[UPDATE Dec. 4, 2023: I've decided to buy another fitbit tracker. Even so, I'll keep this post up.]
I'm taking a pause from my fitness tracker. (I'm not disclosing the brand name of the tracker I use. Just think of Bart Simpson calling his frisbee a "novelty flying disk," and you can probably guess which tracker it is.)
The reasons are many.
They have a shelf life of about a year before they break or their battery, which can't be replaced, goes bad.
The band the company uses seems to aggravate my skin. Not a lot and it's not uncomfortable. It's just a red spot that disappears if I don't wear the thing for a couple days. Even so, I don't like that. It's also very hard to find a replacement band of different material that actually can be attached to the tracker. Along those lines, the company's official band is needlessly difficult to attach and requires the dexterity of a Swiss watchmaker to do successfully.
The brand I've been using is merging with an online search engine company that seems to be taking over much of the world, and I want to keep some information private. Not that anyone wants to know my steps and heart rate, the principle uses to which I put it. But there has to be a line someone.
Okay, those are brand specific concerns. I have other concerns that aren't brand specific.
The price is too high. $100 (or more) for what is really an enhanced wristwatch just seems like too much. A real wristwatch might not last much longer than a tracker, but it'll cost only about $20. Too be clear, I can afford to pay for a tracker. My circumstances are that good (so far, knock on wood).
The tracker is also one more device that monitors my movements and to-doings. I already have a smartphone and a tablet and a home internet connection. I also subscribe to streaming services. Also--though I'm embarrassed to admit it--I'm a regular customer of the online merchandiser that everyone knows about and that that supposedly does any number of horrible things.
I realize that there are ways to minimize the connections and monitoring. I can create a dummy account at the search engine company. I can turn off notifications so that I don't get text messages on my tracker, and turn off bluetooth on my smartphone so that those messages don't get sent in the first place. But I just want a stronger barrier.
It's also true that the tracker is just a measuring instrument, and measuring instruments always have margins of error. It's hard to know the margin of error of any tracker, even if we grant that the technology is always improving. My work, for example involves shuffling a lot of papers and files. I don't want dox my self and disclose my career, but I mean LITERALLY shuffling papers, not the "person at a desk who fills out paperwork" type of shuffling. I notice that after sitting for, say, a half-hour shuffling, I'll register maybe 200 to 500 steps without lifting a foot.
Speaking of steps, I've grown too dependent on them. Avoiding the "only 250 steps to go this hour!" notifications has become an end in itself. So much so that I walk the 250 steps at the BEGINNING of the hour so I won't be reminded to do it at the end. (Given the way my "paper shuffling" job counts nonexistent steps, there's always a chance that I wouldn't be reminded. But that's how my obsession works.) For some reason, turning off those notifications for some reason is very hard for me to do.
I've also gotten too dependent on the heart rate counts. I like seeing what my heart rate is at any given moment, with the proviso from above that I don't know the margin of error of how well the tracker actually monitors the heart rate.
It's that dependency which grates on me. I feel like I "need" the tracker. In fact, it's difficult for me, right now, not to be wearing the tracker. Yesterday I also didn't wear it. And I missed it. On one level, missing it probably doesn't necessarily mean much. If give up something you enjoy, you're of course going to miss it. But in this case, "missing it" comes with a sense of guilt or even panic.
Don't worry! The panic is VERY mild and definitely sub-clinical. But it's there. It's a persistent worry that maybe, just maybe today is the day that I'm not getting some information that I very much need to manage my health. Or it's the worry that I'm slacking off, no longer doing the exercises that, to now, have helped me stay (knock on wood, hope for the best, realizing we're all mortal, etc., etc., etc.) as healthy as any newly minted quinquagenarian with creeping high blood pressure has a right to expect.
So I'll give it a couple weeks. The reason I'm doing it now is because my tracker just broke and would need to buy a new one. That makes now a "natural" time to take a break.
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