Can You Hear Me Now

Note. The underlying article can be found here: https://ajprokop.com/2026/10/05/too-much-of-a-thing/

Pip: There is a certain irony in a technology podcast that keeps asking whether we have too much technology — but here we are, and Andrew Prokop keeps finding new angles on that question.

Mara: This week on Can You Hear Me Now, we’re looking at what happens when the data meant to help us starts to run the show — wearables, health metrics, and the cost of outsourcing your sense of well-being to a device on your wrist. Let’s start with that tension between information and wisdom.

Too Much of a Thing

Pip: The premise here is deceptively simple: more data, more problems. The post opens with a watch upgrade — Apple Watch 3 to Apple Watch 12 — and uses that as a lens for a much bigger question about whether comprehensive health monitoring is actually making us healthier, or just more anxious.

Mara: The setup is grounded in a real experience, and the post frames it with T. S. Eliot before getting personal. Here is the line that crystallizes the whole argument: “Where is the Life we have lost by burying ourselves in too much information. Are we outsourcing our happiness to the charts and numbers of a soulless machine?”

Pip: That word — outsourcing — is doing a lot of work. It is not just that the data is distracting. It is that the machine is now the authority on whether your morning counts as a good one.

Mara: The post makes that concrete. Before the upgrade, waking up feeling rested was enough. After it, the first move is checking the iPhone Health App — respiratory rate, heart rate, sleep duration, REM minutes, breathing disturbances. And a single low number, as the post puts it, can immediately turn happiness into anxiety.

Pip: Nothing says “good morning” quite like a cardio fitness score that implies you should be worried.

Mara: The post extends this beyond the watch. The weather app now reports air quality, and anything above fifty on the air-quality index can turn a beautiful morning into a health concern. The line that follows is striking: “I no longer trust my own senses to tell me how I should feel, and that’s a scary way to live.”

Pip: That is the real stakes. Not the data itself, but the erosion of the internal signal — the body’s own read on how things are going, overwritten by a trend line.

Mara: And the post is careful not to land as a rejection of technology. The argument is about proportion: technology as a tool, never as an equal. The closing image — “there is a serpent in every paradise and these days we carry it around on our wrists or in our pockets” — earns its weight.

Pip: Where wisdom ends and the notification begins is exactly the territory the next episode will keep mapping.

Mara: The question underneath all of this is whether more information produces better judgment, or just more noise dressed up as insight.

Pip: And whether the app for trusting yourself is still in development. More on that next time.