There was a point in my life where I was excited about the Apple Watch. I think in no small part because it represented a new frontier in consumer technology. I was the consumer for whom marketing material about leaving your phone at home and going for a run listening to music really resonated. I was also the consumer for whom sleep tracking really resonated. In many ways, I am the perfect ICP for Apple's marketing—an affluent yuppie with social and physical aspirations and a fervent believer in the power of technology to solve my problems. Bit by bit, though, the Apple Watch has lost its luster for me. I've more or less given up trying to use it as an input device, with the exception of voice-to-text memos, and somewhere along the way, letting every single app buzz my wrist turned into a Foucault-like horror. The dream of replacing my phone has been fully slain by the reality, which is my phone being strapped to my wrist in a smaller but no less distracting or pernicious form factor.

But tracking! Biometrics! Yeah, sure. The reality is I cannot point to a single action or decision I've made based on the data that my Apple Watch has collected for me over the past year or so. This was not always the case, to be fair, and I'm grateful to the Apple Watch for building in me a habit of walking. But I've internalized that habit to the point where I don't need a device to suggest closing my rings, and my problems these days are not due to lack of proximity to the things that a smartwatch makes viscerally close.

So: in the hallway drawer the Apple Watch goes, destined for a year of me throwing it on for random Saturday morning jogs, only to discover that the battery has died.

It feels bad to write a dour post, particularly one about a product towards which I feel no real animus. (This is, after all, an essay about myself more than it is about the watch.) So let me balance it out with an Apple product that I have grown to truly love: Stickers.

When Apple launched custom stickers it just seemed so needless to me — the kind of feature that looked interesting in a three-second sizzle real and fun to show off in a sparsely-attended Genius Bar session but whose usage data barely justified its own existence.

And then — as so many turns go in essays this year — Lucy was born, and suddenly Haley and I had a prime target for stickerification. It is hard to convey how much entertainment we get now out of turning things into stickers: Lucy, sure, and Telly of course, but quickly we turned our attention to the whole universe. Glenn, our 2009 Toyota RAV4: sticker. Can of Polar Orange: sticker. Particularly bulbous loaf of our friend Shep’s sourdough: sticker. Our text messages (much to the chagrin, I’m sure, of our friends and family) are littered with a confetti of our little sticker extended universe, a frivolity that software rarely grants us and that I try harder than ever these days to take for granted.