Wearable activity trackers like Fitbit are all the rage these days. These high-tech devices monitor fitness-related metrics such as how far you walk or run, how many calories you burn, your heart rate and the quality of your sleep. Then you sync your results with a computer so you can track your progress (or lack thereof) – giving us one more thing to obsess (or feel woefully inadequate) about.
Granted, these are important activities to track when it comes to our physical fitness. But at our age, I think there are other meaningful metrics for evaluating what and how we boomers are doing. Imagine an activity tracker that could measure:
- How many times you let things roll off your back versus getting upset
- How much you pay for a bottle of wine, correlated to your level of enjoyment of same
- The number of times you bite your tongue versus saying (out loud) what you’re really thinking
- The speed with which you can get in/out of Spanx
- The number of times you forget why you walked into a room, or misplaced your glasses and/or keys
- How soon after entering a social gathering you start talking about health issues
- How many times your husband can’t find something in the refrigerator, correlated with the level of aggravation you feel when it happens
- How many times you drop an f-bomb, correlated to what triggered it
- How many facial hairs you pluck
- How many times you laugh, correlated to the number of times you pee your pants when you do so
- How often you talk back to the television, correlated to what you were watching
- How many times you tell your inner critic to go f*** herself
- How much of an ego boost you get when you’re carded when buying booze
- How often you say no to doing something you really don’t want to do
- How much time you spend doing absolutely nothing – without feeling guilty
- How often you fantasize about [sex, retirement, winning the lottery, a clean house – insert topic(s) of your preference here since you can program your boomer activity tracker however you want]
- How often you admit (out loud) that your spouse is right
- The number of times you respond to marketing robo-calls with “Bite me,” especially the ones that begin with “Hello, seniors!”
- How many times you’re called “ma’am” or “sir”
- How often you use senior discounts
- The degree of smugness you feel when you refrain from telling your spouse, “I told you so”
- The level of satisfaction you feel when you can resolve a computer issue on your own
- How often you open your mouth and out comes your mother
- How often you like what you see in the mirror
- How many times you contemplate cosmetic surgery
- How often you truly feel comfortable in your own skin
- How often you call a much-younger doctor by his/her first name when he/she does the same to you
- How often you laugh at yourself
- The degree of pride you feel in your children
- How often you refold the laundry after your husband does it
- How often you leave the house without wearing makeup
- How much less you care what other people think of you
- The number of things in this life you have to be grateful for
As I was writing this week’s blog post, I realized that perhaps one of the greatest metrics of “fitness” as we get older is a sense of acceptance – of ourselves and others – and there’s likely never to be a wearable tracking device that can measure that. But I’m working on the acceptance thing nonetheless, inspiring this haiku:
I am more at ease
in my own skin now. Just wish
it were less wrinkled.
What about you? What “metrics” would you monitor on your boomer activity tracker?