I woke up and thought, I should get rid of my fitness tracker.

My primary concern in life at this point is not having enough time, and I spend a lot of my time mucking about with my tracker. It tracks some forms of exercise automatically, while others I have to enter, which I do, along with my weight. It tracks my sleep, doing a very meh job of discerning sleep cycles, but I still check it obsessively every morning. It displays the time and date. It has to be charged every couple of days.

It can track eating, but I don’t use it for that. In the great chain of I’d-never-do-that, I think people who enter everything they eat into their fitness trackers are crazy. Plenty of folks think I’m crazy for the way I use mine. Everyone thinks David Sedaris is crazy: 65,000 steps a day?!

My tracker has the warm fuzzy feature personal tech is most proud of, allowing one to constantly share one’s details with friends. This can be connecting, competitive, assaultive, or propagandizing, as now know. I think mostly millennials do that, though not all of them. Generation Z pretty much all do it. I have not been tempted for a moment.

Of course it has the primary income-generating feature of ads, but I’m pretty good at not seeing those. I’m so determined not to see ads that I think I now miss ephemeral events in the real world, having trained my eyes not to stray.

My tracker definitely has the secondary income-generating feature of planned obsolescence, and it is time for me to make a decision. They aren’t that expensive, and mine has lasted at least three years, yet they are made of plastic and in no wise recyclable. It’s a small gesture for the planet, but if everyone did it…

The most compelling reason for me to give up my tracker, though, is to reduce the number of tiny, self-focused activities in my life. I already resist* Youtube videos, Reddit pages, and online news, things that may be entertaining or informative, but are small. I want to be entertained at concerts and informed by reading books, big things that required investment of time and effort that they pay back proportionately. Most important, I don’t want to replace all the big things with small things to the extent that I forget that big things are Worth It.

Plus, I can tan my left arm evenly, losing that unsightly strap mark.

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• Resist, not avoid. I’m not planning to give up my phone either.