1. Lately I’ve been running without a watch, which raises an increasingly relevant question: namely, if you run without recording the time, pace, distance, heart rate, and calories burned, have you even run at all?
2. I want to say the answer is yes, of course I ran, but there’s a part of me that, over that past decade or so, has been conditioned to answer in the negative, that if I do something that isn’t somehow monitored, tracked, and measured, than I haven’t done it at all.
3. Exercise has been ruined by this kind of data-tracking obsession, although I’m trying to resist; book reading is another area where I’m trying not to record what I’ve read. Would you believe that sometimes I read books and don’t rate them on Goodreads or Amazon, or discuss them with a book club, or even Tweet about them? It’s true. I check many books out of the New York Public Library, read them, and return them without comment. I’m trying not to feel guilty about it.
4. Sometimes I miss the garden in the winter, because gardening is an activity that hasn’t been completely colonized by apps and digital performance. If I were rating the beauty of the snow on the orange dogwood leaves, however, I would give it five stars.
5. It’s more fun to rate things that can’t be bought or sold, like watching a wild gray panther pad across the rocks of a snowy mountain range.
6. This decade was all about digital tracking; the next one is going to be about disappearing without a trace.
