The tyranny of the ten thousand steps

By Dr. R. Balasubramaniam

There was a time, not very long ago, when a walk was simply a walk. You stepped out into the evening air because your legs asked for it or because the mind needed a little unburdening or because the mango tree at the end of the road was worth another look at that hour. Nobody counted anything. The walk justified itself.

That innocent arrangement between a person and our own legs has now been quietly taken over by a small device strapped to the wrist, one that watches, counts, judges and occasionally scolds.

I discovered this at a family gathering many years ago, where a nephew, midway through a conversation about his career, glanced at his watch with the anxious devotion one might reserve for a summons from a higher authority and announced with visible relief that he had closed his rings for the day. I did not have the heart to ask what had been imprisoned in those rings or what fate awaited him had they remained open. But I then decided to imitate him and buy a smart watch of my own.

We have managed to convert the simple act of moving one’s own body into a performance to be measured, logged and reported, as though the human leg had been functioning all these millennia without proper supervision and finally needed a manager.

Grandmothers who walked five kilometres daily to fetch water, with no instrument more sophisticated than a pot balanced on the head, would find it faintly comic that their grandchildren now require an algorithm’s blessing before considering a stroll around the  block worthwhile.

I recall my years among the Jenukuruba community in Heggadadevanakote, where elders thought nothing of walking great distances through forest paths for the day’s work, their fitness a by-product of living rather than a number to be chased. Nobody there ever asked whether the steps were counted. The forest did not keep score and neither the tribals did.

The modern tracker, however, keeps score with the seriousness of an income tax officer. It nudges you at odd hours to stand up, as though your own spine had filed a complaint through official channels. It sends congratulations when you cross an arbitrary threshold, applause usually reserved for national achievements, merely because you walked to the bathroom more often than usual. And it induces in otherwise sensible adults a peculiar guilt on days when the count falls short, as though one had failed not merely a device but a small silent examiner residing permanently on the wrist.

A new species of conversation has emerged, where friends compare sleep scores over lunch with the gravity that earlier generations reserved for examination results or stock market movements. Someone announces solemnly that their deep sleep percentage was disappointing and the table nods in shared concern, as though a beloved relative had taken ill. We have outsourced the ancient human capacity for self-awareness to a piece of plastic and silicon and then thanked it profusely for doing the job.

The irony buried in this is worth pausing over. The very point of a walk, in every tradition I know of, was to step away from measurement, to let the mind wander unaccounted for, free of the targets and deadlines that govern the working day. We now carry that tyranny onto the walking path itself, so that even our escape from performance has become another arena for performance.

My nephew was not being foolish. He was responding, quite sincerely, to a system built to make him feel that an unmeasured walk is an incomplete one, that movement without a witness barely counts as movement at all.

Our traditions have always understood the body as something to be lived in with attention rather than monitored from outside. Mindful movement, whether in a morning walk or in the discipline of yoga our sages refined over centuries, was never about numbers on a dial but about the quality of presence brought to the act itself. A step taken in awareness is worth more than a thousand taken while staring at a screen to confirm that they occurred.

Perhaps the gentlest correction available to us is also the oldest, which is simply to walk because it feels good to walk, to notice the mango tree again and to let the evening air do what it has always done for tired minds. This is not a rejection of the device, which means well and occasionally does a genuine service to a sedentary body, but a reminder of where the true measure of a good walk has always lain, not in the wrist but in the walker.

A life well-lived was never going to be certified by an algorithm and the wisdom our elders carried through their own long unrecorded walks remains available to us the moment we choose to notice it again. The rings, left to themselves, will manage to close and the walker, freed from the need to prove anything, may finally arrive at what the walk was meant to give all along, a quiet mind and a body grateful simply for having moved.

[Dr. R. Balasubramaniam is the Founder of Swami Vivekananda Youth Movement (SVYM). ‘The Lighter Side’ is a series of satirical articles meant to bring a smile by highlighting the funny side of everyday life.]