Chris Abraham

I’ve worn a Fitbit band on my right wrist every single day since 2013. That’s more than a decade of continuous tracking. Steps, heart rate, sleep, workouts. Long before Google.

Long before smartwatches ate the category. Back then, Fitbit was social. Competitive. A little game-ified. Friends compared steps, joined challenges, poked each other to move. I actually used the app. That era faded as people drifted to Apple Watch and other platforms, and it got harder to organically find friends still wearing Fitbit.

Then Google bought Fitbit, and for a while it felt like the whole thing wandered into the wilderness. Hardware kept improving, but the app lost momentum. I stayed loyal to the device, but mostly ignored the software. I wore it, glanced at my stats on the watch face, charged it constantly (because “Charge” really does mean charge), and let the data quietly accumulate.

That changed today.

The new Fitbit app is legitimately good. The AI coach, goal setting, and adaptive workout planning finally feel coherent. I told it what gear I own, what my goals are, and that my knees are temperamental. It took all of that into account and built a plan that actually makes sense.

For the first time in over ten years of wearing Fitbit hardware, the software, hardware, and AI coaching feel like one integrated system again. Good enough that I may stop treating Fitbit as a passive background tracker and start using it as the place where I actually plan my fitness going forward.

Caveat: this appears to be a Fitbit Premium feature.

I’m not arguing that my view is correct. I’m arguing that your certainty is unjustified. I’m not presenting a counter-theory, and I’m not asking anyone to accept my conclusions. I’m not claiming better access, hidden sources, or clearer vision.

What I’m pushing back on is confidence itself. How quickly it forms, how clean it feels, and how rarely it’s interrogated once it settles in. Most of what we experience now arrives filtered, edited, repeated, and emotionally framed. That doesn’t automatically make it false, but it does make certainty feel premature.

I’m not saying nothing is real or that everything is fake. I’m saying confidence often outruns understanding. Doubt isn’t a flaw here; it’s a reasonable response to how indirect and mediated everything has become. I’m not here to replace one belief with another. I’m just questioning why certainty feels so available, so comfortable, and so unquestioned.

If that irritates you, that reaction is part of what I’m pointing at.

From about 2012 to 2020, labels like racist, fascist, Nazi, homophobe, and transphobe functioned as social kill switches. If you were tagged, you could lose your job, your platform, your friends, and your reputation. Those words still carried rarity and moral gravity, so people feared them.

But from 2020 through 2023 and into 2024, they were used too often, too loosely, and too selectively. Every disagreement became bigotry. Every policy became fascism. Every boundary became violence. And then even the most extreme accusation, pedophile, entered the rotation, not just as a serious legal charge but as a rhetorical weapon.

People watched obvious bad actors on their own “side” get protected while opponents were accused, smeared, and destroyed for far less. That taught everyone the labels were no longer about truth or protecting victims. They were about power.

Once that realization landed, shame stopped working.

So the language escalated. Racist became fascist. Fascist became Nazi. Nazi became genocidal. Genocidal became pedophile. What used to be the nuclear option became just another insult in an online argument. And when the nuclear option is routine, it no longer scares anyone.

The tragedy is that the crimes never went away. Racism, authoritarianism, and child abuse are still real. Epstein proved that powerful people can hide horrific things for decades. But when the words meant to expose and stop those crimes are used casually for politics, they lose their force. When every alarm is pulled for tribal warfare, nobody runs when there is a real fire.

People are not tired of accountability. They are tired of moral blackmail. And once people stop believing the labels, even the truth struggles to be heard. 🔥

You’re right, Britain, British, English people, Irish people, Scottish people, Welsh people, we Americans have no natural spidey sense when it comes to having the Mickey taken out of us or getting the piss taken out of us. We’re extremely serious and almost never recognize humor or piss-taking or Mickey-taking when it’s right up in our grill. I finally feel compassion for the denizens of the British Isles for having to deal with me during the halcyon days at UEA Norwich. I mean, I knew I was always thin-skinned, but I’m still surprised by just how thin-skinned I was. Basically, any British person who can have the Mickey taken out of them or the piss taken out of them without flying into a rage is someone Americans don’t really start to resemble until we’re about 50.

The First Amendment’s limits appear when speech turns into “fighting words” (direct, face-to-face insults likely to cause immediate violence), “true threats” (serious intent to commit violence), “incitement” (provoking imminent lawless action), or substantial disruption of government operations, allowing restrictions on how, when, and where speech occurs (time, place, manner) but not what is said, unless it falls into these unprotected categories. Screaming in someone’s face can cross the line into unprotected fighting words or true threats, while blocking federal operations infringes on the government’s ability to function, even if the message is political.

I guess we’ll see where the line is over the next months.