The Baby Boomer Activity Tracker

Look at someone’s wrist these days, and chances are you’ll see one of those wearable activity trackers like Fitbit or Jawbone. These high-tech devices monitor your fitness by tracking how many steps you take, your daily calorie burn, your heart rate and how well you sleep. Then you synchronize your results with a computer so you can measure your progress (or lack thereof)—giving us one more thing to obsess (or feel woefully inadequate) about.

Granted, these are important activities to track when it comes to our physical fitness. But at our age, I think there are other meaningful metrics for evaluating what and how we boomers are doing. Imagine an activity tracker that could measure:

• How many times you let things roll off your back versus getting upset
• How much you pay for a bottle of wine, correlated to your level of enjoyment of same
• The number of times you bite your tongue versus saying out loud what you’re really thinking
• The speed with which you can get in/out of Spanx
• The number of times you forget why you walked into a room, or misplaced your glasses and/or keys
• How soon after entering a social gathering you start talking about health issues
• How many times your husband can’t find something in the refrigerator, correlated with the level of aggravation you feel when it happens
• How many times you drop an f-bomb, correlated to what triggered it
• How many facial hairs you pluck
• How many times you laugh, correlated to the number of times you pee your pants when you do so
• How often you talk back to the television, correlated to what you were watching
• How many times you tell your inner critic to go f*** herself
• How much of an ego boost you get when you’re carded when buying booze
• How often you say no to doing something you really don’t want to do
• How much time you spend doing absolutely nothing – without feeling guilty
• How often you fantasize about [sex, retirement, winning the lottery, a clean house – insert topic(s) of your preference here since you can program your boomer activity tracker however you want]
• How often you admit (out loud) that your spouse is right
• The number of times you respond to marketing robo-calls with “Bite me,” especially the ones that begin with “Hello, seniors!”
• How many times you’re called “ma’am” or “sir”
• How often you use senior discounts
• The degree of smugness you feel when you refrain from telling your spouse, “I told you so”
• The level of satisfaction you feel when you can resolve a computer issue on your own
• How often you open your mouth and out comes your mother
• How often you like what you see in the mirror
• How many times you contemplate cosmetic surgery
• How often you call a much-younger doctor by his/her first name when he/she does the same to you
• How often you laugh at yourself
• The degree of pride you feel in your children
• How often you refold the laundry after your husband does it
• How often you leave the house without wearing makeup
• How much less you care what other people think of you
• The number of things in this life you have to be grateful for

As I was writing this blog post, I realized that perhaps one of the greatest metrics of “fitness” as we get older is a sense of acceptance—of ourselves and others—and there’s likely never to be a wearable tracking device that can measure that. But I’m working on the acceptance thing nonetheless, inspiring this haiku:

I am more at ease
in my own skin now. Just wish
it were less wrinkled.

What about you? What “metrics” would you monitor on your boomer activity tracker?