Everything that is connected with “self-development” causes me a fierce rejection - life coaches, gurus, talkers-motivators. I want to defiantly burn "self-help" literature on a big fire. Dale Carnegie and Tony Robbins infuriate me without a drop of irony - more than psychics and homeopaths. It hurts me physically to see some The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck becoming a super-bestseller and fucking Mark Manson writing a second book for nothing. I inexplicably hate it, although I haven't opened it and don't intend to.
When I was preparing for an interview with the hero of this article, I struggled with my irritation for a long time - because I immediately wrote him down in a hostile camp. Chris Dancy, a man whom journalists have been calling “The most connected man on earth” for five years, makes his life better through data collection and teaches others about it.
In reality, of course, things always turn out differently. Chris, a former programmer, has been recording absolutely everything he does, everything that surrounds him for almost ten years, analyzes and finds completely non-obvious and truly curious connections that allow you to see life from the outside. The engineering approach even "self-development" turns from naive chatter into something sensible.
We talked as part of Chris's preparation for the presentation at the Rocket Science Fest on September 14 in Moscow. After our conversation, I still want to give the middle finger to Mark Manson and Tony Robbins, but I look at Google Calendar with curiosity.
From programmers to TV stars
Chris started programming as a child. In the 80s he was messing with Basic, in the 90s he studied HTML, in the XNUMXs he became a database programmer, worked with the SQL language. For a while with Objective-C, but nothing useful came of it, he says. By the age of forty, he moved away from development by hand, and began to focus more on leadership.
“Work has never brought me much pleasure. I had to work for others, but I didn't want to. I liked working for myself. But this industry pays big money. One hundred thousand, two hundred, three hundred is really a lot. And people treat you almost like a god. This leads to some kind of perverted state. I know many people who do things they don't like, just to maintain their level of comfort. But the best thing I've done in my career is send the job to hell."
Since 2008, Chris began to collect and store all the data about himself. Each of his activities - meals, calls, conversations with people, work and household chores - he wrote down in Google Calendar. In parallel with this, he took into account all internal and external information, environmental temperature, lighting, pulse, and much more. Five years later, this made Chris famous.
Major media one after another told the story of a man who captures every piece of his life and everything that surrounds it. Nicknames given to him by journalists began to be assigned to him. "The Man Who Fixes Everything." "The most measurable man in the world." The image of Chris indulged the interest of the public, which did not keep up with the technological reincarnation of the world - a middle-aged programmer hung from head to toe with gadgets. At that time, up to three hundred different sensors could be fixed on his body. And if we count those that were also installed at home, the number reached seven hundred.
In interviews for TV channels, Chris appeared in full dress, always wearing Google Glass glasses. Then journalists considered them an incredibly fashionable and promising gadget, an image of the upcoming digital future. Finally, the final nickname was assigned to Chris - the most connected man on earth. Until now, if you type in at least the first two words in Google, the first in the search will be a photo of Chris.
The image began to outstrip and distort reality. Because of the nickname, Chris began to be perceived as something like a cyborg, a person who merged himself with technology in an extreme way and replaced almost all organs with microcircuits.
“In 2013, I began to appear more and more often in the news. People called me the most connected in the world, and I thought it was funny. I hired a photographer and took some shots where wires were sticking out of my hands and various gizmos were attached to my body. Just for laughs. People are too serious about the fact that technology fills their lives. And I wanted them to take it easier.”
In fact, Chris was not a cyborg. He does not even have the simplest chips under his skin - he considers their implantation a pop cliché. Moreover, now the most connected person himself agrees that any person with a smartphone is exactly as connected as he is - famous for his "connectivity"
“Most people don’t even realize that they are much more connected in 2019 than I was in 2010. They look at my old photos where I am hung with sensors and think that I am a robot. But you need to look not at the number of devices, but at the number of connections with technologies. Mail is a connection, a calendar is a connection, GPS in a car is a connection. An online credit card is a link, a food ordering app is a link. People think that nothing has changed - it just became more convenient for them to get food. But it is something much more.
I used to have separate devices for everything - a device to measure pressure, heartbeat, lighting, sound. Today, smartphones do it all. The most difficult thing now is to teach people how to get all this data about themselves from the phone. For example, in America, if four people are traveling in a car, each of them has a GPS navigator, although in fact only the driver needs it. But now we live in a world where we cannot understand anything about this world and our place in it, if an interface is not provided for some situation. It's not bad or good, I don't want to judge. But I believe that if you do not control your consumption, then this is the “new laziness”.
Soft-hard-core data
For the first time, Chris began to seriously collect data because he thought about his health. By the age of forty-five, he weighed quite a lot, had no control over his diet, smoked two packs of Marlboro Lights a day, and was not averse to hanging out at the bar for more than a couple of glasses. A year later, he got rid of bad habits and lost 45 kilograms. Back then, data collection became more than a health concern. “Then my motivation was to understand what I understand about the world. And then - to understand why I wanted to understand it, and so on and on. Then, to help others understand.”
Chris Dancy in 2008 and 2016
At first, Chris recorded everything indiscriminately, without trying to evaluate whether the data would be useful or not. He just collected them. Chris divided the data into three categories - soft, hard and core.
“Soft is data that I create myself, realizing that a certain audience is involved in it. For example, a conversation or a post on Facebook. When creating this data, you always keep in mind how it will be perceived by people, and this distorts everything. But for example, I would hardly classify a conversation alone with my dog in the Soft category, because no one influences me. In public, I can be very sweet with my dog, but here we are alone, and I become who I really am. Soft is biased data, so its value is lower.
I trust data from the Hard category a little more. For example, this is my breath. In most situations, it works by itself. But if I get angry in a conversation, I try to calm myself, and this complicates the classification. Different data influence each other. Still, breathing is more concrete than, say, a selfie.
Or an emotional state. If I fix it only for myself, this is the Hard category. If I talk about my condition to others, it’s already Soft. But if I say that I'm bored talking to you, and on Twitter I write “I talked with a great journalist. Our conversation was super interesting”, what I told you is going to be more Hard than a tweet. Therefore, when classifying, I take into account the influence of the audience.
And the Core category is data that no one influences, neither me nor the perception of the audience. People see them, but nothing changes. These are, for example, the results of a blood test, genetics, brain waves. They are beyond my control."
Optimizing sleep, anger and urination
Ways to collect data Chris also divided into several categories. The simplest is single point collectors. For example, an application that records what kind of music Chris listened to, geolocation of the places where he was. The second is aggregators that collect many types of data, such as applications for tracking biological indicators or programs that capture computer activity. But perhaps the most interesting thing is the custom pickers with which Chris manages his habits. They capture data tied to habits and send alerts if something doesn't go according to plan.
“For example, I love ice cream too much, and this gives me a lot of problems. I can eat it every day, seriously. As you get older, you get too cravings for sweets. So - I made a spot collector that tracked how often I visit Dairy Queen (a chain of ice cream restaurants). And I noticed that I start to go there regularly with a certain amount of sleep. That is, if I didn’t get enough sleep, I’ll end up in Dairy Queen anyway. Therefore, I set up a collector that monitors sleep. If he sees that I have slept less than seven hours, he sends me a message “eat a banana”. In this way, I try to stop my body's craving for sweets, which is caused by lack of sleep1.
Or more. As men age, they need to urinate more and more frequently. Keeping to yourself is no longer as easy as it used to be. That's why old people constantly go to the toilet in the middle of the night. When I turned forty, I tried to find out when it is better to drink so as not to get up at night. I hung one sensor in the toilet, the second - next to the refrigerator. For three weeks I measured when I was drinking and going to the toilet to understand how long my bladder could last, and in the end I brought myself a regimen - I set reminders not to drink after a certain time if I have an important day and I need to properly sleep."
Similarly, the data helped Chris figure out how to keep his emotional state in check. Watching his mood swings, he noticed that you can't really get angry several times in one day. For example, he is enraged by people who are late, but being equally angry at a person who is late twice in a row will not work. Therefore, Chris is prophylactic, doing something like emotional inoculations. He put together a playlist on Youtube with recordings of people experiencing various strong emotions. “And if in the morning, looking at the video, you get a little “infected” with someone else’s anger, then during the day there will be less chance of breaking into people who are annoying.”
When I first learned about Chris, it seemed to me that such non-stop data fixing was some form of obsession. There are millions of healthy and successful people in the world who do without it. Becoming "the most connected in the world" to make your life meaningful is like Goldberg's machine - a bulky, super complex, spectacular machine that puts on a half-hour show of physical manipulation in order to eventually break the egg shell. Naturally, Chris is aware of what can cause such associations, and naturally, he analyzed this issue too.
“When you have a lot of money, you can live well without putting in a lot of effort. There are people who organize your time, go shopping for you. But show me one poor man who lives a good healthy life.
Yes, I may seem obsessive and overly enthusiastic to some people. Why stress so much? Why not just do what you do? Without any technology and data? But information about you will still be collected, whether you like it or not. So why not take advantage of it?"
PS
Imagine a sci-fi situation. You collected so much data that you were able to calculate the day of your death with 100% accuracy. And now this day has come. How will you spend it? Will you smoke two packs of Marlboro Lights or will you continue to control yourself?
“Maybe I’ll lie down and write a note. All. No bad habits.
Source: habr.com