The OVER-examined life

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” said Socrates (according to Plato). But what about the over-examined life?

Socrates meant examining your beliefs, ethics and morals, your behavior towards others, your actions in the world. At least that’s what I think he meant. Unlike Plato, I did not sit at his feet and listen. Why I’m writing about this now is to comment on our current-day fascination/fixation – mania? — with over-examining our lives, particularly the many many ways we have of tracking and quantifying the health-conscious (counterclockwise) lives we would like to be living. I am the last person to argue against making every effort to live a healthy, mindful, body- and soul-enriching life. But I’m concerning about the obsessive tracking of such a life.

For Christmas this year Santa presented me with a Garmin Forerunner 620, a sophisticated wrist and chest-band tracking device that measures my heart rate, miles run, split times, calories expended. The usual. But also offers such information as my cadence (steps per minute), vertical oscillation (my bounce while running), my ground contact time (amount of time in each step spent on the ground measured in milliseconds). Not to mention my VO2 max, predicted race times for 5K, 10K, half-marathon and marathon, recovery check (real-time indication of my state of recovery within the first several minutes after a run), recovery time (optimal time until next hard work-out). It also tracks me on GPS and sends all this info to my phone. I can share it with you!

Don’t worry, I won’t.

You can buy devices, download apps and join online groups that will help you track your food intake, water consumption, alcohol intake, volume of oxygen consumed (and air quality thereof) metabolism, blood pressure, skin temperature, sleep time/ quality/ phases, moods, time spent waiting, time spent doing whatever it is you spend your time doing that isn’t waiting. If this interests you, you might want to check out The Quantified Self.

For me, there’s a line – and not really the proverbial “thin line” — between mindfulness and obsessive self-tracking. It’s important to eat clean and healthy, but is it important (or healthy) to quantify every phytochemical you ingest? Yes, we should move our bodies every day, but do I really need to know my vertical oscillation while running on the beach? I care about sleeping well, but I know when I do (or don’t) without tracking how many minutes I spend in various sleep phases. Etcetera, etcetera.

All this self-tracking, all this technology may just rob us of enjoying and experiencing life in the moment – which, really, is the core on counterclockwise living. Or so it seems to me this morning as I resist the temptation to strap on the Garmin before my foggy run.