Wearables: The end of humanity
“How am I feeling?” I asked my watch.
This morning I was in the middle of a CrossFit class, sweating, heart pounding, and I glanced at my smartwatch to check my heart rate. A heart rate I could already feel, hammering in my chest. I didn’t even think about it.
It landed in sharp contrast to the two weeks before. I’d just spent them in Thailand, deliberately connecting to my breath, to my body, to my heart, feeling all of it directly, no screen in between. Two weeks of listening inward. And then, barely a day back, the first thing I did was outsource “how is my heart doing” to a device on my wrist.
Wearable technology pulls us out of contact with our own bodies, disconnecting us from a bodily wisdom we evolved over millions of years.
Our human evolution
Go back far enough, a few hundred years, or all the way to prehistoric times, and humans didn’t need a device to tell them their heart was racing. They ran, and they felt it. They knew when they were hungry and they knew when they’d had enough. They felt tired and they rested. The physiological response carried meaning, and we as humans sensed it instantly. Your body spoke, and you listened, because survival and wellbeing depended on it.
Every wearable we strap on adds something in between.
A friend told me he realized he would check his sleep score to decide if he was tired or not. The number overrode the body. He’d outsourced one of the most basic acts of self-knowledge there is, knowing whether he’s rested, to a sensor on his wrist.
And once you notice that pattern, you see it everywhere. Calorie counters tell us whether we’ve eaten enough, bypassing our own sense of hunger and fullness, and our body’s natural mechanisms of fat (energy) storage and fat burning. Step counters tell us whether we moved enough, instead of how our legs and lungs feel. Readiness scores tell us whether to train or rest. Stress trackers tell us we’re stressed, often before we notice (and sometimes cause the stress in the first place!). Each one is a small surrender. We hand over a piece of interior awareness to an external device, and the inner sense that used to do that work quietly fades from disuse.
How it happens
You don’t choose to stop listening to your body. It just gradually happens, one helpful notification at a time, until the technology becomes the primary source of truth about your own physical state, and your own felt sense becomes the backup, consulted second, if at all.
It’s made worse by the fact that we’re actively taught to distrust our bodies. The body is lazy, the story goes. It just wants sugar and rest. It’s a relic stuck in the past, optimized for nothing more than surviving and procreating, so it can’t be trusted to know what’s good for us. And there’s real truth in some of that. But to take it all the way, to distrust the body entirely, is a terrible outcome. It’s precisely this thinking, the conviction that the body has nothing to tell us, that severs the connection in the first place.
We gradually disconnect entirely from the body, from the felt human experience, and from millions of years of accumulated wisdom. And piece by piece, we lose what it means to be human.
