Likely Normal

There was a time when humans walked purely for survival—to hunt, gather, or escape predators. Now we march in place next to our microwaves at 11:58 PM because our step counter says we’re at 9,823 steps and we vow we will hit that arbitrary goal. Welcome to the absurd world of fitness tracking, where we’ve outsourced our self-worth to wrist-worn narcs that judge our every movement, or lack thereof.

These digital taskmasters have turned walking into a competitive sport nobody signed up for. Your coworker brags about her 15,000-step day while casually mentioning she’s a mail carrier, making your office job “achievement” of 3,502 steps (including seven trips to the snack drawer) feel pathetic. The real kicker? Half those “steps” were just you shaking your wrist to cheat the system while binge-watching Netflix.

Modern step counters have the emotional intelligence of a disappointed personal trainer. Leave your phone on the desk while you walk to the bathroom? “0 steps recorded. Are you even alive?” Take your tracker off during a workout? “Congratulations on your sudden coma.” The audacity of these devices to shame you with judgmental notifications—“You were inactive for 47 minutes”—as if you’re not just sitting at your job where they literally pay you not to pace around like a caged tiger.

The funniest part is how wildly inaccurate they are. One minute you’re a lazy slob, the next you’ve magically walked 500 steps because you drove down a bumpy road. Your fitness tracker thinks you’re either an Olympian or a corpse—there is no in-between.

And let’s talk about the cult-like obsession with 10,000 steps—a number invented by a Japanese pedometer company in the 1960s that somehow became gospel. Why not 9,127? Or 11,045? Because marketing, that’s why. Yet here we are, doing late-night living room laps like idiots because our watch called us unproductive (which, ironically, is exactly what we’re being by obsessing over this nonsense).

At this point, we’re not tracking fitness—we’re in a toxic relationship with a gadget that gaslights us about our movement. But hey, at least when the robot overlords take over, they’ll know exactly where to find us: pacing frantically in our kitchens at midnight, muttering “Just 173 more steps…” like deranged hamsters on a wheel.