Let me be clear. I mostly love my Apple Watch. It came to me as a complete surprise gift. Back in May, Sandy and I finally took the step of getting rid of both cable and our landline, because we finally got tired enough (of paying Comcast through the nose) to do something about it. Perhaps more accurate is to say that I finally overcame my five years of inertia about it, since we had started contemplating this step before the pandemic! We bought a very small Smart TV and an antenna to put in the window, so that we’d have some things to watch besides Netflix. We did keep Comcast for Internet at our house. (None of these brands is paying me or Sounds Good Choir to say any of this. It’s just a personal story about technology and about being a musician.)
In order to ditch cable and the landline, I had to go in person to the Comcast store, which—luckily for us—is only a five-minute drive from our house. When I got there, anticipating some resistance from the staff, I met with an unexpectedly cheerful young man, who looked at our customer record for a long time on his screen. At one point, he looked up and said to me, “You know, it looks like you’ve been a Comcast customer for more than 20 years.” I told him that this was the case. He said that they had a new thing to reward their extremely loyal customers like Sandy and myself: not only a free Apple Watch for each of us, but also a credit for whatever monthly fee it costs to use the watch, so that we would be getting the gizmos for truly nothing. This was rather stunning news to me. I’m not used to getting something for nothing. (Well, after I thought about it for a nanosecond, it wasn’t nothing, which was the whole reason we were giving up cable.) They even threw in a free subscription to Peacock, because NBC and Peacock are now owned by Comcast. Who knew? But I’m not here to talk about that.
The watch’s arrival in my life coincided roughly with a new health initiative. While Sandy and I were on a glorious vacation between spring and summer sessions, I had a sort of epiphany. I decided to get serious about exercise and to take up jogging again, an activity I hadn’t done regularly for years. I began this very, very gradually to avoid injury. My watch is now my trusty companion while I do my routine, which means that I run for a minute, walk for a minute, run for a minute, walk for a minute, and so on. I’ve worked up to about a 30-minute “run” a few days a week, with a longer one from time to time for variety and to challenge myself. I do post-run yoga to stretch out, which really helps. (As we go to press, I’m on a hiatus from running while recovering from a knee injury. Moral: don’t start doing kickboxing videos while your spouse is out of town. That said, we can resume!)
The watch measures all my steps and measures my heart rate. It measures, to the 1/100th of a mile, how far I’ve gone and announces my pace per mile. One of the statistics that I like the best is watching my VO2 Max (an estimated measurement of my lung capacity) Since this number is good, my lung capacity hopefully is also helping my singing. I am not very fast, but that’s not the point. I am running regularly, which is the point. I did the first 5K of my life back in September, the “Barkapalooza” fundraiser for the West Suburban Humane Society. I ran along with George Klippel, my recently-retired singing buddy from church choir, who is the current recordholder for the highest number of average Sounds Good choir rehearsals in a week (four). I have never seen so many dogs in one place—it was totally cool. We all got medals, too, in the shape of a paw print!
As I said, it’s been great fun to have a new widget to tell me all sorts of things about how I fling myself around the universe. However, there are a few areas in which my Apple Watch is a complete failure. I believe that this is instructive, because it seems to be a metaphor or object lesson in how easy it is to get tunnel vision—and how easy it is to be lulled into thinking that the way one’s watch (or anyone or anything else) sees one’s life is the way it has to be viewed. Let me explain further.
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I confess that I do like measuring my progress with my watch—at least the things that the watch measures well. However, I first noticed that something was amiss during Summer Rocks, when I would come home from a day of choir rehearsals and sit down in my living room, only to find that my gizmos were telling me that I had logged roughly double the number of steps that I was expecting to see, based on my level of activity that day. (Some of you dear readers may have experienced this also, if you walk around with both your phone in your pocket and your watch on your wrist.) For example, on a day when I was pretty sure I would have logged about 6,000 steps, my phone and watch would tell me I was more around the 12,000 mark. That’s weird! I looked at the data sources on my phone, and sure enough, my activity is basically being duplicated, at least in terms of the step counts. My phone is counting my steps, and my watch is doing the same thing, and then they are both adding their separate counts to the day’s total. This is not such a big deal, as long as I understand it. I suppose I could even tell my phone not to pay attention to what my watch is doing, but for now I’ll live with the mis-counting.
What really makes me laugh is that my watch also seems to think that every time I wave my arm to conduct a beat, this motion much be some kind of step. After all, the phone is built to count steps! Today, for example, my phone told me that I had taken an additional 2,000 steps in roughly 30 minutes. Hmm.
When I looked at the time of day that these “steps” were logged (10:45 to 11:15 am), I recalled that I was not stepping much at all but was standing on the floor in Room 4G at Fourth Presbyterian at Good Memories, waving my arms enthusiastically through whatever songs we happened to be rehearsing. In other words, the watch thinks I’m walking when I’m conducting. It is exercise, to be sure—and orchestral conductors have the greatest longevity of any profession—but I was not walking when my watch said I was. So there’s some disjunction there. It made me a little disappointed in my watch, as a little of the Patina of Gizmo Wonder wore off after this discovery.
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There was one more episode that really made me stop and pay attention. It came when I did a little Tai Chi. (I have a very sporadic Tai Chi practice.) I decided to keep my watch on while I did Tai Chi, so that I could see what the watch would say about what I was doing.
In this practice, one’s feet hardly leave the floor. Each movement is done nine times, usually with a sort of rocking motion—sometimes front and back, sometimes side to side, depending on that pose’s arm and leg movements. I glanced at my watch from time to time. After at least five minutes of Tai Chi, my watch said that I had gone 0 steps and 0.00 miles.
This is crazy! I was clearly moving. But the Watch Said I Was Doing Nothing.
I had to chuckle when I saw this. I was doing something—I was counting the moves, and I could feel the energy moving between my hands, for example—but the thing I had been trusting to tell me what I was doing was now saying it was nothing at all. What or whom should I believe?
I can’t believe the watch. Or at least I can’t buy the logic that the watch’s way of viewing my life is the one that matters. It does strike me as ironic that we call this thing a “watch,” as if it is watching us, instead of the other way around.
Is there anything in your life like that?
Is there anything that you know you’re doing, while at the same time, some gizmo, or even some person (or expert, or pundit… you get the idea) tries to persuade you that it’s nothing, of no consequence, of no value, of no utility? A relative of ours went to the ER twice in the first part of 2022 with abdominal pain, to be told by a patronizing physician that “it was nothing” and was sent home with Tylenol. Six months later she almost died of sepsis when her colon ruptured. She was in a coma for two weeks. The surgeon took out a tumor the size of a softball, and while our loved one is wonderfully healthy now and cancer-free after chemo and radiation, her story is an extreme example of being told that Something is Nothing.
By way of further analogy: from her thirty-five years of experience as a therapist seeing kids and adolescents, Sandy is highly critical of the way social-media applications have taken over our lives and even our consciousness, to the point where some people feel that if they do not post something on their favorite platform, it is as if it didn’t happen. This can become so extreme that some people—including our already-alienated tweens and teens—feel literally that they do not exist unless and until they are somehow seen or validated on social media. I feel lucky indeed that I was born early enough to have a clear sense of identity, one that does not depend on being seen on Facebook or Instagram in order to feel like I exist. And yet I too have to resist being put in a Bed of Procrustes, to use the old Greek-myth metaphor, and having parts of me cut off that don’t fit the prevailing narrative of my Apple Watch. Especially my conducting arm.
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The lenses, the devices, the viewpoints through which we see our lives are vital to our existence. If we give our watches the authority to assess our lives—and if we only see what our watches tell us that we’re doing—we’ll trust them too easily and will forget that there are other views, other perspectives, other truths that are wider, deeper, more nuanced, and that matter much, much more. Don’t let anyone take that power away from you.
As the great song, “Seasons of Love” from “Rent,” asks, “Five hundred twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes / How do you measure the life of a woman or a man?” Let us continue to look and to see, to discern and to decide for ourselves what is the true measure of our lives. And yeah, you can keep using your watch. Just remind it lovingly from time to time who’s boss.
What a delightful and illuminating piece!