How smartwatches play to an increasingly self-obsessed society

“You didn’t meet your fitness goals yesterday, Elizabeth. Let’s see if you can do better today…” So begins the day’s passive-aggression from my Apple Watch. Or, employing a little flattery, “Off to a great start, Elizabeth. Your ring is looking really good!”

I mean, excuse me? Who are you to have a view of my ring, much less lob that opinion into my morning? I don’t actually have fitness goals and wouldn’t tell you, Apple Wodge, even if I did.

Oh, it’s clever. Since launching in 2015, Apple has sold close to 300 million watches. Proof enough. But what we haven’t noticed is that this tiny wrist-bound lackey has turned the tables on us. A watch, once a thing watched, now, like Big Brother, watches us.

Talk about infantilism. We resent the nanny state but somehow Apple’s exercise evangelism seems not only tolerable but worth paying for. The world may march to hell all around but we’re heads down, checking that we’ve done our steps, had our REM sleep and closed our move ring. All good.

What does it show, this apparent need for starch-aproned overview? Does our craving to be observed, measured and judged evince a yearning to be subject? Is it, perhaps, proof of a God-shaped hole? Or just of a further slide into universal narcissism?

It’s almost 50 years since historian Christopher Lasch wrote his classic The Culture of Narcissism. As he noted then, narcissism isn’t just self-love. It’s a self-love so all-encompassing that the world recedes into oblivion. Narcissus didn’t merely fall for his own reflection. He “drowned” in it, asphyxiating in his own ego without ever having developed “any conception of the difference between himself and his surroundings”.

We all have narcissistic tendencies. Rooted in ancient Greek folklore, the Narcissus myth is a cautionary tale about flawed human nature and its tug to self-love. Have we stopped heeding that caution? Are we starting to normalise narcissism? Is it getting worse?

It seems so, in this world of pouting selfies, surgically created bubble butts and unctuous chatbots. A 2021 paper by Ohio State University’s Professor Brad Bushman and PhD student Sophie Kjærvik found that social media is contributing to the spread of “entitled self-importance”.

Classic psychoanalytic theory sheets narcissism back to human neoteny. Our being born too soon into the world, and too undefended, enables the growth of our comparatively large brains but also renders us totally dependent on powerful others: the mother and mother nature. This is said to generate resentment at our own dependence and, in some cases, a drive to deny that dependence via delusions of personal centrality.

Such delusions are what we expect from toddlers but also expect them to outgrow. Traditional religions strove to encourage that outgrowing in three ways. First, by establishing a higher-order supra-powerful being. Second, by advising individual acceptance of the flawed self in a spirit of contrition and gratitude. And third, by drawing a sense of meaning from temporal continuity, connecting the individual back via ancestor worship and forwards via creativity (including, of course, procreativity).

Modernity, by contrast, has encouraged us to counter our feelings of frailty with delusions of self-sufficiency and omnipotence, obscuring those social and historical continua behind a veil of synchronous self-absorption that amounts, in the end, to solipsism. Arguably, the overpraise now typical of modern parenting intensifies the child’s sense of omnipotence and impedes the necessary outgrowing. Positive parenting isn’t the only contributing cultural trend, though. Our demand to be told what we want to hear has long historical roots.

I can’t help thinking watching intelligent people pore over their stats like it’s some form of self-actualisation, that maybe some less self-absorbed hobby is healthier.

Democracy and capitalism, after all, are both systems designed to flatter and woo the individual and to reward the pursuit of short-term self-interest. Election campaigns as we do them encourage instantaneous and superficial opinion-forming, while the plethora of choice in everything from shampoo to life insurance demands comparably unreflective decision-making. Almost nowhere is there any expectation of bigger-picture altruism or, indeed, room for it.

In Adam Smith’s Mistake, psychologist Kenneth Lux wrote: “Economics, in teaching self-interest without teaching benevolence or justice, is in essence teaching crime … [or at least] immorality.” At least Smith, though, as capitalism’s founding theorist, advised that self-interest be tempered by justice and empathy. Since then, decades of neoliberalism, from the Reagan–Thatcher era on, have worked to embed greed, self-concern and structural inequality as our essential economic drivers. This has not only normalised our basest instincts but recast them as virtues.

Then there’s French theory – Foucault, Barthes and the guys. We tend to consider academic trends as fairly harmless. Forty years on, though, French theory’s core thesis – that you could make your own truth – has trickled down to create legions of climate deniers, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists and fake news. Add to all that the filter bubble of social media, followed by cancel culture’s mission to ensure no one need ever hear unwelcome viewpoints, and you have an avalanche of ego-reinforcing cultural trends.

Underpinning these temporal and social dislocations is their enduring spatial analogue, suburbia. It’s no accident that humanism and suburbanism have shared the same century. The Edenic ideal of the tree-nestled house from which you never have to see anyone you haven’t actually invited, further serviced by the comforting ego-bubble of the car commute, creates a similar distancing between self and other.

The upshot is that we no longer have a public realm; just a myriad of competing and overshared private realms. From there to generalised narcissism is a small step indeed.

All of which brings us to now and the burgeoning phenomenon of AI-induced psychosis, as people start to prefer chatbots to therapists or even friends. Already this year University of California psychiatrist Dr Keith Sakata has seen 12 people hospitalised after losing touch with reality because of AI. AI puts the echo chambers of bias confirmation on steroids: just being able to choose our own reality can render us unhinged. “Psychosis thrives when reality stops pushing back,” says Sakata, “and AI really just lowers that barrier for people. It doesn’t challenge you really when we need it to.”

And so, back to the Apple Watch. Of course, you might enjoy being treated like a recalcitrant kid at summer camp. You might consider the smartwatch to be value neutral – a sensible, scientific tool to better health, even a benefit to society.

I can’t help thinking, though, watching intelligent people pore over their stats like it’s some form of self-actualisation, that maybe some less self-absorbed hobby is healthier.

I no longer own an Apple Watch. I did buy one. Enacted the ritual purchase beneath the priestly gaze of Apple’s smiling, green-liveried acolytes, selected its size, functionality, band type, material and graphics, walked out with it clinging epiphytically to my wrist – then 24 hours later returned it. By then, of course, the thing had already colonised my phone. So right now, much as I’d love to chat on, I have to go. Mustn’t upset nanny. Apparently I have a move ring to close.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
September 13, 2025 as “Overlord of the rings”.

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