It works on a twenty-four hour cycle. Unlike a human, it lacks the ability to think about time in any other way.

With a little input from me about my activity level and general size, the Activity app has decided that I should expend 750 calories each day through exercise – and by "exercise," apparently, I mean "moving my arms around." I've discovered that giving an animated fifty-minute lecture burns a few more watch-calories than a fifty-minute bike ride up and down the hills of San Diego. Instead of saying it measures calories, then, you could say it measures "calories." (Some authors who review the app think otherwise, but I remain dubious.)

Since I had a substantial teaching load last semester, I reached my watch's goal frequently. "Nice job, Self," it would tell me. (My watch has figured out that, when I text myself a reminder, I send it to "Self," but it's a little too short on social awareness to realize that "Self" isn't a good nickname for someone else. What do you expect? It also keeps suggesting a brisk walk right before midnight.) Also, it gives me a little sparkly display as a reward when I "reach" those goals.

It can only think about time in one way, and it dragged me, with encouraging little rewards, into conceptualizing time in its terms as well. Once or twice – I'm not proud of this – I tried to game it, figure out how to gesticulate out the last fifty "calories" before midnight to maintain my streak of successes. (It wasn't all that hard.)

Those heady days of dependable fireworks and weeks-long streaks of arm-waving success ended when I gave my final exams and returned to more traditional forms of exercise and styles of communication. (It purses its lips and shakes its digital head sadly.)

If I poked around for a few minutes, I could probably figure out how to turn it off.

But I don't want to. As I said, I've repurposed it.

Into the Game

There's a new approach to marketing that I'm finding in more and places. Sometimes called gamification, it's the idea the idea that people don't just want value for their money when they buy or use something – they also want to be entertained. This can be done by connecting commerce to games. Some companies have started setting small goals for people to accomplish in a particular time frame, and giving them a little reward when they succeed. (Use your watch to burn 750 calories today! Use these coupons to save up to 50%, this week only!)

The rewards that come when someone wins these games – tiny dopamine-fueled hits of happiness, according to Gabe Zichermann – may keep customers coming back. But what does this do to the consumers themselves?

There's nothing wrong with the goals the activity tracker sets. Being healthy, feeling fit, and looking the way you want are respectable aims in this world. It's not those ends that I'm concerned with, though, but the means of getting there. The Apple Watch activity tracker is a simple program. It has exactly one way of measuring progress, and one set goals to reward. If you want those rewards, you have to play by its rules.

And that means that, for at least a little bit of the day, you have to think about yourself in its terms. Those terms aren't evil or vile or insidious, but while they may encourage good health habits they subtly reinforce a problematic way of looking at oneself and the world, and so they're worth understanding.

Apple Watch Happy Time

The Activity app may only be able to deal with time in one way, but humans can think about it in many. Each way of thinking about time offers its own rewards, and also presents its own obstacles to happiness. Focusing too closely or too unreflexively on one form can compound those problems. The Activity app, I think, is built with a common conception of time in mind, and it locks its users into that conception even more tightly.

The rewards the app offers may appear to be a simple question about a dopamine hit that happens when you feel like you've achieved something, but reducing it to a biological function makes it easy to overlook the fact that the whole thing actually runs on philosophical conceptions built into the history of our culture.

The best question to ask about our connections to those little rewards is: how do we define success?

It's hard to imagine a hunter-gatherer having any use for a calorie-counting watch. Not just because they tend to get a lot more exercise than contemporary city-dwellers do, or because they have different ideas about health, or senses of what it means to be "attractively slim" (although all these may be true), it's because it requires a distinctly modern concept of time.

We're habituated to think of time as moving forward. As a result, there's always a chance for progress. Burning 750 calories doesn't matter much on its own; it is only useful if it's part of a larger project to, say, use up enough calories to lose twenty pounds before summer, and then keep them off. And then, when you realize you haven't, lose them again. If you take it seriously, the Apple Watch causes you to think about time in the longer term, and to orient yourself to a system of success and failure – and the watch itself is the referee.

In terms of progress, or a lack of it: that's one way to think about our relationship to time.

Other Times

Anthropologists have identified a second way that other societies have thought about time: as cyclical. If the rains come each spring (in many ways the same rains) and if the crops grow each summer –much like the ones that grew last year and the year before – and if you harvest before winter comes, as you do every year, and if things don't really change except for the details, then maybe the idea that time moves forward is much less interesting and useful than its cyclicality.

So maybe it goes around in a circle – at least, this is a legitimate and wide-spread way of thinking about it. Take a look at the Mayan calendar if you're not convinced:

Here's another non-western way to think about time: James Suzman, an anthropologist who has worked with the Khoisan people, hunters and gatherers in Namibia, explains that the people he works with have an idea of how time works that seems both familiar and strange. In an interview with Michaeleen Doucleff, he explained it this way:

They were absolutely confident that they would be able to get food from their environment when they needed it. So they didn't waste time storing or growing food.

This lifestyle created a very different perspective on time. People never wasted time imagining different futures for themselves or indeed for anybody else. …

I think that it's a wonderful, extraordinary thing," he continues. "I think it's something we can never get back — this different way of thinking about something as fundamental as time.

It manifests in very small ways. For example, I would ask them what their great

grandfather's name was and some people would just say, "I don't know." They just simply didn't care. Everything was so present-focused.

So if we can live our lives in terms of cyclical time, or live it in the moment, then why have we gotten so caught up in the idea that progress matters, and that little victories add up to a better life?

Time in America

When Alexis de Tocqueville came to the US in the early 19^th century, he found citizens of the new nation who were incessantly forward-looking. Without a hierarchy binding them to a king or a pope, they were free to try and advance up the social ladder. They weren't deep, philosophical thinkers, Tocqueville writes, so instead of seeking out the problems that lay beneath the surfaces of their lives, they tended to look for quick fixes to immediate issues. They "cherish[ed] a persuasion that they have pretty nearly reached that degree of greatness and knowledge which our imperfect nature admits of."

Pretty nearly – but not yet.

Americans had the idea that everything will always be getting better, he writes. This had real practical effects For example, ships weren't built to last because of the widely-shared conviction technology they employed be obsolete before long. Boat-buyers should save their money, then, to buy a new, improved one in a couple years. (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 545)

When life doesn't move on an upward trajectory – when people get stuck in jobs that pay the bills but nothing more, or in relationships that aren't satisfying – Americans tend to get very disappointed. Tocqueville foresaw this, too.

So there are lots of ways to think about time, and that impacts the ways we approach happiness. And that means we have to choose among them – and we do, even though we rarely realize it. Over time, we practice ourselves into being the sorts of people who think about time – and the happiness that comes now or later – in certain ways.

In another article I explained how we learned to live by the clock, apportioning our days according to the demands of the economy more than anything else. Even though it doesn't reflect the natural patterns of life, most of us have practiced orienting ourselves to the expectations our jobs lay out for us for so long that we don't really even notice them anymore.

The Apple Watch Activity app is the next logical step in that practice. I have a watch that doesn't just tell me when to leave for work; it tells me how much to exercise, because somebody thinks that aiming for that style of success, embedded in American history, will make me happy in a way that's matches up with Apple's sales goals.

Stopping Time

James Suzmann, the anthropologist interviewed by Ducleff, has this to say about the sort of eternal-moment happiness the Khoisan experience:

This is one of the big, big differences between us and hunter-gatherer cultures. And I'm amazed that actually more anthropologists haven't written about it.

Today people [in Western societies] go to mindfulness classes, yoga classes and clubs dancing, just so for a moment they can live in the present. The Bushmen live that way all the time!

Contrast this with the attitude required to use the Activity app: it pulls you from the moment into awareness of a long-term goal. And it moves you from immediate engagement with the world around you to thinking about yourself.

Is this a life you'd choose to live? The answer might be yes, at least for some of the time – but there's a strong tendency for people to be pulled into this decision unawares rather than choosing these goals self-consciously.

In April 2014, a small group of Tibetan monks began creating a mandala on the second floor of City Hall in Jersey City, NJ. Thirteen hues of sand were poured from metal funnels a few grains at a time onto a four-foot-by-four-foot spot on the linoleum to create geometric designs, floral patterns, and images of the Buddha.

Early on the morning the picture was to be completed, before the monks arrived to finish their work, a small boy who had come to City Hall with his mother "decided to jump on top of it." The damage was significant.

"Everybody's heart stopped," said Councilman Daniel Rivera.

But Geshe Wangdu, a host of the visiting monks, seemed to shrug it off. “What can we do?” he said.

The thing about mandalas, of course, is that they're created to be destroyed. Maybe not by toddlers, maybe not until everyone has arrived to see it, certainly not until the work is finished – but this one was going to be swept up and dumped into the Hudson River no matter what.

Mandalas are reminders that everything changes. Even the most beautiful works of art, most painstakingly rendered, go away.

So why invest all that time and energy on something that's meant to be so ephemeral? Mandalas are a way of getting people to think about themselves as living with a certain concept of time. Object-lessons in impermanence, they teach you not to focus on what's to come, but rather to recognize that what's beautiful now is beautiful now. It's not to imagine a connection to some wonderful future existence that may never appear, like the ones Tocqueville's Americans, with their shoddy ships, envisioned.[i]

(A friend of mine in Thailand once asked me what the English word "temporary" meant. "Oh!" he said after I'd defined it. Then he applied it: "My life is temporary." He had captured the meaning exactly, but the sense he applied it with was Thai and Buddhist.)

I like this mandala story. It made the national news – and I suspect that's largely because so many Americans, stuck in their own ways of thinking about time, missed the point.

As I said, I haven't turned off the activity monitor on my watch. It's not because I couldn't figure out how. It's because I don't want to.

At the end of each week a little chart appears on my watch telling me which days I lived up to the goals it has set for me, and, on the other days, how short I fell.

This month, there's no real pattern. The lines are haphazard. Even though it goes against my predilection for completeness, that's the way I've decided to keep it.

It makes me look at the way I think about time, and think about success and progress. It tells me that I have a choice: I don't have to work for the clock. I have can choose to look at time from many angles.

I've repurposed my Apple Watch.

Now, it reminds me of freedom.

[i] It's worth pointing out that the Khoisan aren’t Buddhists. Where Suzmann says that they enjoy life moment-to-moment, the Buddha's First Noble Truth is that life is suffering. This is, obviously, a very different way to look at everyday life. For more on the Buddha's path to happiness, click here.