This is a very og style “Thoughtful Millennial” post. I spent most of last night and this morning setting up a Notion (and screaming in frustration several times) when I had a moment of why????? Why do so many people (particularly young women) feel the need to track everything, every dollar spent, every sip of water, every recipe tried?

Some of it make sense, to me it makes a lot of sense to track your budget, or if you are on the job hunt every job that you have applied to and how far you got in the application process, but what is it with young women and optimizing everything?

And I know I’m guilty of it too, I have created dozens of journals, I track every outfit I wear to keep track of the cost per wear of each item of clothing I own. I have an excel sheet where I track every job I’ve applied to, if it required a test, if I got an interview, etc. I have created habit trackers in excel, google sheets, and on paper ever since I was maybe 14 years old. But why are we so obsessed with tracking ourselves?

I don’t have any answers to these questions, and when I did a search to see if anyone else did, there is some research on self-surveillance and monitoring, but really only in the context of monitoring our bodies and their size and appearance. Which is I think part of what I am talking about.

There are a lot of parts of this kind of tracking and surveillance that reminds me of eating disorders. The desire for control I think being the biggest one. All of this tracking and to-do lists and optimizing I think, could come from wanting to be in control and since we can’t control anything that is around us (perhaps especially as young women) we control ourselves as tightly as we can. But to quote one of my co-workers; “who am I to say”. Because I don’t have anything but these ramblings.

What do you think about tracking culture, is this something you have noticed?

Laura