The Mysterious Death (and Rebirth) of Quantified Self

In today’s newsletter, we want to give you a quick history of the Quantified Self movement, along with our predictions of where it’s going.

Over a decade before tracking your sleep, posting your runs, or counting your steps became a core part of the modern athlete’s identity, a couple of journalists writing for Wired asked themselves a simple question…

“How can we know ourselves better through numbers?”

The idea was simple:

By tracking your daily activities, you could use the data to better understand yourself and make improvements. By turning personal experiences into numbers, individuals could discover patterns and optimize their health, habits, and performance, gaining insights that were previously only accessible in scientific or medical settings.

Those two journalists, Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly, acted like a magnet for tech nerds, athletes and anyone interested in tracking everything from mood to heart rate in hopes of unlocking new levels of self-understanding.

In 2007 they coined the term ‘Quantified Self’, which became the name of this eccentric but incredibly prescient movement. Early adopters like Tim Ferris attended the first meetup in Kevin’s home, with just 28 people present.

Also known as ‘personal science’ or ‘auto analytics’, this movement really took off through the early 2010s, peaking around 2015. At its peak, thousands of people around the world were meeting up at local events and conferences to discuss these ideas and find new ways of implementing them.

But nowadays, a quick search of ‘Quantified Self’ will reveal that the movement seems to have died down. The forums are quiet, the conferences halted, and the 5th result when you Google ‘quantified self movement’ is ‘what killed the quantified self movement?’

And yet…

• The global wearable technology market size is expected to reach USD 186.14 billion by 2030 (GrandView research)

• By 2021, there were over 350,000 health-related apps available across major app stores

• Almost 1 in 3 Americans use a wearable (Health Information National Trends Survey)

• Millions of people are watching as tech billionaire Bryan Johnson becomes the most measured human in history and tries to stop aging

• Companies like Levels, Inside Tracker and ZOE have emerged to help you track your insulin, blood biomarkers, and gut health

As blogger Kai Wong put it:

“Quantified self is dead. Long live quantified self.”

What happened?

Here’s our take:

In the beginning, the community of people who ‘bought in’ to these ideas was small enough that a single platform like the Quantified Self organization had the resources and reach to encompass the majority of them. 

It was all weird enough and niche enough that the early adopters could gather in one place—in part because there weren’t many other places to gather. 

But as the technology continued to develop and these ideas became more and more mainstream, the market outgrew Quantified Self. 

Rather than thousands of users interested in all things self-tracking, the industry ballooned to millions of people with specific needs and interests. Quantified self could still be used, technically speaking, as the term to define the wider industry—but the users went elsewhere. 

The law of large numbers meant that as more and more people caught on, it became more and more practical to form niches and specialised groups within the larger movement, with accompanying products and services. 

Athletes focused on recovery and sleep went to Whoop. Runners trying to hit new PBs went to Strava. Anti-aging enthusiasts joined the Rejuvenation Olympics. 

(some went to all of the above.)

The Quantified Self movement, rather than dying, essentially just shed its skin and evolved into the broader digital health and wellness landscape.

A reddit user who used to organize QS meet-ups put it like this:

“Those of us who organized the bigger meetings and conferences knew this was how things were likely to go. We wanted to be midwives, not landlords.” 

We’d wager that they succeeded. 

Quantified self started as a voice in the wilderness, leading people into the future of measuring well-being through technology. 

That future has become our present. 

So what’s next?

If the original set of ideas that fueled the Quantified Self movement are no longer predictions but reality, what new set of predictions can we make?

We’ve been studying these ideas intensely for a while now and can see some trends forming.

Here are some of our takes:

First, we think it’s a safe bet that technology will continue to improve over time. 

We think that sooner or later, technology will be improved to the point that nearly everyone has some form of wearable that is 24/7 monitoring their body and giving them incredibly detailed insights to their health, performance and well-being. 

In fact, we think one day we’ll look back and think that it was crazy that so many of us just didn’t know what was going on in our bodies unless we happened to get some kind of check-up. So many diseases, illnesses and chronic conditions are so much more preventable or treatable if we catch them early. 

We think that someone will invent an easier way to log data—as one of the biggest problems in this space right now is the difficulty of actually collecting relevant data. While some data can easily be collected by wearables automatically and require no user input aside from keeping it charged, some data—especially subjective data like mood, whether or not you performed certain habits, nutrition data, and most everything else you can think to track—requires user input. Technology that reduces the friction of logging your life data, potentially through voice prompts, will be a huge development.

(For example, we think someone will figure out a way to use AI to take your journal entries, provided you enter them online, and turn your day into a set of data points that can be analysed over time.)

We think the available platforms and algorithms for personal data analysis will improve and become more widely available. If the first problem is collecting the data, the second problem is knowing how to use it once you have it. While there are powerful insights no doubt locked in your data, it currently requires a lot of skill to unlock them—which is one reason many people give up on self-tracking.  

We think someone, sooner or later, will develop the ‘holy grail’ of auto-analytics technology. This holy grail would be a software that lets takes all the data users are logging and syncs it all in one place, then gives users consolidated insights, potentially powered by AI, based on cross-analysing all their data. (For example, by pulling your Strava heart rate and Oura ring sleep scores and telling you the impact of your sleep on running performance.)

We think that by using this software and with the right privacy protections in place, scientists could run the largest-ever study on the correlation between lifestyle and health outcomes, and use the data, in turn, to help users optimise their own health. 

We think that as our data is used more and more to sell us better products and advertisements, users will become more and more invested in the idea of taking control back and making their data work for them to live healthier, happier and more fulfilled lives. 

In short, we think that the current landscape is just the beginning of where we can go. 

But it’s important that we do things the right way, and with the right perspective. 

See, one thing we’ve learnt through personal experience tracking over 146 things a day is that your life is bigger than its numbers. 

It’s easy to get obsessed with, lost in or overwhelmed by your data. But at the end of the day, the data is just a means to an end. To the extent that it helps you live a better life, it’s useful, and to the extent that it doesn’t, it’s meaningless. 

“Not everything that can be counted, counts. Not everything that counts, can be counted.” - William Bruce Cameron

The purpose of this newsletter isn’t just to talk about numbers and science. We want to figure out what really counts, and have fun along the way. 

While this early issue might have felt like a serious topic, we’re here to have fun with these ideas. 

Over the following months and years, we want to investigate everything from whether spending 600 hours studying a language really makes you fluent to the diminishing returns on the number of bananas you eat before a run. 

It’s going to be a lot of fun, and we’re happy you’re here for the ride. 

With all that said, we hope you enjoyed this inaugural edition and we’ll catch you in next week’s newsletter. 

Your friends, 

Benji and Jacob