On wearables

I’m writing this as a memo to myself. I’ve had enough conversations where I mumbled at these points poorly. This is an attempt at internal closure after yet another episode.

In my case, the core issue is increased cognitive load without corresponding behavioral change. It’s a net negative. More broadly, wearables are far more likely to add load than to improve outcomes. The marketing is a mishmash of sport, lifestyle, health value propositions fading in a goodness mush, rarely delivering much beyond a wrist-mounted stream of numbers.

Wearables are most useful when awareness is absent. In most other cases, the upside is marginal and the downside is real. The data is noisier and less accurate than it claims to be. Many metrics are proxies. Most measurements vary widely with position, temperature, device, firmware, and context. Yet the brain treats them as truth. Over time, wearables erode interoception rather than refine it.

The optimization mindset they encourage rewards control over adaptation, predictability over resilience. Autonomy matters at the individual level, and this cuts against it. Even longevity advocates suggest that wearables are useful temporarily, for pattern discovery, then should be removed. If a device was necessary, humans wouldn’t have survived long enough to invent it. Intuition over instrumentation is the way to avoid hijacking our nervous system. The psychological cost is invisible but real, even if the data looks « good ». Biological feedback remains the gold standard for long-term health.

All of this stacks on top of the documented harms of digital gadgets, gear acquisition syndrome, and the creeping politics of health tech. Taken together, wearables are increasingly an unbearable shit sandwich.

And yet… They can function as a safety net. Some things cannot be perceived intuitively like atrial fibrillation, sleep apnea, fall detection. For some, the data serves as motivation rather than authority. A nudge, not a verdict. Data literacy, or the ability to not take data at face value, is a critical skill, not just in the context of wearables. Oh, and they’re fun, they beep, shine, and nowadays they even talk.