We have more data about ourselves than ever. But can we really monitor our happiness? | Samantha Floreani
INaspirate by a curiosity to control my feelings, I monitored my mood: too often a bad day may seem like a permanent state rather than a passage experience. Apparently, observing the small colored emojis on my mood card, a bad day does not mean, in fact, it means that I am condemned to live a blue life cried forever. Thanks to the sky.
Others Trace yourself in different ways: Monitoring of the counts of the daily steps, monitor sleep cycles and body functions, the count of calories, recording meals and so on. Digital technologies, wearable devices and a series of platforms make it easier than ever. Many people set reading goals and on -board books read on Goodreds or movies WATCH ON LITTERBOXD. Some monitor daily clothes online with the aim of perfecting personal style. Self-tracking is regularly promoted as a way to self-muffle.
This type of data based on data can be interesting, useful and enhancer for some. Wired writers who created a project called the quantified self Suggest that this derives from the desire to get to know yourself better. But it’s also a little strange, right? Approach life as if it were It is a mathematical problem to be solved With just a little more data. It comes too close to the ideology of a technological brother (Yikes). In fact, the former Google CEO wrote in her book: “With enough data and the ability to creak them, practically any challenge that has to face humanity today can be resolved”. Well, there are more data than ever and the challenges are still abundant.
We live in a saturation society of surveillance and rampant data draws. Now it is well understood that all of us are subject to a “date” process, that various parts of life are usually transformed into data, ready to be guided and commodified by the companies. Are we adopting the business model of great technology by inflicting the same paradigm on ourselves? We are already monitored in so many ways; By offering even more intimate data, we play directly in the hands of the companies that benefit more.
The decision to submit to monitoring for personal benefit is strictly aligned with the concept of luxury surveillance: Some people pay to trace themselves while others are forced to endure it. A person of conditional freedom can have surveillance imposed on them by means of an ankle bracelet, while others pay hundreds of people to wear the last smartwatch. In the same way, some can monitor their health up close by necessity. The difference is in the power and privilege of making the choice for yourself.
Then there is the discipline nature of the thing. I remember in the middle of the pandemic, I developed a kind of star cartel for adults on a blackboard. Every day I would adapt tasks such as: dressing you; exercise; Light; and so on. The basic habits to make me feel a working human being in the middle of chaos. There may be a certain satisfaction in seeing the graphic designer to fill with stars and I felt better to make the things I know in a coherent way are good for me. It also seemed to me that I had transformed myself into my boss trying to control and manage performance to be a productivity machine.
More extreme versions of this are tools designed to break down the day in small and discreet time slots to be assigned to various jobs: planners who do time at a minimum of 15 minutes or software designed to optimize the calendar. This strikes me as a reflective taylorism – the theory of “scientific management” created by Frederick Winslow Taylor at the end of the nineteenth century – only instead of a garment that does it, we do it to ourselves. The idea is based on the idea that reducing actions into meticulously segments and efficiency measurement can increase productivity. If you want to check something, the logic goes, the first step is to measure it.
We could be able to trace our way to some form of self-tacting. But should we even want to? I am not particularly interested in assisting the process of flattening myself in a series of databases, to serve the interests of technological companies by making me even more readable for the machine. I am not convinced that the best way to understand yourself is through quantification. Obviously, the monitoring of parts of your life is not necessarily wrong or bad, but it seems useful to question the impulse of constantly trying to optimize and resist the internship of the technological sector that are more data and better. Perhaps this is trivial – excessively romantic – but a large, disordered and joyful life is not found in a database.
