Are you in the cult of the ‘quantified self’?

Depending on who you follow on Instagram, you might have noticed an obsession with tracking and monitoring habits and behaviours. People track their steps, their sleep, their drinks, their spending, their runs - even sharing your Wordle result could fall into this particular social media genre.

It’s not a new phenomenon. Socrates is said to have extolled the value of an ‘examined life’ 2,500 years ago. Slightly more recently, in 2007, journalist Gary Wolf coined the phrase ‘quantified self’. Since then, the category has exploded with habit-tracking apps and wearable technology designed to monitor everything from your heart rate to your deep sleep cycles.

In a new book, Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement, author James Vincent complains that people who track their habits 'boast about shaving minutes off their day through rigorous self-surveillance, or discovering through sophisticated an…