EVERY STEP YOU TAKE

Gathering data used to be a fringe pursuit of Silicon Valley nerds. Now we're all at it, recording everything from menstrual cycles and mobility to toothbrushing and time spent in daylight. Is this just narcissism redesigned for the big tech age?

- Tom Faber

I first heard about my friend Adam's curious new habit in a busy pub. He said he'd been doing it for over a year, but had never spoken to anyone about it before. He had a furtive look around, then took out his phone and showed me the product of his burning obsession: a spreadsheet. This was not a record of his annual tax return or numbers he was crunching for work (Adam is a data scientist). Instead, it was a spreadsheet recording the minutiae of his life, with dozens of columns tracking every element of his daily routine. It all started, he told me, because of a recurring argument with his boyfriend. His partner didn't think they spent enough time together, but Adam thought that they did. There was only one way to settle this, he decided: cold, hard data. So he began keeping a note of the days they saw each other and the days they didn't.

"It started with just that one element," he told me, "but then you're like, is there more stuff to track?" The spreadsheet expanded; soon, he was tracking his sleep, social engagements, exercise regime and cultural intake. He even started to record, on a scale of one to eight, how much cheese he had eaten that day.

While gathering data about our lives might once have been a fringe pursuit for Silicon Valley tech nerds, now it's just an everyday activity for many of us. We track our step counts, calories consumed, exercise completed, menstrual cycle or hours slept. We list books we've read on Goodreads, our top films on Letterboxd, or share our mostplayed music via the data presented by Spotify Wrapped.