Unpopular Opinion: Step Counters Are A Scam As Big As The Shoelace Industry
I refuse to let a judgmental piece of plastic tell me when to stand up, especially when my sofa is offering zero resistance.
I am sick of being bullied by a rectangle. For three weeks, a hostile little slab of silicone on my left wrist has been issuing orders. It buzzes when I sit down. It vibrates when I lie down. If I walk circles around the living room, it throws tiny passive-aggressive fireworks across a screen the size of a postage stamp. These fitness trackers have taken hostages, and I would like the authorities to know I am prepared to talk.
The whole business of counting steps was invented by the shoelace industry to move more aglets. This follows from simple logic. Before wrist wardens started blinking at us, nobody knew their daily total. You walked until you got to the sofa, then stopped. Now the tracker wants ten thousand steps before midnight. I end up marching through the kitchen while the microwave heats a bowl of synthetic cheese puffs, which is apparently what personal progress looks like now.
Things came to a head last Tuesday. I was in the middle of a competitive staring match with my neighbour’s indoor plant, visible through the window. It takes concentration. Then my wrist began vibrating like it had received urgent news from the government, and a stick figure told me to stand up and stretch. I blinked. The ficus won. There are losses from which a person does not fully return.
“These devices are just digital bullies trying to make us sweat for imaginary vegetables.”
Sleep tracking is worse. A watch cannot know whether I am enjoying deep restorative slumber or lying completely still while remembering everything humiliating I said in primary school. It guesses. Then it records my snoring and sends the findings to a secret underground bunker staffed by people with a longstanding objection to comfort. I will not be judged at night by a strap with a charging cable.
And the heart-rate monitor is plainly a random-number generator. Yesterday, while I sat in an armchair breathing softly, it congratulated me on a vigorous cardiovascular workout. Later I sprinted down the street to discourage a raccoon from staring at my dustbins, and it reported that I was entirely relaxed. The device is editing reality in real time. Fine. I will remain seated out of spite.
My friend Horace Tablecloth agrees. Horace knows a great deal about stationary objects. “These devices are digital bullies trying to make us sweat for imaginary vegetables,” he told me. He removed his watch and put it on his spinning record player, which convinced the gadget that he had run a marathon in forty-five minutes. Human ingenuity survives, for now.
We should stop treating a glowing piece of plastic as a personal supervisor. It needs plugging into a wall every two days and still has the nerve to demand validation from me. Ban the step counters, the heart monitors, and the wrist-based sleep critics. Physical activity used to be an unfortunate accident. An expensive rubber bracelet has turned it into homework.