For the last few months, I've been wearing an Apple Watch. At first I thought it was my friend, offering good advice and cheerful encouragement. But over time I've come to realize that it had other motives.
The Apple Watch – and especially the built-in activity-tracking app – uses many of the same attention-keeping tricks that social media does, and it can be addictive in a similar way.
But how do these techniques fit into our world? And what does thinking in the watch's terms (you need to do this to get the little bursts of pleasure that it offers) do to a person's way of thinking?
Going for its constant stream of little rewards causes us to overlook the bigger picture of the larger rewards life has to offer.
I explore that bigger picture – and the plusses and minuses of the Apple Watch activity app – here, in The Apple Watch’s Peculiar Kind of Happiness.