Silencing the Statistics

GPA. Class rank. Weight. Calories consumed, calories burned. Daily steps. Minutes exercised daily, days exercised monthly. Hours slept. Paycheck total. And so on.

Modern society is ruled by statistics.

Every day, new technologies are introduced to the market that assign numbers to our lives. Be it an Apple watch, a food tracking app, the number of likes we receive on an Instagram post, or even our friend count on Facebook, technology constantly presents us with metrics by which we compare our lives to others’ and to arbitrary standards. We worship these technologies; billboard models glamorize them, they become objects of prestige, and members of social groups rush to be the first ones to display them.

The standards such technologies present are all part and parcel of cyborg anthropology, a field of study concerning how machines affect our definition of humanity. As such, they perpetuate one another in modern data-driven mechanisms of societal control and self-surveillance. In particular, diet and exercise related standards feed into the hegemony of healthism, a collective imagination of the moral rectitude of eating “well” and looking “fit” and “healthy.” *

And it is important to remember that it is just that: an imagination. Rarely do we question who came up with the 10,000 step goal and why. Rarely do we tune in enough to our unique bodies and environments to understand how many glasses of water we really need each day. Rarely do we observe what numbers cannot: how well we digest food based on our emotional state, how specific foods and combinations of foods affect our minds and bodies, and how content and happy we are eating in certain manners.

Many of us cling to statistics to achieve a certain body type. But we forget that a beautiful body in our culture looks drastically different from a beautiful body in another culture.

Further, the quest for the perfect body and perfect health is one of immense privilege. Few people have the time and money that eating cleanly, exercising often, sleeping well, and breathing clean air requires. For some, poverty and lack of opportunity are barriers that will never allow them to buy organic groceries or take time away from work to cook meals at home. And for many of us in college, it is time for us to finally accept that we are still (and may forever be) learning how to balance a busy lifestyle with self-care; we are human, and we will make mistakes in the process.

That is OK. With mindfulness, out of mistakes comes growth.

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As I left the care-free nature of childhood behind and entered adulthood, I, too, blundered into the jaws of number-crunching technologies. When I met the (usually arbitrary) criteria I set for myself based on health blogs, government publications, and conversations with peers, I felt a brief state of relief and validation, followed almost immediately by the stress of upkeeping the standard I had just proved myself capable of meeting.

This became more and more difficult, of course, the more and more standards I set for myself. Just like a triathlete can never be a world champion in any one of their three sports, I could not operate at 110% in all areas of my life. When I failed to meet the criteria, I victimized myself with a seemingly endless stream of self-abuse.

Then, last summer, my counselor challenged me to leave my Garmin watch behind as I travelled for ten weeks in France and India.

As I studied mindfulness and yoga, I was to learn to listen to, and live by, the needs of my own body and mind, rather than the indicators of a standardized machine.

The first week, I checked my bare wrist like a child probes the hole in their mouth for a lost tooth – with surprise, fascination, excitement, and pride. I was empowered. After a week at Plum Village Monastery, I went 24 hours without counting calories for the first time in over two years. And it didn’t stop there. I made it through nearly the entire summer without running numbers in my head.

Above all, I learned that we will never escape the data-driven standards of healthism if we sit around passively and wait for the world to change.

For “the world” is merely a projection of our own internal value systems and desires. We must want to change, and we must show ourselves some tough love by taking the difficult steps toward improvement.

Taking off the watch, deleting the photos to which you compare your body, and throwing out the scale can all be integral to replacing statistics with intuition.

After all, we were perfectly fine (and presumably happier) as children without such technologies. If you asked someone who lived two hundred years ago, they would think it quite silly how much we have come to think that we must rely on smart watches and calorie counts.

Most importantly, and a priori to ridding ourselves of technological burdens, we must consistently and sternly tell ourselves “no” when unhealthy thoughts arise.

There is no softer way to go about this. Self-discipline of the mind may be difficult to grasp at first, but it is ultimately the most empowering (and only) form of control we can truly have.

Appreciate the opportunity to tame your mind.

Explore it with curiosity.

And use it for the betterment of yourself and society.

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*If the topic of healthism interests you, I highly suggest reading Julie Guthman’s book Weighing In, which provides an excellent commentary on the obesity epidemic and its presumed causes, solutions, and victims.