This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they’re going to change your life. Opt in for Optimizer here.
During my summer vacation, I went in on the screenless wearable life. These past two weeks, I wore the Fitbit Air and the Garmin Cirqa on my right wrist. My right index finger was home to the Oura Ring 5. In my right arm, a Dexcom G7 continuous glucose monitor. If I did whip out a pair of smart glasses, I opted for the display-free Meta Glasses. The wearable data generated? A metric crapton. The number of times one of these wearables bothered me about it? Exactly once — and that was a fluke. (The G7 thought my blood sugar was perilously low. What actually happened: My 20lb cat triggered a false alarm while napping on my arm.)
After years of never-ending, nagging notifications, the wearable silence was glorious.
This silence is why smart rings are taking off and fitness bands are making a comeback. You don’t have to sacrifice the health data tracking, but you can minimize how often you interact with any given device.
Minimal trackers aren’t new. The first wearable bands collected data, but you primarily interacted with the data via a companion app on your phone. Most had tiny screens that did little more than tell you the time, heart rate, and step count. This was okay for fitness, but not so useful for anything else. Eventually, trackers gave way to smartwatches because the latter could do more. They served as a form of notification triage, a backup line of communication for your phone, and a fitness tracker. You got more bang for your buck. Part of that was a bid to keep you engaged. In theory, the more you can do or track on a smartwatch, the more trapped you are within a particular gadget ecosystem.
Except over the last two or three years, I’ve noticed more and more of a certain type of request from readers. Tech-savvy folks who used to want wrist computers started asking for a return to simpler wearables. Apple Watch users started querying about the Oura Ring life. Garmin devotees asked whether the Whoop subscription was worth it. And after mulling it over, I don’t think it’s because everyone suddenly wants fewer features or less health data. My hunch is that two things are at play: intense data fatigue, and minimalism as a status flex.
I’ve written about this before, but with data, more is not always better. Even so, wearable tech makers have to appease investors who like to see lines go up. That often means churning out iterative software updates that claim to improve your health (and therefore, extend or save your life). It’s why we’re seeing health tech companies racing to be the first to provide insights on blood pressure, new sleep metrics, and metabolic trends derived from urine, blood, and any bodily fluid you’re willing to part with. But the “default” user experience, as of late, is increasingly tedious. It’s endlessly scrolling through cluttered graphs and widgets in what was once a simple health dashboard. It’s correcting your AI health coach because it’s drawing the wrong conclusions from your data. It’s pushy alerts to your phone saying “Hey, guess what! Your wearable is done charging!” or “You don’t need to take your wearable off to shower! It’s waterproof!” (These are real notifications I’ve received.) I’m not even trying to single out a particular company because it’s all of them.
To feed all these features requires a lot of upfront work from you. The appeal of wearing a screenless band is that it’s sort of like saying, “I care about my health, but I don’t let it control me. I’m not obsessed.” At least that’s the vibe.
You could still overindex on data while you’re on your phone, but the screenless device itself can’t truly vie for your attention. It’s designed to be stealth. You trade a degree of accuracy for a more silent experience. You could sync every few days if you’re forgetful. You don’t have to deal with charging notifications. On your wrist, nothing is competing for your attention. You could train an AI health coach, but in a display-free life, it’s easier to ignore it and glance at charts if and only if you feel like it. The optimizers among us probably wouldn’t love that, but the average person? It’s sort of a flex.
Minimalism is luxe now. Imperceptible manicures have replaced flashy nail art. The sharp cat eye and cut creases of 2016 have given way to the clean-girl, all-beige aesthetic known as “quiet luxury.” If that’s the overarching trend in lifestyle spheres, is it any wonder that people want to apply those same principles to the devices they wear on their bodies?
A more cynical read is that a screenless wearable can be a status signifier. It conveys that you can afford being less efficient. You can miss the notification because people move around you, not the other way around. Your time is your own, and when it suits you, then you spend that time focusing on health in an extremely intentional way. You can go on a run and look at the scenery instead of the metrics on your wrist. You do not need the bang for your buck that smartwatches offer. It confers the illusion of effortlessness, even when there’s a great deal of effort behind the scenes.
Since my job necessitates wearable immersion, the screenless life was perfect for my summer vacation. I’m already putting screens back in my direct line of sight and on both wrists, but when I had oodles of time — enough for multiple naps a day — being notification-free was bliss. The first few days off, I felt a phantom urge to check my data. By the end, I was only syncing every few days, breezing through workout summaries because hey, I did the work. Who cared if it was optimally done? After several months of doing increasingly more, intentionally doing less felt like a revelation. It feels so right, like such a relief, that the rise of Whoop dupes seems obvious in retrospect. Of course Apple and Samsung are rumored to be considering more minimal wearables.
I know firsthand how draining data fatigue can be. Sometimes, you just want things to be easy and less complicated. Deciding that for yourself, setting that boundary, forcing tech companies to give you that option? To me, that’s what makes screenless devices truly feel like the ultimate flex.
