Weird, right? We sell all sorts of random crap, but who would buy a blood pressure monitor on a whim? A lot of people, as it turns out. Some have specific health reasons, others have doctor’s orders, but a large number of purchasers are just geeks who track every bodily datum.
Our own @dave is one of these health metric obsessors. He’s got a Wi-Fi scale, a fitness tracking watch, and, yes, a blood pressure monitor. Why does @dave do it?
“You might assume I’m sickly, or at least a hypochondriac, but it’s more just love of stats.”
Yes, tracking these stats lets you follow trends and identify causes in your own health, such as the general bodily deterioration that follows the release of a new Civilization game. But mostly, it’s satisfying. There’s something dopamine-releasing about seeing your own life neatly arranged in a spreadsheet. There’s a reason it’s so (relatively) popular.
No trend would be complete without bandwagoning, of course. We’re clearly doing so with this deal, but not as blatantly as this gem that landed on the front page of Reddit recently:
That’s right, parking spaces at the periphery of the lot are no longer “shitty,” they’re “opportunities for meeting your step goals.” Pandering like that really boils our blood. Or does it? If only there was some way of quantifying the extent to which this stressor affects us physically…
