Physical Intelligence - Day 76

The socialization of health data was also a concern.  These were apps which collected our health data on the cloud and no matter how much the owners of that cloud could cite "higher purpose" - where collected data has value, it has value and eventually it will find its way to the highest bidder, either because the owners of that data decided to or they were bought out by a larger organization who had no qualms about making profit off that data - especially when they did not have to seek permission from the person that data is associated to.  Even today the workaround over cookies is a "give it or get out" mindset.  We are collectively being data-raped and we don't know it.  What is the point of reading an article about insurance companies getting hold of our quantified self data when there will always be workarounds that don't protect us.

Yet lifestyle change requires management and management in a large part is made more manageable by what one can measure.  When I engaged in quantified activity it was a creative rather than measured act, I did not become beholden to the metric itself, only the thinking that looking at one's life that way can enhance.  With Quantified Self systems, the metrics are hardwired and not custom - so it offers measures that that we may look at, but really have no deeper meaning other than they look rather cool on a dashboard.

Lifestyle change can quickly move from healthy practice to an obsession about data.  Data can itself be a natural opiate that fires off hormones inside us simply because we are thinking or rather reacting that way.  Lifestyle change for me is not about becoming a health robot, it is about life.  No time during the prior 90 days and during this years 90 days have created a visual management system for my physical fitness.  I have not put that data into this log or even a paper diary - and while jotting numbers down by itself might not lead to lifestyle change, when that data is made visual - it is harder not to see what others in my family will then also see.

If I lived on my own, I would make a straight bee-line for aiding lifestyle change with visual data management but I live in a communal setting and the gym is a shared family space, and worse my wife maintains our bedroom as a private space - a space that she knows can quickly fill up with stuff that should be in other parts of the house like the office or even the gym.  So good on her for keeping that space from being occupied but that being said I still need to find a space to create visual monitoring - and writing in a diary or even a digital log like this is not "visual".

I admire Jason Silva's faith in quantified self data but he belongs to a group of people we call human, not a group of industrial age professionals, who each year find new ways of making their professionals more closed group rather than open source.  Giving out our data should be into a world whose infrastructure is a function of trust, not an infrastructure that is a function of image.  Not only turning out life into an image but people not seeing us human but collectable data points - something that is akin to a resource for data consumption and dinosaur mindset.

Tracking fitness, nutrition or exercise is socially viable if our personality and way of life is extrovert but how we go about tracking can be imaginative and motivating, so those people who choose the quantified self-movement are doing what is right for them, but in rejecting doing that (not the movement) am I simply doing what is right for me.  There are so many people who have a hang up why people like me will reject what it is they do, and that is because they have their own identity attached to what they are involved in - hence they are image based and not trust based.  Anything that is different to their image or questions their identity becomes a source of distrust.  I am not invested in distrust, trust is not a system, it is an intuitive feeling.  We can learn more when trust is natural rather than a tribal identity.