Sunset: 5:19pm. A cloudy day with highs in the low 40s and a few beautiful minutes of blustery snow. I’m reading Bring Up the Bodies, the second installment of Hilary Mantel’s dense portrait of Thomas Cromwell. It’s slow-going for me, but worthwhile for images like this: “Troubled men . . . sidling around the peripheries of their own souls, tapping at the walls: oh, what is that hollow sound?”
If I have a soul, what are its measurements and boundaries? I close my eyes and try to imagine it. Perhaps this is a fool’s errand, a pointless exercise in metaphysical speculation. Then again, there’s the 21st-century joke—or horror—that our search histories might be the most accurate portrait of our souls.
All the little gestures and routines that define me—listening to music, walking, running, meditating, writing, reading, sleep, breathing—can now be quantified via a weirdly persistent army of devices and apps that want to tell me how fast, how long, how far, how often, and how many people.
While I wasn’t paying attention, my life became gamified into metrics and streaks. But turning myself into a scoreboard has led to blinkered thinking, a binary view in which every activity becomes about the accretion of data, not the mystery and mess of life itself. Maybe I’m not meant to know so much about myself.
So I spent the afternoon sidling around the peripheries of my devices, tapping at the delete button.
