Your step count is boring me to tears (and probably everyone else too)

Once upon a time, in the distant year of 2005, when it was inconceivable that statement belts would ever be unfashionable, Special K launched a wildly exciting promotion: buy an enormous box of cereal and a pedometer might just appear inside! My memory of the specifics is a little hazy (2005, to me, will always be the era of Going Out Tops and little else), but I’m pretty sure it was a one-in-every-three-box-wins-a-pedometer situation.

Fuelled by the twin desires to get our hands on this technology and to do so in the cheapest possible way, my housemate and I went off to the supermarket. We weighed a bunch of Special K boxes and emerged victorious with our very own pedometers. I wore mine to university a few times, then quickly grew discouraged that my purely incidental exercise wasn’t quite hitting the mythical goal of 10,000 steps a day. So I stopped wearing it, then I lost it altogether and never gave it another thought until now.

If this rather tedious tale were to unfold in a contemporary setting, things would be quite different. For one, almost everyone has some form of step-measuring device in their watch, Fitbit or smartphone now, so there would be no need for cereal boxes. But also, since the heady days of boho chic and Kim Beazley’s last dance (not together), the world has changed. We in the West have evolved into body data narcissists. Thanks to our smartphones, smartwatches and Fitbits, we have become obsessed not just with compiling but aggressively sharing operational information about our bodies with the world at large.

Step counting is the most profoundly stupid example of this. Did you know the idea of walking 10,000 steps a day isn’t rooted in modern science at all? It originated from a Japanese clock company that created a pedometer for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. They chose 10,000 steps because it was a nice, round, memorable number. The notion that this is an achievable, desirable and genuinely beneficial health goal is about as meaningful as feeling “so special” after a bowl of cereal. While, of course, physical movement has proven benefits, the core objective of modern fitness is just part of a convenient marketing ploy.

All right, so we’ve established that the whole premise of counting steps is flawed. And that would be fine if it were just one of those things we knew but nobody talked about (like Maroon 5 having three Grammys). But these days it’s apparently a crucial part of the step-counting process to just blah blah blah about it.

If my Special K story happened today, I’d wear the step counter constantly. I’d talk endlessly about it, doing annoying things like announcing to the office, “All right, I’m going for a walk to get my steps up!” or “I’ll get the photocopying, my steps are way down today”. I’d even proclaim, “Hey everyone, did you know that I WALK?” And I’d never lose interest in or stop wearing that pedometer. In fact, I’d request in my will that someone else put on my Apple Watch, so when I died my steps could continue for time immemorial.

This is because the incessant monitoring of step counts (along with sleep scores and exercise loads) has become intricately linked to our identity. Talking about your daily steps tells everyone that you have a health regimen and the emotional, mental and financial capacity to indulge in this particular brand of self-analysis. It’s showing off. A stupid flex, like carrying a huge water bottle or constantly eating fruit. Yes, I get it, you’re healthy; now please leave me alone with my idleness and my tablespoon of butter dipped in the communal sugar.

It’s also incredibly boring for everyone else to hear about. You know how sometimes you wake up from a strange or moving dream and feel an intense urge to tell someone? So that morning at the office you find a kindly colleague and say, “Last night I dreamt I started a cake stall outside Dan Andrews’ house, and he invited me to run for parliament in something called the Cake Party, and also my dentist was there because my teeth were falling into the cakes, which is why no one was buying them.” And the colleague looks back at you with the glazed detachment of someone who doesn’t give a damn, then gently extricates themselves by pretending they heard the fire alarm? Well, that’s precisely how everyone feels about your step count.

Being active is important, and even if 10,000 steps a day is way off the mark, it won’t hurt anyone if you choose to live that way. But surely there are better ways to indulge the very human tendency for self-involvement than pinning your identity, and all your conversations, to your steps.

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