06.12.11
But what’s the metric for life as an asshole?
Michael Galpert rolls over in bed in his New York apartment, the alarm clock still chiming. The 28-year-old internet entrepreneur slips off the headband that’s been recording his brainwaves all night and studies the bar graph of his deep sleep … Before he eats his scrambled egg whites with spinach, he takes a picture of his plate with his mobile phone, which then logs the calories. He sets his mileage tracker before he hops on his bike and rides to the office, where a different set of data spreadsheets awaits.
“Running a start-up, I’m always looking at numbers, always tracking how business is going,” he says. Page views, clicks and downloads, he tallies it all. “That’s under-the-hood information that you can only garner from analyzing different data points. So I started doing that with myself.”
His weight, exercise habits, caloric intake, sleep patterns—they’re all quantified and graphed like a quarterly revenue statement.
The founder of his own online company, Galpert is one of a growing number of “self-quantifiers ….”
“I’ve rewired my brain [with smart pills],” [says another ‘self-quantifer’].
[The annoying guy has made it into a product, sharing] his results with the CEOs and venture capitalists he consults with through his executive coaching business, BulletProofExecutive, but he’s found an even more welcoming audience at the first-ever international Quantified Self Conference.
Over the last weekend of May, in the upstairs of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, 400 “Quantified-Selfers” from around the globe have gathered to show off their Excel sheets, databases and gadgets.
Participants are mostly middle to upper class, mostly white …
“I was giving birth to our son, and instead of holding my hand and supporting me and hugging me, [the self-quantifier husband of this poor woman] was sitting in the corner entering the time between my contractions into a spreadsheet,” says Lisa Betts-LaCroix.
You can’t change what you can’t measure, say the “self-quantifiers” in the piece.
It’s true. How do you measure the amount of asshole in your personal composition? The douchebaggery? There’s no machine for it, no way to digitally quantize, no way to visualize it in an .xls file.
But you know it when you see or hear about it.
It’s a dilemma, not being able to change something because you can’t measure it even when you know it must be there.
Frank said,
June 14, 2011 at 12:13 pm
Bet he grows up to be on Hoarders.