"The best thing I've done in my career is to send the job to hell." Chris Dancy about turning life into data
Everything that is connected with "self-development" causes me fierce rejection - life coaches, gurus, talker-motivators. I want to defiantly burn self-help literature at a big fire. Dale Carnegie and Tony Robbins infuriate me without a drop of irony - stronger than psychics and homeopaths. It is physically painful for me to see how any “Subtle Art of Pofigism” becomes a super-bestseller, and the damn Mark Manson is already writing the second book in nothing. I inexplicably hate her, although I have not opened and are not going to.
When I was preparing for an interview with the hero of this article, I struggled with my annoyance for a long time - because I immediately recorded him in a hostile camp. Chris Dancy, the man whom journalists have been calling “The most connected man on earth” for five years, makes his life better by collecting data and teaches others how to do it.
In fact, of course, everything always turns out differently. Chris, a former programmer, has been capturing absolutely everything that he does for almost ten years, everything that surrounds him, analyzes and finds completely unobvious and truly curious connections that allow us to see life from the outside. The engineering approach even turns “self-development” from naive chatter into something practical.
We talked in preparation for Chris's performance at the Rocket Science Fest on September 14 in Moscow. After our conversation, I still want to show the middle finger to Mark Manson and Tony Robbins, but I look at Google Calendar with curiosity.
From programmers to TV stars
Chris started programming as a child. In the 80s, he was busy with Basic, in the 90s he learned HTML, in the zero he became a database programmer, worked with the SQL language. For a while - with Objective-C, but from this, as he says, nothing useful came of it. By the age of forty, he moved away from development by hand, and began to engage more in leadership.
“Work has never brought me much pleasure. It was necessary to work for others, but I did not want to. I liked working only for myself. But in this industry they pay a lot of money. One hundred thousand, two hundred, three hundred - this is really a lot. And people treat you almost like a god. This leads to some kind of perverse state. I know many who do what they don’t like to maintain their comfort level. But the best thing I have done in my career is to send the job to hell. ”
Since 2008, Chris began to collect and store all the data about himself. Each of his activities - meals, calls, talking with people, work and household matters - he wrote in Google Calendar. In parallel with this, he took into account all internal and external information, ambient temperature, lighting, pulse, and much more. Five years later, this made Chris famous.
Large media, one after another, told the story of a person who captures every piece of his life and everything that surrounds it. The nicknames given to him by journalists began to be assigned to him. "The man fixing everything." "The most measuring person in the world." The image of Chris appealed to the interest of the public, which did not keep pace with the technological transformation of the world - a middle-aged programmer hung from head to toe with gadgets. At that time, up to three hundred different senosors could be fixed on his body. And if you count those that were also installed at home - the number reached seven hundred.
In an interview for TV channels, Chris appeared in full vestment, always wearing Google Glass glasses. Then the journalists considered them an incredibly fashionable and promising gadget, an image of the upcoming digital future. Finally, Chris got the final nickname - the most connected man on earth. Until now, if you drive in at least the first two words in Google, the first in the search will be a photo of Chris.
The image has become much ahead and distort reality. Because of the nickname, Chris began to be perceived by someone like a cyborg, a person who in an extreme way merged himself with technology and almost replaced all organs with microcircuits.
“In 2013, I began to appear more and more in the news. People called me the most connected in the world, and it seemed to me that it was funny. I hired a photographer and took some pictures where wires were sticking out of my hands and different things were attached to my body. Just for fun. People are too serious about the fact that technology fills their lives. And I wanted them to take it easier. ”
In fact, Chris was no cyborg. He does not even have the simplest chips under his skin - he considers their implantation a pop cliche. Moreover, now the most connected person himself agrees that any person with a smartphone is exactly as connected as he - famous for his “connection”
“Most people don’t even understand that in 2019 they are much more“ connected ”than I was in 2010. They look at my old photos where I am hung with sensors and think I'm a robot. But you need to look not at the number of devices, but at the number of connections with technologies. Mail is communication, calendar is communication, GPS in the car is communication. Online-attached credit card - communication, food ordering application - communication. People think that nothing has changed - they just become more convenient to get food. But it is something much more.
I used to have separate devices for everything - a device to measure pressure, heartbeat, lighting, sound. And today all this is done by a smartphone. The most difficult thing now is to teach people how to get all these data about themselves from the phone. For example, in America, if four people ride in a car, each of them has a GPS navigator, although in fact only the driver needs it. But now we live in a world where we cannot understand anything about this world and our place in it, if an interface is not provided for any situation. This is not bad and not good, I do not want to judge. But I believe that if you do not control your consumption, then this is a “new laziness”. ”
Soft-Hard-Core data
For the first time, Chris began to seriously collect data, because he was thinking about his health. By the age of forty-five, he weighed a lot, did not control food, smoked two packs of Marlboro Lights a day, and was not averse to hanging out in a bar for longer than a couple of glasses. A year later, he got rid of bad habits and dropped 45 kilograms. Then data collection was more than a health concern. “Then it became my motivation to understand what I understand about the world. And then - to understand why I wanted to understand this, and so on and on. Then - to help others understand. ”
Chris Dancy in 2008 and 2016
At first, Chris recorded everything indiscriminately, not trying to assess whether the data would be useful or not. He just collected them. Chris divided the data into three categories - soft, hard and core.
“Soft is the data that I create myself, realizing that a certain audience is participating in it. For example, a conversation or a post on Facebook. Creating this data, you always keep in mind how it will be perceived by people, and it distorts everything. But for example, I’m unlikely to classify talking alone with my dog ​​as Soft, because no one influences me at the same time. In public, I can be very nice with my dog, but here we are left alone, and I become who I really am. Soft is biased data, so its value is lower.
I trust the data in the Hard category a little more. For example, this is my breath. In most situations, it works on its own. But if I am angry in a conversation, I try to calm myself, and this complicates the classification. Different data affects each other. Still, breathing is more specific than, say, a selfie.
Or an emotional state. If I fix it only for myself, this is the Hard category. If I speak about my condition to others, it’s already Soft. But if I say that I’m bored with talking to you, and on Twitter I will write “I talked to an excellent journalist. Our conversation was super interesting, ”what I told you would be more Hard than a tweet. Therefore, when classifying I take into account the influence of the audience.
And the Core category is data that no one influences, neither I nor the audience perception. People see them, but nothing changes. This, for example, blood test results, genetics, brain waves. They are beyond my influence. ”
Optimization of sleep, anger and urination
Chris also broke the methods of collecting data into several categories. The simplest is single point collectors. For example, an application that records what kind of music Chris listened to, geolocation of the places where he was. The second is aggregators that collect many types of data, for example, applications for tracking biological indicators or programs that record activity at a computer. But perhaps the most interesting is the custom collectors with which Chris manages his habits. They capture data that is tied to habits and send alerts if something goes wrong.
“For example, I love ice cream too much, and it gives me a lot of problems. I can eat it every day, seriously. When you get old, damn you too much to pull for sweets. So - I made a point collector who watched how often I visit Dairy Queen (a chain of restaurants with ice cream). And I noticed that I start to go there regularly with a certain amount of sleep. That is, if I did not get enough sleep, I would end up in Dairy Queen anyway. Therefore, I set up a collector that monitors sleep. If he sees that I slept less than seven hours, he sends me the message “eat a banana”. Thus, I try to stop my body’s craving for sweets, which is caused by a lack of sleep 1 ".
Or more. When men age, they need to urinate more and more often. Keeping in yourself is no longer as easy as before. That is why old people constantly go to the toilet in the middle of the night. When I turned forty, I tried to find out when to drink when not to get up at night. I hung one sensor in the toilet, the second - next to the refrigerator. I measured for three weeks when I drink and go to the toilet to understand how long my bladder can hold, and as a result I brought myself a regimen - set reminders not to drink after a certain time, if I have an important day, and I need to get enough sleep. "
Similarly, the data helped Chris figure out how to control his emotional state. Watching the change of his moods, he noticed that you can not really get angry several times in one day. For example, he is enraged by people who are late, but who are equally angry at a late person twice in a row will not work. Therefore, Chris conducts prophylaxis, does something like emotional vaccinations. He put together a playlist on Youtube with recordings of people experiencing various strong emotions. "And if in the morning, looking at the video, a little" get infected "with someone else's anger, then during the day there will be less chance of falling for people who are annoying."
When I first found out about Chris, it seemed to me that such non-stop data capture is a form of obsession. There are millions of healthy and successful people in the world who do without it. To become "the most connected in the world" to make your life meaningful, reminds Goldberg's machine - a bulky, super complex, spectacular mechanism that arranges a half-hour show of physical manipulations to eventually break the shell of an egg. Naturally, Chris realizes that he can cause such associations, and naturally, he analyzed this issue too.
“When you have a lot of money, you can live well without a lot of effort. There are people who organize your time, go shopping for you. But show me at least one poor man who lives a good healthy life.
Yes, I may seem obsessive and overly keen on some people. Why strain so much? Why not just do what you do? Without any technology and data? But information about you will still be collected, whether you want it or not. So why not take advantage of this? ”
PS
- Imagine a science fiction situation. You collected so much data that you could calculate the day of your death with 100% accuracy. And now this day has come. How do you spend it? Smoke two packs of Marlboro Lights or continue to control yourself?
“I guess I'll lie down and write a note.” All. No bad habits.
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