The dance floor isn’t dead, people are just choosing to Strava it instead.
He takes his hand and moves your sweaty fringe out the way. You close your eyes, and feel like this is your moment.. When the moment doesn’t come, you open your eyes, potentially expecting him to be taking in your beauty from afar, you find he is instead staring at the garmin on his wrist in the same way a besotted owner stares at a calamatious puppy that has rolled in fox poo, too cute to ever find frustrating. You think at one point he might even lick it. You tell yourself it’s fine, it just shows you he cares about his general health, what’s not to like about that? If you were ever to be cooking in the kitchen together and you found yourself getting too carried away, moving saucepans like Fred Again, you will be rest assured to know that a calming presence behind you could whisper in your ear any minute and say seductively ‘slow down with those pans darling, not good for the heart rate’. How steamy! How erotic!
As the bass of the music reverberates around you both, he shouts something in your ear about recovery and for a second you fear you have found yourself getting it on with an ex heroin addict. Noticing your alarm he ushers you with his garmin-free arm to the smoking area, and you fear he may be about to break his recovery journey there and then. You immediately start thinking of how to politely turn down an offer to do heroin in a shit smokers in east London.
It turns out no needles are withdrawn, and the ‘supposed’ recovery actually surmounts to a game of padel that was played a few days ago. He gets up pie charts and bar diagrams that represent his health, his health when playing said game of padel a few weeks ago, his sleep score before getting up to go to work that morning, and his heart rate with you pre-embrace on the dance floor that got rudely interrupted by the third wheel he was now excitedly introducing to me on his wrist in great depth. This was more than oversharing it was sheer health obsession crossed with self-indulgence. He speaks of vasodilation and average step count like a doctor lecturing on cardiology, and if you weren’t so grossed out by his sheer obsession with himself and his health you would almost be impressed with his translation of medical terms into a post-dance floor Ted Talk session.
The dance floor isn’t dead, people are just choosing to Strava it instead.
Our obsession with tracking tools from watches to Oura rings is turning us into a hyper-health aware and anxious community of people. We don’t even have to start our day and we are already being told by the robot on our wrists that we may as well sack the entire day off as we didn’t get maximum sleep the night before. There is a time and place for a watch that can break down every single one of your bodily functions down to your blood viscose to your sleep hygiene, and if it ends up permeating your life even after you have done the exercise and seen the stats, then we have a problem. Our phone screens are making us more fragmented and lonelier than ever. Our watch can also do the same thing.
“Sorry I can’t come to the pres my recovery is down from the night before because I ended up partaking in a marathon game of FIFA and my heart rate reached a maximum BPM of 150” (a statement I have actually heard). Ermm ok. Back in the day we could bang out a game of FIFA, call up our mum and tell her we loved her and then hit the club until 6am without even thinking about heart rate. The dance floor is a chance to unwind, a chance to forget about numbers found on spreadsheets that fill up our weekdays in stuffy offices. Why are we choosing to take these numbers out of the office and into our unwinding time outside of work?
After speaking to three people who own health tracking tools, I gathered that they all had a vague understanding of what their watches meant by the term ‘recovery’, the million dollar phrase in the health conversation today. One cited rest from half iron man training (valid), one said rest from walking to work, one even said rest from a heavy game on the X-box (I mean come on now…) Recovering is often associated with those partaking in extreme exercise for over one hours a day at least five days a week. Recovery is now forced down our throats as something which anyone who exercises even only once a week is entitled to. Of course, having a rest day is a healthy boundary to pursue after exercising intensly, yet taking recovery as the gospel whilst not even being able to define it is ridiculous. This adds to the sphere of Stephen Bartlett-esque health optimisation of it all, where having a glass of alcohol on a Wednesday night can make you spiral, triggering a recovery day, and so forth.
It is also the unhealthy physical dissonance these watches can stir up that causes issues. Say you are backpacking in deepest Peru and all of a sudden a Jaguar comes out of nowhere and starts attempting to maul you. It turns out that you are not only being mauled by a jaguar in Peru, but you have also ended up in some warped reality where society has shunned general common sense and must lead by the example of their health watch which are now also mandatory in this reality. The tourist guide you are with leaps to your wrist yet sees positive stats all round, even the heart rate isn’t looking so bad! He feels a dissonance between the scene that is unfurling before his eyes and the world found on your wrist, and he proceeds to let you get eaten alive because after all, it’s what the Garmin would have wanted! Sheer extrapolation is my way of making a point around when we feel fine but when our watch says we have lived a double life and we are not in fact fine and we need to take action immediately. Actually listening to our bodies is so last season it seems, and we are being subconsciously gaslit by the watch that sleeps next to us, creating an unhealthy reliance that may take us on a dangerous path where we live through our watch and not let it live through us.
The global smartwatch and fitness tracker industry is valued between 44 billion to 83 billion dollars today. This is in no means a bad stat, and certainly points to an evolving society that are more health aware and conscious than ever. Perhaps you are someone that may have had health issues in the past and like to feel secure in your body, using a watch to build back up that trust after a health scare. There is a need and a place for smart watches within society, the unneccesary reliance that they can however nurture is not a good thing, where the lines are blurred between over-indugling in tracking when we do not need to just because you can now by something that can give you health data at the drop of a hat. Cancelling on plans to get in a night of recovery after doing a 30 mins leg day session at the gym? Please. Watches can turn even the most carefree of people into number-obsessive fitness freaks, and with the rise in people opting for cleaner and healthier lifestyles, the message online to start tracking is louder than ever.
Back to the smokers in East London.
By now I was well-versed in this individual’s day-to-day physical health that I felt as if I had already had that previously craved moment of intimacy with him, but instead it was an involntarily intimacy journey of another kind, and not one I had asked to be taken on. I had experienced a biology lesson thrice over and a health lecture that I didn’t need to go to university for. When he started mentioning his faceal rate I knew it was time to get back in the thumping bass of the club that was calling out to me inside.
Excusing myself with an utterance of wanting to dance, I left my Garmin guy and his bar graphs, vowing to never use recovery as a pick up line in my life.