Quantified Self-Consciousness

By @edent · 750 words

I'm afraid of failure. I think most people are. Even worse than failing? Failing in public!

Pink Floyd were completely right in the denouement of The Wall where they articulated the prehensile terror that many feel when they open themselves up.

Since, my friend, you have revealed your deepest fear, I sentence you to be exposed before your peers. Waters / Ezrin

Talking about our fears, our failings, our humiliations, seems... alien. I've written before about how Social Media sometimes forces us to confront a never-ending stream of our friends' triumphs - but I never really thought about why it's so hard to share when things don't work out so well.

In the last few years, the obsession with the The Quantified Self has grown. We endlessly measure every drop of sweat expended in cardiovascular exercise, each calorie of organically manufactured hummus is photographed lovingly, each night's particular allocation of REM cycles graphed, each perfect turd shat out and analysed for signs of mortality.

And yet, that little button which says "Share This With Your Friends" (a command, incidentally, not a question) - it only ever seems to get pushed when we've achieved something worthwhile.

How often do you see your friends posting statuses like this?

A simple search of Twitter shows a couple of 0.25KM runs each day - vastly outnumbered by those friends who seemingly do nothing but jog for a living.

That can't be right, can it? Surely even the sportiest of our friends must occasionally spend 2 minutes in the pouring rain before quitting and deciding to watch TV with a can of Pringles?

Not that you'd know it from their tweets.

Why are we so self conscious? Why do we hide away these flaws?

I've no coherent data to support my hypothesis, but I suspect it's because we know that when others see weakness, they attack. It's normal mammal behaviour, and it's about as edifying as watching cat idly torture a half-dead mouse.

I don't tweet any quantified self data - unless my beer drinking habits count - but my solar panels do. And I've noticed something upsetting. When they tweet about how successful they've been at converting photons into electrons, no one replies to them.

When they admit defeat and share the (fairly obvious) news that Britain's weather can be a bit crap, they attract snarky comments.

(Don't worry, Bruce, Chris, and Charles are big enough to take some mild criticism.)

Perhaps I'm misremembering. But I don't recall them cheering the panels on in times of plenty. Just the sting of their words when the panels have underperformed. (And, yes, I know that I'm anthropomorphising an inanimate object - sorry.)

I don't want that for me. As it happens, I'm quite good at beating myself up for the mistakes I make in my life.

I don't want the world to know I've put on weight, or that my exercise bike has spent more time as a clothes-horse than getting me fit. I'm scared of how nasty strangers on the Internet can be.

Some people, like my mate Vicky, have more faith in humanity than I do:

I just know that the knives will be out for me if the façade slips and I'm revealed to not be as perfect as you lot are.

I am quantified self-conscious.

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