I stopped wearing my Apple Watch

Tired of keeping up with the movement goal streaks and collecting all this data about myself. What purpose does it serve?

I once had a 600 something day streak in Duolingo. Then, life happened and I forgot Duolingo for two days. My streak was lost. The anger I felt was unreal, I wanted to strangle that stupid green owl and smash my phone. I was amazed at my anger while feeling it, I rarely feel anger as an emotion (I’m more in the despair camp, usually, how about you?). It was a quitting moment for me, I have not used the app again.

Don’t you want to smash this green little face??? [Photo by ilgmyzin on Unsplash]

Somewhere along the way of my language learning journey, it stopped being mostly about learning and turned into “…have ….to…. keep …my streak going ….at all costs 😬”. The app facilitates and promotes this. If streaks motivate you (you like a good carrot and stick mechanism, aye?), all the power to you. Cynical me thinks there are ulterior motives for them wanting to keep people on their streaks (more time spent in the app is a nice metric that will have managers drooling, people will view more ads, etc.), but whatever the case: I’m done with streaks. They don’t motivate me, they have the opposite effect.

I knew this already because the device on my wrist also wanted me to keep a streak going, a movement streak in this case. I actually bought the Apple Watch because I wanted to gather more health data about myself. Apple marketing successfully planted the idea in my head that I needed this in my life, and I coughed up yet another couple hundred to solve this cognitive dissonance.

Photo by Brandon Romanchuk on Unsplash

The initial effect was that I started walking more to close my movement rings every day. I got a nice movement streak going. You get badges when you keep a streak for x amount of days. But again, sometimes life happens, and you can’t get your movement in (travel day, sickness, etc.). I’d lose the streak and would feel that same anger I felt from Duolingo, it was just a lesser version of that anger because the streak wasn’t that long. I think my top movement streak is 60 days. This should have been a lesson, but I got suckered into the Duolingo streak all the same, and the anger was proportionally larger when I lost my streak there. It was the first and last time I felt like smashing my phone, thankfully.

Other than streaks, the Apple Watch provides you with a lot of health data. I tracked my sleep with it, amount of steps per day, heart rate through the day, heart rate variability, floors climbed, workouts. Cool, but what can you do with this info? What did I do with this info?

Other than needlessly feeling anxious after I had a night of bad sleep, having all this data didn’t make a difference in my life. At all.

I don’t need the Apple Watch to count my steps, I know when I have gone on a walk or if I sat on my ass all day. In order to get the Stand Ring complete, I just frantically waved my arms around (all Apple Watch users have done this to game the metric, don’t lie to me now!). Knowing my heart rate as a healthy person is kinda useless. Heart rate is low when I sit down, higher when I work out, mind-blowing stuff. I don’t give a damn how many flights of stairs I climbed on each day. My house has two sets of stairs, I use them a lot, which is good for some free cardio, I guess? I don’t need the watch to motivate me to work out, I’ll go to the gym in any case. The amount of calories burned from a workout is incorrect (way overstated) and you should not use it in order to track your calories, so it was only satisfying my inner monkey brain (har har, number goes up). I could go on and on. I’m always ranting about how stupid KPIs are, and yet I had KPI-ed my own life.

I only realize all this now that I’ve stopped wearing the watch. It wasn’t even a conscious decision to stop wearing it. I updated watchOS along with iOS 17, but there’s a battery draining issue in the current watchOS that made me have to charge the watch two times per day, and I just couldn’t be bothered. I was like: “bye felicia”, put it away and haven’t looked back.

Now that it is off my wrist, I realize I feel better without it. No more data gathering, no more streaks and no more notifications coming through, either. If I put my phone away, I’m offline. In the end, was the Apple Watch anything more than just another energy vampire in my life? In a world where everything tries to claim your attention (including me from you, with this post), a sensible person makes choices to shield themselves from it.

Right now, my Apple Health app keeps pinging me. “Your steps trend is lower than before”. Yeah, no shit. Have you seen women’s jeans pockets, Apple? My iPhone doesn’t fit in there, so no steps will be counted. “Your activity level is lower”. Yup, still doing the workout, but without feeding you the data, Apple.

In a few weeks, all the health data will be at my new baseline. Which, according to the tech, is really low, but in reality: nothing has changed. I just detoxed from my data gathering addiction.

What about you? Are you tracking a lot of data in your life? Does it make a difference?