[samhain]

To reference the top comment right now… I’d imagine if you are looking at the metric at all, you’ve already lost. This, coming from someone who’s mother was walking 10-20k steps per day for decades, and seeing them fully stop walking after a few weeks with a Fitbit.

[helmholtz]

Could not disagree more. Yeah, yeah, stop and smell the roses and all that, I get it. But there are a tonne of people, my mother included, who are spurred on greatly by the need to fill out the rings on their Apple watch. It's the thing that gets them out of the door, the metric. We bought the watch for her hopeful she would actually use it, and not leave it buried somewhere in a drawer, and it's worked an absolute treat. She's walked more, and more strenuously, since she got the watch. She loves sharing the graphs of her hikes/walks, and the km covered.

Even for me, as much as I hate giving away my medical data, I love compiling GPX files of hikes I've been on, or keeping streaks of commuting by bike everyday.

Metrics are great, and I don't think it's as simple as a dichotomy between being all about number crunching, vs all about feeling the grass under your feet. One can do both.

[teekert]

Why would the fitbit make her stop walking and how do you know she did 10-20k steps before the fitbit... And I have more questions after you answer this one :)

The steps are a proxy metric for activity, you can correlate it with how you feel or with the amount of backpain you experience in the evening. I don't see how I'm loosing looking at this metric.