Discussion
Background: Why I put my whole life into a single database
brodo: The takeaways at the very bottom of the page are valuable:> Overall, having spent a significant amount of time building this project, scaling it up to the size it’s at now, as well as analysing the data, the main conclusion is that it is not worth building your own solution, and investing this much time. When I first started building this project 3 years ago, I expected to learn way more surprising and interesting facts. There were some, and it’s super interesting to look through those graphs, however retrospectively, it did not justify the hundreds of hours I invested in this project.The whole "qualified self" movement might be more about OCD and perfectionism than anything else.
StefanJVA: I wonder how much time you spend daily on tracking things / data entry
TutleCpt: Yeah, we've all put our whole lives into a single database. It's called the United States Government.
lokimedes: [delayed]
ismailmaj: In my experience, tracking objectives things like nutrition and sleep hours is immensely useful to reflect on what went wrong, and tracking subjectives things like "mood" or "stress" is useless given hedonic adaptation or heavy swings that make problems obvious, and not really need tracking.
behehebd: Just check one of the pie charts and it'll tell you!
behehebd: I wouldnt have minded if I kept a simple daily journal with a photo a day. If I had that now with LLMs I could ask it "what year did xyz happen".
BoredPositron: I definitely see the appeal, but I can’t help feeling it’s the same trap we fall into with product data and telemetry. So much of what we collect ends up being noise, and my worry is that if we go looking through enough of it, we’ll eventually talk ourselves into seeing a pattern that isn't actually there.
cyanydeez: The whole "this is a movement" thing might be more about mental health issues than anything else.
noemit: A counter example:I've been wearing an Apple Watch for close to 10 years. I've tracked my weight as well along those years but nothing crazy like OP. The Apple watch tracked plenty.I had some strange symptoms and two doctors insisted I had a weak heart and potential heart failure. This was shocking! Turns out I do have a really "weak" rhythm, but heart failure is when your heart is progressively getting worse in it's pumping. I don't even remember which metric he looked at in my Apple health - but basically my heart has always been this way. A doctor looking at a single data point might think I have abnormally low blood pressure/heart rate, but if I've had this for 10 years with no change, the medical assessment is very different - it means nothing. Sometimes boring data is exactly what you need. For this reason, I will probably always wear an Apple watch (or equivalent) moving forward.
cafkafk: I get that everyone wants to be cynical about this, but you really can't deny that both the visualization and sheer scale of data is impressive. The way the "my life in weeks" is done is also very cool, I'll be stealing that for myself.
stevekemp: I had a similar epiphany a few years back when I started wearing a step-tracker/sleep monitor.It was kinda interesting to see how many times I woke up, or track hours, but to be honest I realised after a few months that when my tracker said "You had good sleep", or "You had bad sleep" I was already aware - I woke up smiling, or grumpy depending on how I'd done.I didn't ever look at the data and think "I want to go to bed now to catch up on the four hours I missed yesterday". I continued to have mostly consistent hours, but if I was doing something interesting I'd stay awake, and if I was tired I'd go to bed earlier naturally. The graphs and data wasn't providing anything of value, or encouraging me to change my behaviour in any significant way.
oldandboring: Same. I had a Garmin for about 6 months and I eventually just stopped wearing it and sold it. Knowing how many steps I took today, checking it several times a day to see if I was meeting my goal, knowing how many vertical feet I skied.. none of this data ended up meaning anything to me.
BirAdam: This was far more interesting than I first thought it would be when clicking the link. In particular, the place/time and life events and such being presented this way told a story and was fun.
aitchnyu: Waiting for a neckband/choker wearable that can take transcription from my vocal cord nerve, so I can operate a chatbot silently. Yes, scientists have made impulse-to-speech lab equipment.
coffeefirst: Yep. Same goes for elaborate note-taking and productivity systems. The simpler, the less bookkeeping and cognitive overhead, the better.
vidarh: For me it's about managing ADHD-like (never diagnosed, and I don't care to assume) patterns, coupled with self-accountability. I have a self-improving dashboard (it kicks off Claude to propose additions based my positive/negative feedback on past attempts, and then builds them) that feels quite helpful. E.g. one of the things it added was fitbit integration that shoves my step count and resting heart rate in my face every day, and it's helped me drive my step count back up towards where I want it to be.I do think it's not worth spending a whole lot of time on, though - hence why the first thing I did was add that mechanism to have Claude build it for me, with me mostly glancing at a plan and saying yes/no. It's the perfect thing to vibe-code - if it breaks, I revert a commit and it doesn't matter because nobody depends on it but me.
andout_: It's important to tell the readers how long you've been doing this - especially to those that also manage ADHD or ADHD-like symptoms.Why? Because those individuals tend to spin something up, tell everyone about it (online, and offline) and then stop doing it few days later.The result then ends up being a false signal for others in the same boat. People who read it, feel a spark of recognition ("someone like me actually figured this out"), and then invest real time, energy, maybe money, into replicating something the author themselves quietly abandoned two weeks later.Just a small heads up from someone who used to get burned in the past :)
vidarh: I have data going back many years, but this recent effort is a few months old at this point. It's however notably an iteration that has reduced the amount of time I spend on collating and reviewing data, by automating away most of my previous manual effort, including most of the coding, and so I do suspect I'll stick with this for a very long time. A significant part of the prompt to the Claude part of it is to focus a substantial portion of plans on how to automate little things that costs me time, and it's doing a decent job at that.I've absolutely not figured it out, but I now have an agent throwing stuff at the wall (with guidance from read access to e.g. my journal and a few other data sources) to figure it out for me, and it's gotten steadily better.
Noaidi: If you are not sick, tracking your life like this is, like he said, is useless. Enjoy your life!On the other hand, if you are sick like me, charting your long term heath data from doctors visits and photographing skin issues can lead to great discoveries. I have been diagnosed with Erythrocytosis and a susceptibility to mycobacteria infection which caused pulmonary nodules and skin lesions. Only after showing my data collection to my doctor. Since I have mental illness they constantly over looked my physical issues so I needed hard data to convince them of my ideas.For those curious, I have an minor IL12B deficiency and a partial immune deficiency leading to mildly elevated levels of DexoyATP which is partially corrected with zinc supplements.
austy69: > Data can feel useless for 10 years until one day it becomes critical. The benefit is spiky and uneven.Not sure if in your case the data was critical, since the doctor likely would have just had you wear a monitor for a while after to come to the same conclusion.
lejalv: A simple back of the envelope calculation shows that Felix causes between 70 and 110 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year just from flying.Paris accord says 1.5t per person per year, from all activities, Felix's flying alonre is ~10-15x current European yearly per person emissions and ~50-75x those compatible with +1.5C.
alex_duf: Exactly, I stopped reading when I saw the flying stats. There are people who still haven't clocked where our climate is headed.I get that you may have to see family abroad or maybe indulge for a holiday, but this is "I'm using an airplane to commute" kind of level.And here I am trying to book my train tickets to go to London instead of flying even though it costs three times as much just to avoid a few kg of CO2 (among other things), it's making me angry.
terabyterex: > Back in 2019, I started collecting all kinds of metrics about my life. Every single day for the last 3 years I tracked over 100 different data types - ranging from fitness & nutrition to social life, computer usage and weather.I know this is the type of person i would not like.
flexagoon: > The whole "quantified self" movement might be more about OCD and perfectionism than anything else.Quantified Self, at least in the original form, is focused on testing specific theories, not on collecting large amounts of data and trying to find something interesting in them.See, for example:https://gwern.net/zeo/zeo#what-qs-is-not-just-data-gathering
Bullhorn9268: I too learned this the hard way. I still haven't figured out why this is the case - like, is the inherent incidental irreducible complexity of human life too high, so it dominates majority of our actions?
gardenhedge: Isn't this a drop in the ocean? Why would any 'normal' person forgo flying? How much CO2 emissions have 'world leaders' produced going to summits, or Taylor Swift and her fans flaying to concerts or war flights?
fxwin: extensive tracking of self-related metrics to improve ones health is the equivalent to reading tons of self-help books to improve ones life/social skills/...We already mostly know what makes people happy/healthy: personal connections, physical activity, healthy diet and some sort of purpose/goal in life that goes beyond day-to-day activities. The problem is that these things generally require (hard) work and can be unpleasant sometimes, so humans do what humans do and spend unreasonable amounts of time doing reading and gathering info rather than applying these and what they already know. (That's not to say that a project like this can't be fun or lead to insights, especially across longer time spans, but i feel like all of the questions in the first paragraph have fairly obvious answers if you know yourself at all, that don't require extensive tracking of stats to get)
criddell: > And here I am trying to book my train tickets to go to London instead of flyingReminds me of the soggy straw memes floating around now. I've been having those why bother? thoughts as well.
hamasho: Why don’t you just query Palantir DB by your human ID? It shows your entire life data and much more.
Noaidi: That made me laugh, but it was a sad laugh, because it is true.
jirigalis: Wow, this sounds amazing! I am a statistics and chart lover, I love tracking various types of data, but this? I can't even imagine how much time it must have taken to input all the data. Huge respect to you! Keep going.
nicbou: I think it's good to track mood swings, because it makes you notice them. After a while it makes you call out your own BS.
Noaidi: As someone with Schizoaffective Disorder Bipolar Type, if you are not diagnosed with a mood disorder, tracking "swings in you mood" when you have no clinical disorder seems like a disorder of its own.I have had people tell me they were "manic". Then I showed them videos I took when I was manic and they see what I mean when I tell them they are not manic.We have come to a place where we do not want even normal fluctuation in mood, and that is a illness of its own, but it is a cultural illness.
revolvingthrow: Eh, I found several interesting things from various tracking tools. Take a nap? Sleep is destroyed this night. Exercise in the evening? Same. Not something I’d pay attention to without noticing the chart afterwards.There’s also the motivation factor. I’m not sure of the total %, but I certainly did some exercising just to fill the daily goal. Nothing life-changing, but for the price of a cheapo apple watch se once every 5 years or so, more than worth it.It’s not unlike simplistic time tracking on my iphone. I spent a lot of time on bullshit websites. Obviously I knew it was happening, but the sheer magnitude was surprising. It’s akin to acute pain letting you know there’s a health problem vs something brewing in the background that you are vaguely aware of, but have no motivation to truly care about - one is far more noticeable than the other
ej31: The value rarely shows up where you expected it to.I kept a rough log of my sleep and mood for about a year with no specific goal. Mostly forgot about it. Then I had a weirdly bad few months and went back to look — turns out there was a pretty clear pattern I would've never noticed in the moment.Maybe the framing of "was it worth it" is the wrong question. It's less like an investment with a return and more like keeping receipts. Useless 99% of the time, then suddenly you really need one.
fxwin: Why do anything for the greater good at all then? (Also there's a big gap between "forgo flying" and "fly every 2 weeks for 7 years")
