[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.