Sometime in my late twenties I became fluent in a language I no longer wish to speak — the language of dashboards, metrics, and marginal gains.
It started with productivity apps. Then sleep tracking. Then a brief, embarrassing period of monitoring heart rate variability every morning before getting out of bed.
What I was actually optimizing for
The error, I think, was treating life as a system to be improved rather than an experience to be had. Optimization implies a target function. I had mistaken the metrics for the thing itself.
The map is not the territory — and the dashboard is not the day.
I kept all my data, of course. But I stopped checking it. Something shifted: I was reading more. Cooking longer meals. Taking walks without a step goal. None of this is measurable. All of it is the point.