For ten years, until December of last year, Michael Allen Smith maintained a blog. In a series of posts, from the end of 2013 until the middle of 2014, he explained why he changed from being an early-adopter life-logger to an opponent of the quantified self. In an introduction to a collection of those posts he wrote:
Once I realized that QS is about control and control is a cause of stress and stress is a cause of health issues I stopped my 2.5 years of self tracking. I surrendered and ended my quest to use data to optimize my health. Doing this ended up being the best decision I could have made. My health improved immediately.Smith recommends, and links to, a blogger who seems to have stopped posting a year ago - The Unquantified Self. In a post that seems to be from September 2013 we read:
All I am saying is that there are people like me for which counting, and the devices that help you count, become an unproductive obsession. Who are logging lots of data but are not actually discovering anything interesting about themselves. Who need a bit of perspective, and a reminder to focus on all the stuff that matters but doesn’t fit onto a spreadsheet. That’s all.Allen Frances, former chairman of the Psychiatry Department of the Duke University School of Medicine replied to Anderson's signing-off tweet with a tweet of his own:
True that the unexamined life is not worth living, but equally true that a too examined life is not really lived.and he needed only 113 characters to make that point.