Withering Watch - Mandaris

Apple watch homescreen showing water levels, food intake, mindfulness, and rings. — The current first home screen on my watch.

Apple will soon be having its developer conference where it will be showcasing the next operating system. And, like I’ve done for the last couple of years, I wonder if this will be the release where I won’t be able to upgrade my sixth generation Apple Watch.

My time with the watch

Back in 2016, I was unemployed. I was lost in worry about being able to provide for my family and fighting depression and thoughts that I had failed on so many levels.

My wife bought the watch as a gift. Something to cheer me up and get my mind off of things.

I liked. It was the one material thing that I had really been desiring. It reminded me of the first thing that I had ever purchased with my own money, a watch.

But, I felt that I couldn’t keep it. Bills needed to be paid, and having a $300 wrist computer felt like a lead weight on my arm.

It was a reminder that even though I could buy the watch, I could not afford the watch.

I returned it.

The Apple Watch Strikes Back

Years later after establishing gainful employment, my wife and family bought be another watch.

This time was different!

Apple was promoting the fitness aspects of the watch and I made it part of my identity to Close those rings! I loved seeing new workouts and the way that I could track my accomplishments.

The fact that you had apps on the watch wasn’t something that I would rely on but it was nice to track my water consumption and relay small messages.

What do I actually use it for

I’m generally happy with my watch and feel that it has held its value with me pretty well. Although, the battery life has definitely diminished and changes to the operating system has made some features harder to use, putting it on is the first thing that I do that day.

But there have been some real sore spots with using it.

A new challenger has appeared

The first has been the challenge of challenges. The Apple Watch allows me to compete with one of my friends to see who can do more with the watch. The problem is two fold. First, you and your friend have different goals set up. I might have a goal of doing 800 Kcal of movement and 40 minutes of exercise while my friend could set it to 200 Kcal and 5 minutes respectively. We both compete based on percentage of completion and whether we go over. When I first got the watch it was easy to find people who had similar goals. Now, I have one person who consistently beats me by setting their goal to the minimum

Additionally, having notifications about people finishing workouts has slowly made it so that people who don’t work out with it turn this feature off. I kind of blame myself for this as I would try to squeeze out a 11:30 workout to close my rings for the day.

The Chains that Bind Us

As I mentioned earlier, being able to monitor my progress is a wonderful aspect of having the Apple Watch. It allows you to track how many consistent days that you have closed your rings. This is great motivation to start off and keep going. It’s often attributed that Jerry Seinfeld uses this as motivation to write jokes. The idea is that you’ve started a streak or chain.

Do not break the chain!

Unfortunately, this can also work in the opposite way. I remember the exact moment that I had broken a streak of over 400 days. I had my daily movement goal set to accommodate the fact that I was going rollerskating that night; I wanted push myself to do extra laps around the rink while I sing the B-52’s Love Shack at the top of my lungs.

Someone fell and I had to drive them home.

By the time that I handled all of the excitement, it was 12:02 and I realized that I had missed my goal by 2 cal.

That sucked.

No way to go back and adjust the numbers. And even if there was a way, that would have compromised my integrity.

I’ve had other streaks since then but it just hasn’t been the same. Comparison between the largest streak and what I’ve done since has taken a little bit of the joy that I had.

Double tap for Mindfulness

At one point, they introduced an application called Breathe to the watch. It was a simple application that would vibrate and show a visualization of breathing. You could set it for small intervals that would encourage you to take a couple minutes to calm your mind.

Since then, the application has been expanded. You have to First go into the mindfulness application and from there you go into Breathe. It’s one more tap, but a bit of friction that hasn’t been addressed since.

Apple watch mindfulness app — The current state of the Mindfulness application on my watch.