Why I stopped using a smart bracelet

I didn’t ask for it but they gave it to me. And when I’m given something, even if I have no emotional connection to the person who gave it to me, I feel an ethical obligation to use it. A purple vest, grandfather’s pajamas, glasses with piscolara phrases or books by Alberto Mayol: even if I hate them, even if I know from the first minute that they will only interfere with my life, my principles push me to put them on, to read a chapter, to have a fucking drink on them. Then, immediately, they will head to the unwanted items corner, waiting for one of their two destinations: donation or trash.

But this smart bracelet, which I don’t remember who gave it to me, stayed on my wrist for more than a few days. In fact, it stayed on my forearm for several months. Without being pretty or too useful, the Xiaomi Mi Band 5 managed to seduce me where I least expected it.

First, to be honest, I will save its virtues. Xiaomi is already on the eighth version of its smart braceletbut I imagine these basic attributes will be retained or even improved in their most recent models.

Its biggest advantage, and what stopped me from taking it out the next day, was that the battery lasted a long time. In my case, more than a week, but I read that the Mi Band 8 – launched less than a month ago – could achieve up to sixteen days of autonomy. That’s more than half a month without having to remove or plug it in.

The second thing was its easy setup: I just had to download an app, pair it via Bluetooth and voilà, the bracelet ended up with the date, time and my exact location. Nothing very favorable to my privacy, of course, but convenience has already won this battle against security.

And the third thing was the wide range of sports and physical activities that he was able to record. From the steps I took each day to the miles I traveled on my bike, between the bracelet and the app, they gave me data I never thought I would have. The speed of my pedaling, the area of ​​my route where I walked the fastest, the moment when my aerobic capacity was at its maximum. peak: He showed me all this on a sultry, dark map, like a sports show, that made me feel like I was in the middle of a European cycling competition every time I went home to through the potholed streets of Viña del Mar.

From this third virtue is born the fourth, which quickly became my downfall: being able to look at and compare data. My mediocre bike rides, hidden by the app’s design, now looked like the statistics of a professional athlete, comparable day to day. If on Monday I did 14.4 kilometers in 35 minutes, according to my bracelet, on Wednesday I should be able to do 14.5 in 33. Without looking for it, I began to compete with myself. It seemed fun, but it ended up ruining everything.

Without realizing it, going out on a bike is no longer an end in itself, this moment of feeling the cold wind on your face, the speed of your legs, the landscape moving at your pace and your head wandering without order , an exercise which is more than an exercise but also less; an excuse to leave alone and come back tired.

With this light bracelet on the wrist, as if it were Sauron’s ring, pedaling has become a way to obtain the precious Statisticsthese statistics that obsessed me and without which getting on the bike no longer made sense.

More than once, during the morning rush hour, I had the smart bracelet at home. It’s really embarrassing to remember the anger I felt when, a few blocks away, I looked at my right hand and couldn’t find the plastic bracelet. One day, I stopped in my tracks, very angry, thinking that this bike trip would be in vain: that without the statistics, it would be as if it had never happened.

The same thing happened to me when I was walking. The bracelet also counted my steps, and when I exceeded 10,000 per day, it offered me, via a notification, a sort of medal or decoration: congratulations, you have reached your daily goal! The first time I did it I thought it was ridiculous, but the second time I liked it. By the third year, it had already become one of the main missions of my life.

If ten p.m. came and I had walked nine thousand steps, I would walk around the house or yard, go up and down the stairs, or take the dog for a fifth walk to get my well-deserved reward . Then I opened the app and enjoyed seeing how every day this week I managed to achieve the goal. Where did I walk? What was I thinking as I walked? It doesn’t matter: I have taken more than ten thousand steps and this fact, in the universe of Big Datait will be saved in the cloud forever (as long as I pay for my iCloud subscription).

Thus, walking and cycling, two of my usual means of transport but also two precious forms of freedom, have become neurotic, quantified activities, relevant only by the numbers they leave on my phone. Another symptom of this ridiculous era, which on the one hand seeks to oust performance from everything, even leisure, and on the other hand requires inscription to give meaning to the experience. “Photo or fake,” the joke goes, demanding a photo to prove something really happened. Without data, my solitary physical activities also seemed to become insignificant.

But one night, after one of its nearly ten-day cycles, its powerful battery died and I decided not to plug it in. The next morning, with my wrist free, I went out for a bike ride. I never knew how many miles I had covered, or how long it took me, or how fast I was going. But it was good, it was good.