Why I'm Breaking Up With My Fitness Tracker

I have fallen into another trap of competition-based oppressive capitalism. It came on so insidiously that I didn't realize it had taken over my life. I'm talking about my fitness tracker. About fitbit life, counting your steps, obsessing about "activity minutes", calories burned, heart rate, and walking a specific amount of steps in a day. 

I was late to this party, only falling into the trap in 2018. I mocked the step counting obsession at first, said I would never fall in to the trap. As if I could outsmart the algorithms, trick the dopamine response. But of course I can't. It's how these things are made. To keep us interested, to keep us buying new devices. It's the little celebration notification when you meet a goal, the tracking of how many days you surpass it, the "fitness age", the calorie counting. When you have a history with your body like mine, anything tracking calories burned is a gateway down a dangerous road. I was playing chicken with my self-destructive tendencies, and it made me hate myself. I didn't actually realize how much I needed to break the habit until I broke my ankle. I still look at my step counts from last fall and think "I'm so lazy" when actually I didn't walk because I literally couldn't for part of it. I do like the distance tracking for running and hiking. So I'm moving backwards, to my old watch where I can enable GPS when I'm actually doing something, but just tells me the time when it's a regular day.  

I have been thinking about the problem with this competition mindset for a while. I say I'm competitive person by nature, but I think it's actually by society. I think my compulsive need to compete comes from a few sources. I grew up feeling like I was in a losing contest with my sister. She is incredibly smart, very focused, and excels at a lot of hobbies that we shared. I'm also pretty smart, but I have a hard time with focus. I'm a little more disorganized and all over the place with my thoughts, ideas, hobbies and plans. I'm impulsive and a bit more chaotic. I also now see that our whole soul-crushing capitalist society is built around competition all the time. Fight for resources, fight for attention, compete for jobs, for grades, for the nicest car. Buy and compete your way out of misery.

I also internalized my own oppression. I felt the gay shame big time growing up. I thought if I could just be perfect, then maybe people would still love me, even though I was a lesbian. I thought that if I was a perfect student, it I got a good job, if I ran faster, jumped higher, weighed less, was prettier and more perfect, I could make it ok. The thing it, it wasn't ok. It wasn't ok for society to treat gay people as less-than. No amount of competition could fix a problem that lies under the surface. 

Conditioning us to believe in competition, in scarcity takes away from the ability to see that there actually is enough for all of us. There is enough food, world hunger is a choice made by the powerful. There are enough houses. Having unhoused people on the street is a choice that society makes. We choose to look the other way. We choose to tolerate misery, oppression, starvation, and death. We reward billionaires while the rest of us fight for scraps. This is a choice. And not by those of us at the bottom. This is a choice that the rich and powerful make every day. When they look around and still decide to take their dick shaped rocket for a 15 minute joyride instead of helping actual people. 

Competition leads us to believe that those who are "losing" deserve it. That if they tried harder, they would be fine. This mindset makes us feel like we are failing all the time. Then our self-blame leads us to a negative feedback loop of trying to buy our way out of oppression. And I am done with it. I'm not playing the games anymore. We don't have to live like this. So I'm fighting it where I can. It starts inside my own head. I'm trying to break those thought patterns. To stop thinking that way about myself or anyone else. We are not the problem. 

So is giving up a fitness tracker going to solve any of this? Absolutely not. But it closes one lane of competitive distraction in my head. It will be a weird adjustment. Change starts in the mind. Believing things can be different is an essential prerequisite to change. Comparison will probably never go away. It might actually be human nature. But I can stop fighting with myself so much. I can stop making myself feel like a failure and hopefully free up some mental energy for something else.