In which I state my opinion. An opinion literally no one has asked for, or is even interested in!

OMFG, fitness trackers. Waste of money and resources for the collection of so-called ‘data’ you can mentally jerk off over while learning absolutely nothing of use!

Most of what you know about how your body works is either so incomplete as to verge on useless, or is just plain wrong. Like that whole calorie theory thing turned out to be bullshit, for instance, so knowing how many calories you’ve “burned” while, I don’t know, walking on your lunch hour, is “information” that basically means nothing in the real world and so why the fuck should you be tracking it?

But fitness trackers record how long you’ve worked out! Super useful! Because, what, clocks don’t exist? You don’t need a device to tell you how long or how hard you’ve worked out, and you know it. You know every moment of your life how you’re eating, how you’re moving, how you’re feeling. A device can’t tell you shit about those things you don’t already know. Nor can a device make you care about things you don’t actually care about, or cause any change in your behavior whatsoever. Only you can do that.

And sleep problems? Bitch, please. Quit the drugs and alcohol and stimulants, stabilize your schedule, and go to bed earlier. That’s it. You don’t need a high dollar toy to tell you what you need to do to sleep better, and you fucking know it.

Your nifty new toy — and the charts and graphs it generates — will not strengthen your willpower, relax you, or increase your health. It’ll just give you a bunch of useless data and increase whatever anxiety you might have about your body or your health. I mean, come on. You already know that software has never truly changed your life for the better; generally the trend is that avoiding software is the best choice for mental, emotional, and physical health. Who doesn’t know this already?

“Fitness” tracker is an oxymoron because there’s no fitness — of anything — involved whatsoever. It’s just another high tech gadget, the mass production of which is wasting more goddamned resources so that upper class white people can learn absolutely nothing meaningful about themselves while still seeming to be doing something.

Knowing how many steps you took today is important in a total of absolutely zero ways to everyone except perhaps people in physical rehab after foot surgery. Knowing how often your heart beat today is useful only if your numbers are far, far out of the range of the norm, in which case you’d best get yourself off to a doctor and wonder how the fuck you’re so out of touch with your own body that you never noticed you were dying before. Knowing how many calories you ingested or burned is useless too, considering that the quality of calories is far more important than the quantity in terms of intake, and incredibly complicated in terms of fat storage or calories burned, so much so that these numbers are effectively meaningless.

If you really want to quantify yourself, please find some other metric (like maybe how much money or time you donated, or how many minutes you spent with friends, or how many times you think about love per hour). Unless you’re a professional athlete, having a fitness tracker is dumb. Everything you might think a fitness tracker can tell you, you already have methods of measuring: you have clocks and the internet. With clocks you can measure how long you exercise, how long you sleep, and what your pulse rate is. With the internet you can find out in an instant that your spaghetti squash Alfredo has an incredibly low G.I. for such a delicious dish. You do not need another piece of plastic and rare earth-wasting electronics to tell you shit you already know.

Plus nobody actually uses the things! They end up in random drawers within weeks. Tell you what: rather than buy a stupid piece of future landfill, just send me the a hundred bucks and an email about what you’ve eaten, and I’ll send you back a pie chart explaining that you need more fat in your diet and that you should go to fucking bed already. Win/win!