I’ve been playing self-defeating games for years with the software progeny of the mysterious figures who work on the Apple Watch activity challenge. Since the monthly challenge regime began in October 2017, I’ve only twice failed to obtain the hideous digital trinket:
- February 2018
- July 2018
It was a protracted learning experience as we groped around the edges of the programmatic forms we were being placed in and the activity team (presumably?) came to understand the bounds of feasibility for their experimental subjects.
Eventually it became clearer that the current month’s challenge was a product in some way of the activity data of the recent past. This is when we started referring to it as “ratcheting”: if last month you were particularly active, this month you might be held to an unreasonable standard!
As a former “gifted child” trained to outsource self-worth to displays of approval from authorities, it galled me to have missed out on those monthly challenges, as unreasonable as they were. I was motivated to complete the challenges by the bare minimum so as not to set up next month to be unreasonably difficult.
Apple appeared to have taken some pity on us as the realities of 2020 unfolded by ratcheting ratcheting down, but I persisted with the queer habits.
You can see that after I obtained the January 2022 challenge, activity mostly collapsed. I even had a ridiculous anti-challenge idea: a day without once registering one “stand” hour out of the default that calls for 12 per day. I skipped going for candy because I didn’t want it to count as a “stand”. Ultimately, I failed just walking down the hallway but by then I didn’t want to face the frigid outdoors 🥶
It’s less than an hour until I learn what’s in store for me in February, and now that I’ve documented these absurd practices for the world, perhaps it’s time to say: the line must be drawn here!
After all, is it even worth it for things so uggers?