When I was a child, our family holidays involved driving from northern England to eastern Europe. It was the 1980s; the Iron Curtain was closed. Mostly we camped wild, occasionally had the treat of a campsite with showers and a playground. Our destinations were secondary cities in Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia, where we met certain people in cafes and parks. I never knew what it was that the border guards shouldn’t find under the camping gear in the car and I never asked.
I remembered one of those summers when reading about “wearables” in this paper recently. The year I was 10, I made a friend at a campsite and went to have lunch with her family beside their tent. There was sausage. It was a hot day, a hot week. There was no cooler box, certainly no refrigeration.
I do not recommend days of severe food poisoning endured while sitting on leg-burning black plastic seats in the back of a 1980s car with no air conditioning crossing the Hungarian Plain in August, staying in campsites with minimal plumbing. There was a lot of roadside indignity, some desperate running around tents in the dark. After a few days, I was weak and dehydrated and abjectly miserable.
But I was also an essentially healthy child. As I recovered, I developed an urgent craving for yoghurt and carrots, both of which were available. I wanted as much of them as possible, and nothing else, until normal operations resumed and I continued to develop a lifelong taste for communist cola, pickled vegetables and chilled soups.
I don’t need a smartwatch to tell me how rested I am when I wake up
For seven years, I slept four or five hours a night, rarely for longer than an hour at a time
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My family was generally slow to seek medical attention, and these days you’d probably at least try to get some rehydration powders for the child. But my point, in relation to the “wearables”, is that my body knew what I needed. The built-in, or evolved, systems worked, the same way they work when we feel hungry, thirsty, tired, when we need the bathroom (I’m sure we’re not far off a watch that tells you when to pee).
I’m not suggesting that trusting our bodies is an alternative to trusting science when we need it. Those evolved systems often don’t work, or work against us, when we’re seriously ill. Nature is concerned for the survival of the species before the survival of individuals, and pathogens also evolve to survive. When I’m sick and not getting better, I absolutely want research-based healthcare. I want vaccinations for myself and everyone else, medical interventions as necessary to preserve life and health. I am all for “wearables” to manage conditions that would otherwise shorten our lives and happiness: for my diabetic friend, her insulin pump is life-changing. A heart monitor allows a relative to return to running more safely after a heart attack. But it is an absurd idea that the first thing you should do on waking is check a device that will tell you how rested you are. How do you feel? If you wake exhausted without obvious reason, you might want to make changes. If not, not. On waking, maybe look at the sky, kiss your partner, say your prayers, think about what to wear or cook today.
Aficionados of these devices claim that they give individuals control of their health, but individual control of health is always a fantasy. We all age and die. As I keep pointing out, most of our health is environmentally and genetically determined and a lot more is luck. Unsurprisingly, the lifestyle of a rich person living in a safe and pleasant place correlates with long life and good health. No device will spare you air pollution, give you dry and properly ventilated housing, provide active transport or access to affordable fresh food and the time to prepare it. I don’t mean we shouldn’t bother trying – exercise is one of few habits that obviously improves individual health regardless of socio-economic status, environment and genetics, and also most of us can find enjoyable forms of movement. However, the idea that you can buy, count and measure your way to personal control of your biology is just an anxiety-fuelled dream that distracts.
If we devoted even some small part of the resources given to individual attempts to control our bodies for the profit of global corporations to collective action for healthier environments, we’d achieve so much more than making already healthy, wealthy people more unhappy and self-obsessed.
