The buzz on your wrist is insistent. Not angry, not yet, but a persistent, digital nudge that says you are incomplete. You’ve been sitting for 48 minutes straight. Your move ring, a circle of mocking, vibrant red, is only two-thirds full. The day is almost over. A familiar, low-grade anxiety settles in your stomach. It’s the same feeling you get when you have 8 unread emails from your boss. It’s the feeling of a task undone.
So you get on the stationary bike. The one tucked in the corner of the room, facing a beige wall. You pedal. Not with joy, not with any sense of purpose other than appeasing the algorithm. You watch the numbers on the tiny screen climb. Calories burned: 18, 28, 38. You’re not moving your body through space; you are generating data to close a loop.
This isn’t exercise. It’s administration.
The relentless quantification of movement strips it of its inherent joy and purpose.
We fell for it so beautifully. We were promised that data would set us free. Track your steps, monitor your sleep, log your macros, and you will unlock the optimal human experience. And for a while, it worked. I loved it. I admit it freely. I loved watching my resting heart rate drop by 8 points over a few months. I felt a surge of pride seeing my VO2 max estimate creep into the ‘excellent’ category. Each notification was a gold star, a pat on the head from a disembodied coach who lived in the cloud. I was doing it right. My efforts were being validated, quantified, and graphed.
A run through the woods wasn’t a chance to feel the cool air and hear the crunch of leaves; it was a mission to stay in Heart Rate Zone 2 for 28 minutes. A swim in the ocean was less about the raw power of the water and more about whether the GPS would accurately track the distance. The experience itself had become secondary to its digital ghost, the record it would leave behind. We’ve become archivists of our own activity, curators of a museum of movement that we were too busy documenting to actually enjoy.
This reminds me of something incredibly awkward that happened last week. I was walking down the street and saw an acquaintance wave enthusiastically in my direction. I gave a big, friendly wave back, a wide smile plastered on my face. It was only after a few seconds of sustained, un-returned eye contact that I realized they were waving at the person directly behind me. The heat rushed to my face. My gesture was technically correct-a wave is a wave-but it was completely misplaced.
It was an action without context. That’s what it feels like to pedal on a stationary bike to please a watch. It’s a technically correct motion, entirely stripped of its meaning.
I’m not saying we should all throw our trackers in a river. That’s the kind of dramatic, black-and-white thinking that gets us into these messes in the first place. I tried that for about two weeks and just felt disconnected. The problem isn’t the data. The problem is our worship of it.
Play is, by its nature, gloriously inefficient. It serves no purpose other than its own execution. It’s aimless. It’s what a child does when they spin in circles until they get dizzy and fall down laughing. There’s no metric for that. No ring to close.
I was talking about this with my friend, Riley T.-M., who has one of the most interesting minds I know. Riley is a crossword puzzle constructor. Their job is to create intricate little worlds of logic and language, constrained by a rigid grid and a set of unforgiving rules. Yet, the entire point of their work is to create a moment of playful discovery for someone else. Riley approaches their own physical well-being the same way.
Instead, they slowly started building a small home gym, piece by piece. Their goal wasn’t to burn 348 calories; it was to solve physical puzzles. They wanted to see if they could master the complex geometry of a kettlebell swing or finally achieve a full pistol squat. It was about building skills, not just accumulating stats. They spent months researching, looking for a centerpiece that was more like a toolbox than a single-use gadget, something like the best power rack in Australia that could adapt to dozens of different “puzzles.” For Riley, the equipment isn’t for reps and sets; it’s a jungle gym for solving the problem of their own body in space.
Calories Burned?
What cool thing today?
The shift is subtle but profound. It’s the difference between asking “How many calories did I burn?” and “What cool thing can my body do today?”
My own turning point came after a disastrous 10k race I had trained for with near-obsessive precision. My watch was my master. I hit every target heart rate, every prescribed pace for 8 weeks straight. I had spreadsheets. I had graphs. My projected finish time, according to the algorithm, was a personal best.
On race day, I felt flat. The weather was unexpectedly humid, and I’d had a poor night’s sleep. My body was screaming at me to slow down, to adjust. But the watch on my wrist was telling me I was off-pace. I listened to the watch. I tried to force my body to match the predetermined data points. I ended up cramping so badly at kilometer 8 that I had to walk the rest of the way, finishing 18 minutes slower than my previous, less-“optimized” race.
Data Betrayal: The 10k Crash
I had trusted the data more than my own senses. I let the ghost in the machine override the living, breathing person doing the work.
We need to reclaim movement as a form of expression. As a source of simple, uncomplicated, and untracked joy. What would you do if no one was counting? Would you dance in the kitchen while waiting for the kettle to boil? Would you try to balance on a fallen log in the park? Would you throw a ball against a wall for 18 minutes just to enjoy the satisfying thud?
This isn’t an argument for mediocrity. Play is demanding. Learning a new skill, whether it’s a handstand or a perfect deadlift, requires discipline and effort. But the motivation is intrinsic. The reward is the act itself, the feeling of mastery, the quiet click of a new neural pathway locking into place. The data can be a useful byproduct, a faint echo of the real event, but it can never be the reason.
The map is not the territory.
So maybe the goal isn’t to close the rings. Maybe the goal is to forget they exist, even for just a little while. To move for the simple, rebellious pleasure of it. To get a little bit dizzy. To feel your muscles work and your lungs burn, not because an app told you to, but because you remembered, deep down, that it feels good to be alive in a body that can move.