Nov 13, 2025

The question now is how to best serve the millions who, freed from a lifetime of yo-yo dieting, are re-engaging with their health and looking for a helping hand. For many GLP-1 users, that success has reawakened a long-dormant sense that a healthier life is within reach . They’re primed and hopeful, even if some caution remains. Advertisement Technology could, and should, assist them. But instead of starting with what most people care about — living a deeper, more fulfilling life — wellness apps have framed the task as metrics optimization, fixated on boosting your VO2 max, nailing your sleep score, extending your streaks. As a result, platforms optimize the measurable and miss the main opportunity: sustained support for a fuller life. What we need are products designed for the many people whose expansive health goals are neither reflected nor well-served by a myopic obsession with metrics and dashboards. These health platforms should center agency and connection alongside exercise and recovery. They should translate small wins into confidence and next steps; foster real-world engagement with family, friends, community, and ideas; and let metrics serve the mission, not define it. Advertisement Related Story While exercise, sleep, and sensible eating are part of the picture, most people aren’t training for elite performance. They want to live better lives and pursue what is most meaningful to them. This often means more time with family and friends, space for hobbies, and participation in community — not relentlessly chasing metrics . Our deeper yearning for purpose and meaning, connection and participation has been largely neglected by health platforms drawn to what’s easiest to count rather than to what we actually value. The responsibility for living a fuller life is too important to outsource to a digital platform, but technology can support us far better than it has. It begins with humility: recognize that our ambitions exceed what performance metrics can capture, and resist the tendency, as Kate Crawford warns , to let “the affordances of the tools become the horizons of truth.” Health platforms can help people live more expansively by enabling real-world engagement with communities, nature, and — above all — each other. Backed by solid evidence, these objectives, difficult as they are to measure, should be first-class priorities for any serious longevity platform. Advertisement Agency grows when we see credible evidence that our choices make a difference in domains that matter to us. Platforms can help by making those inflections visible, turning small wins — like completing a ride or choosing a healthier entrée — into evidence that accumulates into confidence. The opportunity is to capture and compound the “ agentic dividend ” so it can be channeled into further positive action. A broader brief can transform fitness apps from a “dashboard of my inadequacies,” as Rachel Feintzeig poignantly put it , into a gateway to a fuller life. Imagine: After a workout or healthy choice, a quick “Bank your win” tap could 1) name the win (“Finished even when I wanted to quit,” “Chose the right effort today”), 2) give it meaning (“Energy for the afternoon,” “Kept a promise to myself”), and 3) set a tiny reinvestment (“Bike tomorrow,” “Text a friend to walk”). In parallel, apps can offer proven, low-friction techniques — such as cognitive reframing and active-constructive responding — to strengthen confidence and follow-through. An example of a startup pursuing this direction is Lore Health , which uses an artificial intelligence reflection partner grounded in solution-focused therapy principles, community support, and modest financial incentives to prompt self-reflection and build resilience. (Disclosure: I’m an adviser.) Related Story Health platforms should widen beyond measurement to enable what I’ve described as “soulful engagement” — experiences that we feel more than we tally. Encourage us to do things with others like family fun runs, neighborhood trail walks, local volunteer projects, and activities with fellow hobbyists, perhaps facilitated through partnerships with organizations like AllTrails and   Points of Light , and startups like buildIRL . Help engage the mind through on-platform “learn and burn” sessions, and partnerships with curated content apps like Kanopy , CuriosityStream , and The Great Courses . After the activity, a light reflection — what did this make possible for you? (e.g., “reconnected with a friend,” “kept a promise to myself,” “learned something that energized me”) — can reinforce agency without gamifying it, helping people see how meaningful experiences build capacity for the next healthy choice. Advertisement Many pieces of a better platform already exist. Wearables like Oura and WHOOP can sense and summarize; Peloton can motivate at scale; Function Health is refining an early-detection model. Expand the scope of these platforms to embrace the broader human brief — connection, purpose, engagement, agency — and they can set the standard. If not, a new entrant with a more capacious vision will, or we’ll keep assembling a patchwork of narrower apps to meet particular goals and needs. This moment was earned by science. Let’s meet it with products that lift people up rather than offer a reductive quest for mechanical perfection. David A. Shaywitz is a lecturer in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School, an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and founder of KindWellHealth, an initiative focused on advancing health through the science of agency. Letter to the editor