appetite for effort. They wear the uniform of an upper middle class for whom the difference between leisure and work is supposed to have disappeared.

I get a little frisson of same! when I see another FitBit wearer. That slate wristband is kind of like the American Girl doll experience, but for grownups: it comes in at right around the $100 price point, which makes it something that might require a bit of saving but is still an achievable purchase; it is a recognizable and distinctive status symbol; the people with the slate wristbands (Samantha) totally judge the people with pink wristbands (Felicity), and at some point BuzzFeed will publish “what your FitBit wristband color says about you;” and there’s an underlying understanding that this is all good for us, somehow. Because it’s educational.

Wearing a FitBit is also clearly an act of conspicuous consumption. My FitBit works just as well tucked into a pocket, but nobody can see it if it’s in my pocket.

So yes, New Inquiry, you’re right: we work to acquire this good that allows us to feel desirable by publicly displaying our desire to do more work. And we think all of this is fun, because it is. Feeling special is fun. Getting a data update on your own body is fun. Seeing a FitBit on somebody else’s wrist and thinking “I’m also participating in this part of our culture” is way fun. Taking the money we earn and using it to be same! with other people has always been fun.

The exorexic craves a challenge. Specifically, she aims to work her way out of desiring itself.

But you’re wrong there. Wearing a FitBit has not diminished my capacity for desire. Right now I desire a FitBit that is also a watch. At 3 p.m., I’ll probably desire a snack. And beyond that, I desire both a predictable and an astounding life, which is to say I desire everything.

Photo credit: Mike Mozart

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