The all-seeing pen that feeds our need for motivation

AT THE end of a recent Sunday morning run, my companion disgorged a howl of primal rage into the glorious, blossom-kissed Tokyo sky. 

He had forgotten, 10 hard kilometres earlier, to hit start on his Strava running app. Our exertions, he mourned, were wasted; the accomplishment hollow; the experience lost like tears in rain. Truly, as Socrates nearly said, the un-Strava-ed life is not worth living.

My friend’s fury is of our times. The cocktail of tech, social media and human competitiveness awakens an obsessive, constant hunger for self-quantification. Particularly where some sort of effort is involved. Measurement is meaning, and we are all trying to feed our step-count rings to get it.