Cool Girls Don't...Self-Optimise

OPTIMISATION FATIGUE?

Gimme this ring over a smart ring please. @Annika Inez

I was clearing out a drawer this week (boring, moving house soon) and found my husband's Apple Watch under some papers, dead of battery. He used to love that thing. I call out to him should I put it on the charger?…"Nah, not bothered about that tracking stuff anymore."

Next day I was bumped into a creative director friend in the coffee shop so we sat down together. She told me how she'd decided, just that morning, to delete her sleep tracker. "I’m tired of being told how I’m supposed to be feeling".

And yesterday a viral Tweet showed up in my feed from the CEO of tech business Creator Buddy, Alex Finn, explaining he’d “Got rid of my Apple Watch. Got rid of my Whoop. Got rid of my Oura ring.” because “We've gone too far” and “Optimising every part of my life caused more stress than it solved.”

I think they're all experiencing optimisation fatigue and - despite these product categories reporting strong growth (see below) - I have a feeling that Alex is right when he says: “I think we are going to have a massive swing over the next 2 years away from optimisation culture”.

There’s been a low-level hum in the past few years about the negative side of self-tracking and optimisation…these apps and wearables could be “making anxiety worse”; causing us to “lose track of what really matters”. You might even be “priming yourself for certain mental health disorders.”

And if you don’t buy that, getting on for half of users in this study ditched these products/services after about six months. Perhaps because so many fail to reflect the basics of human psychology and behaviour change.

We've been measuring and tracking ourselves for so long now that it’s become second nature. But it wasn’t always so!

The great self-surveillance experiment

Remember The Quantified Self movement back in the tech-optimist-boomtime ‘aughts? First named (I think) by Wired editors Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly around 2007, the idea was that we'd get to know and understand ourselves so much better and live richer, brighter, healthier lives with the help of all these new self-tracking devices+services that were emerging by the day.

So began the normalisation of personal tech for self-surveillance.

But are the metrics making us miserable?

Sleep tracking that makes us stress about the quality of our sleep.

Meditation apps that become another thing to think about when we're trying to meditate.

Productivity systems that seem to create more work than they save (for me anyway!).

Fitness trackers that make sitting down feel like failing.

Macro-tracking.

Life-maxxing.

We're led to believe all this monitoring makes us better.
But really, does it just make us more predictable?

As we know, more predictable people are easier to sell to.

Have we been optimising ourselves for someone else's benefit this whole time?

Every meditation streak, every step count, every biometric reading represents data that can be harvested about our behavioural patterns, our motivations, our vulnerabilities. A person who tracks their mood becomes a prospect to be targeted with the latest variant of the mood-boosting gummies. A person who monitors their sleep becomes low-hanging fruit for whatever the sleep-hygiene industry develops next.

Back in the ‘aughts the WIRED editors wrote: “The excitement in the self-tracking movement right now comes not just from the lure of learning things from one's own numbers, but also from the promise of contributing to a new type of knowledge.”

I think we can now see what at least some of that new type of knowledge turned out to be: valuable marketing data.

And yet the category (well, parts of it) is in growth.

Smartwatch sales are flattening out now as wearables have shift from wrists to fingers, but the smart ring market is defying economic gravity with a projected CAGR of 17–21% over the next 5y. Oura, Samsung, Ultrahuman, and a tranche of newcomers are all betting the farm on our continued desire to quantify ourselves (Oura alone is valued at approx $5.2 billion after its stonking series D last December).

Talk about a paradox. What’s going on? Are we done being tracked, or hungry for more?

With growth like that in market like this, clearly optimisation fatigue isn’t happening across the board. Maybe it’s actually optimisation stratification. Just like how it’s no longer the most plugged-in Sephora Tweens who are queuing up at the Drunk Elephant fixture, maybe self-tracking is having its own socio-demographic baton pass. A creative director or even a tech CEO may have moved through the classic hype cycle of enthusiasm, obsession, and eventual disillusionment, but is the (much, much, much larger) aspirational middle just getting started?

Status dynamics, again.

Where do we go from here?

I’d planned to write that I think we’re moving away from rabid self-optimisation and towards quieter self-acceptance…away from data and towards intuition…away from external validation and towards internal validation.

But I don’t think that’s what’s really going on. Maybe for some.

I think what’s actually happening is the whole self-improvement thing is shape-shifting. For example I think it’s very hard to ignore how damn cool reading is right now. And once I managed to put words to it, I’m struggling to unsee the Wisdom Signalling (some people are being a bit snobby/purist about this, but not me. I think it’s great if someone’s digging deeper into things they’re interested in).

So perhaps it’s just same story, different day.

From optimising our lives, to optimising our minds?

Thanks for reading, see you next time.

beth