Words by Annabel Bai Jackson.
For a growing community of self-trackers, data holds the answer to life's biggest questions.
In my local subway station, a billboard advertising a private diagnostic service shouts a compelling slogan: “What if your body could tell you all its secrets?” According to this tagline, your body is covert and illegible, stubbornly foreign flesh. You might muddle through symptom and sensation to try and understand it, but the method is always guesswork and the result dubious. We take this logic with us when we can’t decide whether to blame our morning fatigue on fractured circadian rhythms or late-night eating, or attribute a spike in menstrual pain to the catchall culprit of “hormones.”
For the laypeople among us, our bodies resist interpretation. But a loose group of scientific researchers, enthused techies and amateur analysts believe they have the key to decoding them: data, collected by the individual through a process called “self-tracking.” Connected to the Quantified Self (QS) movement, a phenomenon led by former Wired editors Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly which advocates for “self-knowledge through numbers,” self-tracking involves stringently recording an aspect of your physiology and parsing the resulting data.1 Popular tags on the QS online forum include “ketosis,” “productivity,” “menstruation” and “cholesterol.” Smart devices are typically used to amass data on heart rates, glucose levels and sleep phases.2
“It becomes so embedded in their
daily routine, like brushing your teeth
or eating your food.”
Since Wolf and Kelly coined the term “quantified self” in 2007, the ethos has trickled into mainstream culture: jabbing the dates of your period into apps like Flo, checking Fitbits for burned calories and chasing a 10,000-steps-a-day ideal. But for the 95,000-strong QS community, self-tracking is more than just a casual habit. “It becomes a way of life,” explains Btihaj Ajana, professor of ethics and digital culture at King’s College London and co-editor of The Quantification of Bodies in Health (2021). “It becomes so embedded in their daily routine, like brushing your teeth or eating your food.” Regimen is key: One QS-er spent over a year tracing the relationship between her menstrual cycle and her creative “eureka” moments; another diabetic QS-er used self-tracking to run a series of marathons without any food, an “impossible” feat for a person with her condition.3
Adherents take a commonplace desire—to be in charge of our own bodies—to a place of passionate, mathematical preoccupation. Because why listen to your gut, when an app can tell you what it needs? Why guess, when you can know? “Most QS-ers are technological solutionists,” says Ajana. “They believe in the power of technology to fill the gap left by human agents: doctors, nurses and healthcare institutions.” Indeed, swathes of self-trackers were provoked to join the QS community after growing dissatisfied with the medical establishment. If medical advice is predicated upon averages, standards and baselines, QS takes the idea of the individual ultra-seriously: As patient and doctor, analyst and analyzed, are rolled into one freestanding, self-reflexive unit, no specificity can be too specific.
For QS-ers, this independence can be empowering. “I use [self-tracking] as a diary,” says Jordan Clark, a self-described “data architect” working in the tech industry. In 2018, Clark presented a talk at a QS conference called “Quantifying the Effects of Microaggressions”—a creative and uniquely political approach to self-tracking, in which Clark consistently measured his heart rate variability after experiencing racial microaggressions on his college campus. “Ultimately, it’s therapeutic,” he says, explaining how the data could elucidate this much-dismissed form of stress in an evidence-based way. “Data doesn’t lie: It tells a story.”4
“Ultimately, it’s therapeutic.
Data doesn’t lie: It tells a story.”
But Clark has continued to self-track for a multitude of other purposes.5 He shows me the litany of devices he uses to turn his experience into the empirical: there’s the Oura Ring, a $299 device that tracks an array of physiological signals; the Lumen, a sleek bar that calculates your metabolic rate when puffed upon; a smart water bottle that flashes red when Clark hasn’t met his hydration goal. (His belief in the power of tracking extends beyond his own body; an electronic dog collar tells Clark’s phone whether his pet has reached his exercise target.) Faced with this collection of gadgets, the thought of making decisions based on sensation alone does begin to look woefully archaic. But at what point does listening to the numbers mean we forget to listen to our actual bodies? “Yesterday, I woke up and the battery of my Oura Ring was dead,” Clark says, regretting the lost data that would have quantified his “sleep score” for the evening. “In my eyes, it’s as if I didn’t go to sleep.”6 QS gestures toward a contradiction: People are at once desirous of control and eager to hand it over to devices; their “solutionism” is also a form of abdication. And while many QS-ers self-track precisely because it allows them to feel more embodied, there’s always the risk of alienation—of treating your body as a petri dish.
While this might ring alarm bells for any non-self-trackers, implying a way of life entirely mediated by apps and algorithms, self-trackers genuinely believe in QS’s ability to bring about a more informed society. As many self-trackers already work in tech or software engineering, they’re buoyed by a DIY spirit, building devices and embracing the sense of being at a social and technological vanguard. Clark also represents this distinctive utopian streak in the movement: He hopes to blend the basic premise of self-tracking with VR technology, and ultimately develop a new system of financially compensating people for their data. “It gives me a sense of purpose to do this stuff,” Clark says, “but I acknowledge that I’m very unique in that—right now.”
Among the graphs, charts and conferences, what actually seems to be revealed in the process of self-tracking is the lively, dynamic tension between instinct and quantification—between the human desire to eat, exercise or train as much as the body wants, and the ring-fencing implicitly imposed by self-tracking. This negotiation is clearly stimulating and worthwhile for the majority of self-trackers. But, like all forms of self-regulation, it can become excessive. Alexandra Carmichael, who was once the director of the Quantified Self, wrote a poem in 2010 called “Why I Stopped Tracking”:
Each day
My self-worth was tied to the data
One pound heavier this morning?
You’re fat.
2g too much fat ingested?
You’re out of control.
This is a reminder of a claim Ajana makes: that the way a self-tracker interprets data does not take place in a vacuum, but also bears “its own political and ethical dimensions.” Why a self-tracker would seek to be one pound lighter, or ingest 2 grams less fat, is of course wrapped up in social mores. Carmichael’s words expose one of the difficult frictions at the heart of QS: Despite being individualized and data-driven, it can’t help but replicate the ideals of the social world beyond.
In 2004, the writer Mark Greif penned an amusingly prescient polemic against the quantification of our bodies called “Against Exercise,” in which he observed the way an “individual’s numbers” attain “talismanic status.” The risk of data transforming into totems is always present in the QS community. It’s what makes finding a balance so difficult: “We have to achieve that middle ground,” says Ajana, “but that’s always elusive.”
