Let me paint you a beautiful picture: Jacob Elordi at the airport, classic novel in hand, sporting a leather jacket, with a designer bag resting on his shoulder. Performativeness is the show of something specific to intentionally control one’s own image. Was Jacob Elordi really reading that book, or was it merely a prop?
Especially at boarding school, everyone has something that they do specifically to be perceived a certain way by their peers. String headphones, matcha, sunglasses on a cloudy day – you name it. And you cannot name the performatives of Taft without mentioning The Whoop. In other words, it is a black box, a bad version of an Apple Watch, bound to leave a striking tan line.
The Whoop is an average fitness tracker to be worn if you would like to be perceived as athletic. For a steep yearly subscription, on top of an initial price, the device will let you know some mediocre and unessential pieces of information like your heart rate, sleep score, and “strain”.
First of all, people have lived for thousands of years without their precise heart rate being a measure available to their knowledge. Big whoop, your heart rate was high when you were running! Secondly, I do not need a device to tell me that doomscrolling an hour before bed makes me tired in the morning. Or, say you wake up in the morning, feeling great, ready to tackle whatever unseen equation is thrown at you on your Chemistry test. Then, unsuspectingly, you check your Whoop app. Actually, you slept terribly! Queue the voice in your head, telling yourself you will not perform well today due to your sleep. For zero dollars, I can tell you that if you go to bed earlier, you will have better sleep.
Additionally, the image of your average Whoop wearer is very unclear. While some are legit, there is definitely a selection of users whose main form of exercise is walking to their third-floor Wu class. Perhaps this person wears a Whoop to be included in a Taft Whoop Group, where you can view other people’s statistics. If you were on the search for another online platform where you can compare yourself to others on, here you go! Connect with your friends by judging their recovery scores.
Remember in 2018, when Fitbits were the cool thing to have? Were steps the cool thing to track? This is the same. In five years, some other accessory will come along, replacing “sleep score” and “strain” with fresh metrics. And like clockwork, the Whoop users will unloyally move onto the next performative device, and you can say you heard it here first.
Photo courtesy of Whoop
