by Gary Borjesson

If you don’t have a plan, you’ll become part of someone else’s plan. —Terence McKenna

1. Wearables

This morning I headed outside first thing with my dog Theila for our daily short morning walk in the woods around our home, to stretch our legs, sniff around, and get some morning light. I looked at my new Garmin Forerunner 165 smartwatch, which I’d just started wearing the afternoon before. The first thing I saw was my sleep score, which was 67, and in case there was any confusion about the meaning of this, above the 67 was the word ‘Poor.’

I felt resentment at getting such harsh feedback first thing in the morning. Then I asked myself whether I agreed with its blunt assessment. Not really. I’d have given my sleep a score of 85. Was I missing something? Was the watch missing something? Whom should I trust? This tension raises a key theme of this essay. Put as a question: what authority should we give such feedback? How do we weigh it against the authority of our self-experience? A related question is whether we want to adopt its proposed terms of discourse in the first place. For example, the watch measures the charge of my “body battery.” Is this a playful nod to the Matrix, or are we encouraged to reduce our aliveness to the same terms we use for our phones?

I have come to admire the watch’s straightforward, metric-driven honesty. Even that first morning, it felt like I was being challenged in a useful way. The watch wasn’t tiptoeing around my feelings but calling it like it computes it, the way a tough-love coach might.

I soon realized, however, that I didn’t understand how the feedback was calculated, and what exactly it meant. For instance, take two key data points used in a range of assessments, V02 max and Heart Rate Variability (HRV). V02 max measures overall aerobic conditioning, while more variability is a sign of a rested, adaptable nervous system, and less signals stress or fatigue. The watch could meaningfully help me improve my health and fitness if I prepared myself by getting to know all this. It offers real-time, cumulative, data-crunched biofeedback that gets more accurate as the adaptive AI gets to know me. For example, the watch gathers data about your HRV for three weeks before determining your baseline score against which further scores are measured. The biofeedback can help us become more sensitive and attuned to ourselves, or it can become a substitute for this, depending on how we use it.

In any event, the technology is here to stay, it’s getting better fast, and it’s being widely adopted. Read more »