Data Madness

 

Anxiety, Head of a Girl
Jean-Baptiste Greuse (1725-1805)
Photo Credit: Victoria Art Gallery  [CC  BY-NC-ND]

It all started ... because of a recurring argument with his boyfriend. His partner didn't think they spent enough time together, but Adam thought that they did. There was only one way to settle this, he decided: cold, hard data. So he began keeping a note of the days they saw each other and the days they didn't

"It started with just one element," he told me, "But then you're like, is there more stuff to track?" The spreadsheet expanded; soon, he was tracking his sleep, social engagements, exercise regime and cultural intake. He even started to record, on a scale of one to eight, how much cheese he had eaten that day...

While gathering data about our lives might once have been a fringe pursuit for Silicon Valley tech nerds, now it's just an everyday activity for many of us. We track our step counts, calories consumed, exercise completed, menstrual cycle or hours slept. We list books books we've read on Goodreads, our top films on Letterboxd, or share our most-played music via the data presented by Spotify Wrapped.

Today an average smartphone has a host of self-tracking tools built in - the iPhone Health function can help you keep track of your mood, mobility and nutrition, but also sexual activity, toothbrushing and time spent in daylight. Then there are the tracking tools: smartwatches on wrists, smart rings on fingers, Zoe glucose monitoring patches on arms, fitness trackers turning every step of that parkrun into thousands of data points. The latest is a £210 device that promises to monitor blood pressure, 24/7. In a recent YouGov poll, almost 40% of Britons surveyed said that they own a wearable device.

Beneath all this is a promise: understand your life better with data and you can improve it... But can a human life be reduced to a dataset? Can a body be tuned up like a machine? or is this explosion of self-tracking simply narcissism redesigned for the age of big data, by a society that has internalised the tech industry maxim that more data is always better? ...

(Tom Faber, The Guardian, 2025)

Thank God that Tom started asking himself some questions! Do the people who monitor how many steps they undertake become anxious when they don't meet their target? Do they think that they could have done more? Are they ever content or are they in a constant state of  distress or self-analysis?