Data-Driven Life (DDL: Data-Driven Life)

I. The Unrecorded Two Kilometers

Last weekend, I went for a walk in the Olympic Forest Park. After about twenty minutes, I instinctively glanced at my wrist to check how long I’d been walking. Normally, after around 10 minutes of walking, the Apple Watch detects the activity and prompts you to start a workout. If you choose to begin then, it includes the past 10 minutes in your exercise time.

But occasionally—like this time—when I raised my wrist, I found the workout hadn’t been recorded at all. The rings remained at zero, as if that stretch of walking never existed in the data world. In that moment, what washed over me wasn’t the healthy frustration of “I put in effort for nothing,” but a more absurd sense of weightlessness—that walk didn’t count. I even half-seriously considered turning around and starting over.

I’ll admit: a significant part of why I exercise is to produce a record that says, “I worked out.” Exercise is the means; the data is the end. It sounds backward, but if you also use a certain watch or app, you probably know exactly what I mean—you’re not alone.

2. Naming This Condition: DDL

I’ve named this mindset DDL: Data-Driven Life. (Yes, it’s a programmer’s dad joke, a pun on “deadline”—in a way, it is indeed a kind of deadline, an implicit “today’s grid must be filled” reminder.)

Once you name it, you realize it’s no longer confined to just fitness—it has seeped into every crevice of life:

• GitHub’s green grid. Just to make the contribution graph look good, people deliberately find something to commit. Even crazier, some sell services on to generate fake commits for you.

• Duolingo’s streak. Sometimes you open it not to learn, but to avoid resetting that consecutive-day counter—and then there’s the friend leaderboard, which is another story.

• Douban’s “Read/Watched” tags. A book abandoned halfway, yet the satisfaction from clicking “Mark as Read” sometimes outweighs actually finishing it. For instance, I never had the energy to finish One Hundred Years of Solitude, but since I read the beginning, I still tagged it as “Read.”

• Gaode/Baidu Maps’ travel footprints. Countries and cities visited, lit up on the map like passport stamps—“Checked in N cities.”

• WeChat step rankings, annual summaries. Even listening to music gets recorded, ranked, and summarized into a year-end report card.

At its core, DDL is a lifestyle: First ask, “Can this be logged?” then decide whether and how to do it. Recording shifts from a byproduct to a primary motive. I’m guilty of every single example above, often without a hint of guilt—that’s what makes it so insidious. It doesn’t feel like a flaw; it feels like a habit.

Three. There Are Actually Two Me’s: One Posts on Moments, the Other Secretly Watches

Let me clarify this distinction now, otherwise things will get increasingly confusing. Behind DDL actually lie two “selves” with different motivations.

The first self is the signaling self. Posting cycling route maps or calorie counts from hikes on social media—let’s be honest—is about looking cool and enjoying the thrill of showing off. It’s a social signal broadcasting: I’m disciplined, I’m healthy, I have the time and money to travel abroad for fun. When economist Veblen talked about “conspicuous consumption,” today we might as well call it conspicuous fitness. This part of the motivation is undeniably tied to vanity.

The second self is the private archivist. Some data I never share; I just revisit it alone, over and over. A solo cycling route, a hike I told no one about, an unexpected food discovery—no audience, yet I still record it, save it, and occasionally open it to look. This part has almost nothing to do with vanity. It’s more like a personal ritual against forgetting, a ledger written only for myself (and my future self).

That sense of accomplishment after posting—does it come from the activity itself or the row of red hearts? My answer is: a mix, and not a particularly honorable one. Sometimes, the likes are sweet, so sweet that I question why I even went out in the first place. But one detail reassures me: the data I never share, the ones just for me, are precisely the ones I can’t bear to delete. They have no audience, yet they withstand my repeated revisits. So I suspect the vanity half is real, but beneath it lies another half that has nothing to do with anyone else. Separating these two selves is crucial because, when defending “vanity” later, we must first admit: a big part of DDL isn’t about vanity at all.

4. Digging Deeper: What Are We Really Chasing?

Vanity is merely the outermost layer. Dig a few layers deeper, and you’ll find that DDL taps into several more profound things.

First, instant feedback against delayed rewards. The true returns of exercise—health, longevity, fitness—are slow, invisible variables. After a run today, your muscles won’t visibly grow larger. But data forcibly compresses this feedback loop: you can’t see yourself getting healthier, but you can see the numbers rising. At its core, DDL is essentially slapping an “instant gratification” dashboard onto something that inherently involves “delayed gratification.” This mechanism, which leverages loss aversion (fear of breaking a streak, fear of an unclosed ring) to drive behavior, is almost like welding behavioral economics directly into a watch.

Second, fighting entropy and forgetfulness. Memory decays and deceives; delve even deeper, and it takes on an existential tone—an unrecorded experience carries a weightless feeling of “it might as well not have happened” (remember those two kilometers at the beginning?). The fitness world’s blunt motto says it all: If it’s not on Strava, it didn’t happen. Every timestamped record is a letter to your future self, a clumsy negotiation with time: Don’t erase all that I’ve lived.

Third, a sense of control. Most of life is chaotic and uncontrollable. “Quantifiable” roughly equates to “legible,” and “legible” roughly equates to “controllable.” Slicing life into measurable metrics creates a sense of certainty in the chaos—“I’m making progress, I’m holding the steering wheel”—even if that certainty is somewhat illusory.

Fourth, commitment mechanisms. This is actually a switch with two sides. The darker side is when “you forget to start recording mid-workout and would rather quit or start over”—data ends up hijacking the exercise. But flip it around, and it’s precisely this “if it’s not recorded, it doesn’t count” obsession that forces you to put on your shoes, step outside, and finish that session.

It’s a bit self-referential—I’m the one building these very tools: timestamped journals, iOS apps that aggregate fitness and health data. I complain about being data-driven while simultaneously crafting this dashboard for myself (and others). To some extent, I’m both a prisoner and the architect of this panopticon.

V. In Defense of Vanity: Low-Quality Fuel, but It Does Spark the Fire

Now we can directly answer that question: Is it legitimate to rely on vanity for fitness?

My view is this: Vanity is low-grade fuel, but it does ignite the fire. And I don’t want to settle for the lukewarm judgment of “harmful yet useful”—I’d like to push the argument further.

There’s a famous 18th-century notion called “private vices, public benefits” (from Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees)—vanity, greed, and other seemingly “base” motivations actually drive “noble” outcomes like fashion, commerce, and ambition. Applying this to an individual: If a low-grade motive (vanity) can consistently produce a high-grade result (health + discipline), is that motive really so shameful? A pragmatist would say, judge something by its fruits.

Going even further—knowing full well that you’re driven by vanity and deliberately leveraging it isn’t weakness; it’s a form of self-engineering. Like Odysseus, who knew he couldn’t resist the sirens’ song, so he tied himself to the mast in advance. You don’t need to be a saint with pure motives; you can be the engineer of your own behavior: knowing you’re lazy, you design a system of incentives that even a lazy person can’t help but follow. (Of course, this doesn’t mean you can claim you’re powerless against temptation and spend all day scrolling to practice “edging”—let’s stop there, that’s another topic entirely.)

That’s why I say, “Doing it for vanity, yet genuinely reaping the benefits of exercise, has intrinsic value”—the more I think about it, the more it holds up, and more convincingly than I initially assumed. I can recall multiple times: knowing full well I only stepped out to close that damn ring, yet the wind, sweat, and soreness were real, and so was the grounded satisfaction afterward. Whether the heat comes from burning trash or nuclear fission, the water boils all the same, and the electricity flows either way.

VI. But Don’t Get Too Cocky: Do the Full Accounting

If the article ended at the previous section, it would merely be an elaborate self-justification. To be honest, we must also leave ample room for opposing viewpoints. The fuel of vanity comes with several real costs.

Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The danger lies in the subtle distortion of activities to make the metrics look better—for example, choosing a route with more impressive data but one you don’t truly want to take, or simply not moving once “this one doesn’t count toward the data.” At this point, the means have hijacked the ends.

Overjustification Effect: External incentives can erode intrinsic enjoyment. This is a counterintuitive finding from self-determination theory. The worst outcome is this: the day the audience disappears or the data vanishes, motivation collapses instantly, like influencers who stop working out when no one is watching. You start running for yourself, but gradually, you’re running for others (a familiar script).

And the most subtle one: The loss of presence. Are you climbing the mountain, or are you “filming yourself climbing the mountain”? When experiences are mediated through lenses and sensors, they become thinner. The person who keeps glancing at their pace while climbing isn’t fully present on that mountain. Hidden here is a trade-off, and even I haven’t fully figured out whether it’s worth it: DDL might be exchanging “depth of presence” for “permanence of record.” The mindfulness tradition of “living in the moment” would say this is a bad deal, but who’s to say that years later, a replayable trail won’t be more precious than a hazy, unreliable memory? This tension is something I prefer to lay bare rather than rush to answer.

Of the three, the one that stings me most is the last. There have been times when, while climbing, I’d obsess over whether my pace had dropped, whether the trail would break, or if I’d forgotten to resume tracking after a break—only to realize later that the mountain was already behind me, and I could barely recall what it actually looked like. In those moments, I’d wonder: Did I truly visit that mountain, or just its data?

7. A Self-Check Question: If My Watch Broke Forever, Would I Still Go?

After laying out both sides, I lean toward a compromise—one I consider a more mature stance: Vanity and data are best treated as training wheels, not the engine itself.

The value of training wheels lies in “getting started”—they trick you off the couch and over the hardest hurdle. Ideally, as you ride, intrinsic rewards gradually take over: the thrill of a stronger body, the flow state, the post-workout mental clarity. Once these kick in, data should fade into the background, becoming a nice-to-have rather than the sole motivator.

To gauge where you are in this journey, ask yourself a simple yet brutally honest question:

**If my watch broke forever, would I still go?**

If the answer is “Then I wouldn’t go,” it means you still rely on those training wheels—and there’s no shame in that. If the answer is “Yes, though I’d miss the recording,” your engine is already running on its own. The goal is to graduate from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation; but if the scaffolding isn’t ready to come down, that’s okay. You might never fully “graduate,” and that’s perfectly fine too.

My own honest answer oscillates between the two. On good days, it’s “Yes, though I’d miss the recording.” On tired, unmotivated days, “Then I wouldn’t go” wins out. Could I ditch the watch entirely? Probably not yet. But I refuse to feel ashamed about it—riding with training wheels forever still beats leaving the bike untouched out of disdain for their “childishness.”

8. Closing: Impure persistence will always beat pure intentions

After circling around, I want to land the conclusion somewhere deeper than “showing off looks cool.”

The highest form of DDL might not be vanity at all, but rather a quiet resistance against the inevitability of being forgotten. Every timestamped record is a negotiation with time: “Don’t erase all of what I’ve lived through.” Vanity is just the loudest, most superficial layer of this impulse.

As for whether the motivation is pure or not, my current answer is: don’t overthink it. A workout with impure motives that you actually stick with will always beat a pure intention that never leaves the couch. I stepped out the door just to post on social media, but the wind truly touched my face, the sweat truly dripped, and the mountain was truly beneath my feet. That mountain won’t shrink an inch just because my reason for being there wasn’t noble.

So next time I forget to hit record, I’ll probably still feel like giving up. But I hope the me in that moment can laugh it off and keep moving forward—because those two kilometers happened, whether they were recorded or not.

In the spirit of the Great Zhou Rites, I’d like to end with this:

I once heard that when craftsmen first learn their art, it’s mostly to boast about their skills in front of others; when hunters first draw their bows, it’s mostly to hang their prey at the door for all to see. But look—the craftsman, in all that boasting, actually honed their craft; the hunter, in all that showing off, truly strengthened their arms. Should their progress and strength be taken away just because their initial motives weren’t pure?

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