What happens when you track every aspect of your life in a database for almost 3 years?
Last week, I came across a gloriously angelic frock of hair attached to a dude named Felix Krause, a style far too fancy for any man I personally know to legally don. 1
He ran an interesting project for the last 3 years—tracking, collating, and sharing as many personal details of his life as possible.
“Back in 2019, I started collecting all kinds of metrics about my life. Every single day for the last 2.5 years I tracked over 100 different data types - ranging from fitness & nutrition to social life, computer usage and weather.”—Fancy haired Felix
I won’t get into the technicalities of how he did it, nor pretend I actually understand what a Postgres timestamp-based key-value database is, even if it does sound super fancy.
But I still think the project was a super cool idea.
Spending 3 years monitoring most aspects of your life sounds like an uber self-awareness version of meditation I’m far too lazy to ever personally start.
It’s also kind of funny why he started it in the first place.
His life is seemingly that of a true digital nomad. The dude flew almost 200 times in those 2.5 years, stayed in AirBnBs and friends’ apartments for 80%+ of the days, and worked remotely the entire time.
Apparently, he was often asked when/if he was gonna be in town by his multitude of presumably similarly fancy-haired friends in many of the cities he visited, so he eventually started a website to direct them too: whereisfelix.today/?2.
Clever. I like that.
What were the most interesting takeaways from his experience?
Personally, I thought his sleeping, weight, mood, and drinking correlations were pretty cool.
Here’s a few charts from the long-form page if you’re too short on time to sift through them:
It’s cool to see the correlations presented, or at least the ones that might affect our own lives. And many of them make sense.
Less time spent wasted, more time exercising and learning and socializing, and nicer weather all correlated with the happier days.
I suppose that’s probably an obvious conclusion for everyone, though. And we could probably venture down the whole causation vs correlation argument.
But today I’m choosing to look at it as a reaffirmation of my own recent-years’ life choices.
I strive to read, listen to non-fiction podcasts, learn a bit of Chinese, walk, gym, and sit in the sun for a bit every day. Of course, I don’t always do it, but I strive to.
A few years ago, I made the conscious (I think?) decision to move work down from the #1 priority in my life to #2 or #3, depending on the project du jour and hangover.
I don’t think about it too often, but after reading Felix’s fancy-haired website in-depth, I’ve had the same thought reoccur in my head multiple times this last week.
Am I happier now than I was before my last big move (career/country switch)?
For a long time, whenever I thought of this question, I’d look back at my friends and co-workers and see where they are today.
I left the company, they didn’t.
But I think most of them are happy.
They’re certainly far wealthier now, at least relative to my own lack of income. (Being 1 in a billion writers is often commensurate with salary relativity3).
But if you put money aside, or if I do rather, then the answer to my question has to be a resounding “Yes!”
Am I jumping for joy? No, my hair doesn’t allow me to do such things.
But I am content.
And that’s probably something I’ve never been able to say for a long stretch of time before in my life.
So I must thank Felix for allowing me to realize that this week.
Back to the data now.
Fancy Flairy Felix says his entire project, which he’s since cut down by 95% ish, contained more than 380,000 data points. Sheesh.
Just think of the tens of thousands of manual entries, the programming hours required to set everything up, create the charts, create the website and integrate it all. And then do the same task daily for 913 odd days.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, that’s for sure.
That’s probably why at the very end of his page, he had this to say (bolding mine):
Overall, having spent a significant amount of time building this project, scaling it up to the size it’s at now, as well as analysing the data, the main conclusion is that it is not worth building your own solution, and investing this much time. When I first started building this project 3 years ago, I expected to learn way more surprising and interesting facts. There were some, and it’s super interesting to look through those graphs, however retrospectively, it did not justify the hundreds of hours I invested in this project.
He also points out how many, many companies already have this data about us. But I’ll leave that screed essay for another day.
My take is this.
We live in a world full of tracking. Your phone, your computer, your IoT devices, public cameras, credit cards, purchases, and everything else under the sun is producing thousands if not millions of tiny little data points about your life.
And yet, how little of it do we know about, are aware of, or more importantly in terms of proving my little thesis here, that we actually use?
I used to wear a FitBit for years. I even forgot one while taking a boxing class in a soccer field in Singapore and bought a new one after a passerby permanently borrowed it.
I never checked the damn thing.
It just became another extension of my arm. A signal to the world that I was digitally connected, on top of trends, and a sign that I was in the tech industry.
Years later, I find myself wondering:
Who gives a flying fack?
It’s a cool device. It tracks everything. But I never used the data. I’m sure Fitbit did though. And I’m sure the shady intermediary data collectors they sell that data to did as well. And then the thousands of business clients that collect those datapoints and use it to manipulate me into buying their shit, knowing about their brand, and voting for their candidate did too.
But I didn’t really use it.
The only data collector I’ve ever had some use out of was MyFitnessPal, a food tracker/ostensibly-your-personal-lord-and-savior. Hardcore Pals insist on using apps like that day in and day out for years on end.
I think this is a recipe for the 1% and a failure for the 99%.
But I did use that. I used it for a month, tracked every single morsel I ate, beer I consumed, and fly that flew in the wrong hole full of shit.
I adjusted my diet based on that data and moved to a lower tier of weight. A year later, I found myself straying back upwards on the scale, downloaded the app again, used it for another month, and lost the weight.
That was 2 years ago. I haven’t needed it since (although I could do with another tier lowering I’m sure).
And I can’t help but feel maybe that’s how we should look at all these data trackers, at least the ones we willingly consume and use.
The companies are motivated by long-term consumption.
We consumers are motivated by results.
The two motivations are seemingly at odds.
If I can use your app to lose 20 pounds in 3 months, what’s my impetus to use it for the rest of my skinnier life?
Ask the app that, and it will say it needs to know your location. Ask your Fitbit and it will insist it needs to send you loud notifications in the middle of the night telling you you’re a fat piece of lard. Ask Zuckerberg and you’ll have to press his reboot function, a line of code presumably located somewhere in the Postgres timestamp-based key-value database.
My point is, maybe don’t listen to the apps and fancy products.
After all, they lie to you for a living, it’s the only existence they know.
Instead, focus on your goals. Use the apps and devices to aid in those goals, and then dispose of them quicker than Zuckerberg did his moral code after seeing his first shiny dollar of investment.
Companies are never our friends, but we can pretend they are while they’re still useful.
We consumers owe no moral extension to a piece of paper.4
Use them, lest they use you.
This has been a thoughtsay written by a non-lizard-king named J.J. Pryor.
Wanna help me out by sharing or liking this post? Love ya if you did. Cheers!
Now renamed howisfelix.today
As in my salary is also 1 in a billion of what it used to be, eek
As in articles of incorporation, a bunch of papers with far too much importance in our modern society
Probably 7 or 8 years. I have several Garmin devices that all track differently. Also gone through 2; one the button stopped working and the other the strap broke and was not replaceable. I mainly track sleep and steps.
Didn’t think his hair was so fantastic. The rest of the read was interesting. I have My Fitness Pal (not sure why the call it fitness when it’s about diet) and a Garmin device that throw lots of information my way. Still trying to figure out how best to use it, but I do look at it every day. I am amazed at the calculating power I wear on my wrist.