All I wanted for my birthday this year was a Fitbit, but my parents were extremely reluctant to buy me one because they said I would never use it. After insisting that my Fitbit would compel me to exercise more, explaining how all my friends had one and promising it would never leave my wrist, my parents relented.

For the first few weeks, my Fitbit had me taking unnecessarily long routes to my classes, taking my dog for extra long walks and even marching in place before I went to bed — anything to outstep my friends. However, this trend didn’t last long.

Now, my Fitbit lies at the bottom of my drawer, buried in an electronic graveyard.

People buy fitness trackers, such as the Fitbit and other step­counting devices, as motivation to exercise. However, a recent statistic from the Journal of the American Medical Association reveals that more than half of the people who buy fitness trackers such as Fitbits eventually stop using them.

So, what happened to my original vision for my Fitbit? Why didn’t it turn me into a superstar fitness fanatic?

There was something I forgot to consider when buying my Fitbit. I had painted a mental picture of the strong, new and athletic me that it would produce and forgot that Fitbits don’t have that kind of power. Sure, it can tell me how many steps I took or the distance I ran, but it doesn’t have the ability to force me to take those steps or to push me to run farther. After the novelty of my Fitbit had faded, I realized that I wasn’t exercising any more than before I had owned it.

I bought my Fitbit thinking I was buying my fitness, but working out takes more than snapping a bracelet on my wrist.

Although technology is becoming the solution to a lot of society’s problems, it can’t solve the pitfalls of the human spirit, like a lack of motivation to exercise. You can buy a pair of running shoes, but you need to put them on and run with them yourself. Similarly, you can buy a Fitbit, but you need to put in the work to get in shape.

Fitness isn’t something that comes wrapped up in the package of your new fitness tracker.