Greetings from Ashland, Oregon where I just drove up to attend bike school at UBI. I’ll be here all week. But more about that tomorrow. Today I wanted to talk about the experience of driving up here with no speedometer. I recently took over my brother’s Chevy Cavalier, which is a beloved car with a lot of character but a marked lack of functioning equipment, most relevantly basically all the dials in the dashboard. So I drove up here - about 500 miles - with no idea how fast I was going. Of course, that’s not true; most of the time I had a pretty good idea based on the behavior of my fellow drivers and little cues, like whether I was passing the semis. Also, you wouldn’t know this until you don’t have a functioning speedometer, but those little roadside “You are going this fast” signs are remarkably useful. It turns out that - unsurprisingly - I underestimated my speed by about 5-10%. So I just took a little bit off what I thought I should drive and everything was fine.

But, spiritually, it was a really interesting experience. There’s something oddly freeing about not having any idea how fast you’re really going. I’m certainly not recommending that anybody try it on purpose, but given that I was stuck with it, I tried to really investigate for myself what it felt like. Usually I pay a lot of attention to my speed. I am basically a fifth grader at heart, which means I’m terrified of breaking rules. This is not to say I’m patient or dumb enough to drive the speed limit; I have a 10 mile rule, which has held me in good stead. But I always know how fast I’m going. Except suddenly I didn’t. The first hundred miles or so it really bothered me. But after a while, my brain just kinda unclenched. And except for a few specific moments the rest of the way up - like going downhill - I really stopped worrying about it.

The implications are obvious. All day we over-data ourselves. Likes, emails, step counts: we crave data about ourselves and other people. But how useful is it, really? Do we really need to know?

Maybe, just maybe, we don’t.