Amongst friends and family, I’m known as something of a digital curmudgeon. I’m usually the one person in group chats who does not use an iPhone, a habit I gave up in 2012 when I sensed that Apple was enclosing the entire mobile space. I stopped visiting Facebook and Instagram a decade ago, and I left Twitter in 2022, the year Musk took over. I refuse to employ AI chatbots as therapists, friends, or any kind of replacement for human engagement. I turned off all notifications on my phone – even for calls – 15 years ago.
Given my early bona fides in all things digital, I take a bit of pride in my heterodoxy, though in practice it creates friction, both for me and my friends and colleagues. Silencing notifications forced me into a new habit of checking my phone proactively, which one could argue has its own downsides. My Google phone breaks group chats, my absence from Meta’s products means I miss updates from friends and family, my aversion to AI therapy could mean I’m out of touch with how technology is changing society (though my adult children do keep me somewhat in the know on this count).
That said, I’ve always been interested in new digital technologies, particularly if they intersect with the physical world. I was an early beta tester of Strava, Google Glass and Meta’s Quest; I wasted at least a few days playing Pokemon Go. And I was an early and enthusiastic user of health wearables like the Fitbit and Jawbone, which dated back to the late 2000s.
But in health, the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze for me, and I gave up on the category until early last year, when I purchased an Oura 4 ring. I was running a longevity science startup, after all, and nearly everyone I worked with had an Oura. They’d discuss HRV fluctuations, exercise goals, how much deep sleep they’d gotten the night before. I felt out of the loop – clearly the tech had gotten much better, and I needed to understand this obsession first hand.
For the past year or so I’ve been a committed daily user of Oura’s ring and app, and I learned a lot from all the data they provide. The app not only tells you how you slept, it also measures your movement, heart rate, and calories burned. You can input your meals, and a new AI assistant offers all manner of advice based on the copious data the service collects.
Over time I found myself increasingly caught up in how my numbers looked, and what that said about me. If I had a late night out, I’d hit the sack knowing my sleep score would be shit in the morning and that I’d need a hard workout, if not a nap, to set things right the next day. In fact, over the past year I’ve become something of a champion napper, and I attribute this new habit to Oura. A nap almost always increases your sleep score, and I felt a happy jolt of dopamine every time a well-timed snooze pushed my score past 85, which the app rewards with a small golden crown (for reference, my worst sleep score was in the mid 50s, the best, mid 90s).
I’m also addicted to exercise, and Oura fed that addiction with personalized tracking data. I connected Oura to my Strava and Peloton apps, and I was quietly obsessed with always beating my daily goals. But as I fell deeper into the tracking rabbit hole, I began to feel a deep-seated ambivalence. Do I really need to know how many calories Oura counts each day? Do I need a digital app to tell me if I slept well? Was my commitment to this sophisticated piece of technology around my finger making my life better, or was I simply abdicating my own agency to a digital platform driven by profit margins and data capture?
Last week, serendipity offered me a chance to find out. I left my Oura charger at our place in New York, and I knew that within a day or so, my ring would be dead. Instead of enduring the countdown to its demise, I took the ring off and began an experiment. What might change now that I wasn’t checking my Oura app every few hours?
Turns out, not much. In fact, I feel somewhat liberated from the tyranny of the sleep score, the taskmaster of the calorie count. And while it’s only been a week, I can say that I’m actually sleeping better than I did while using the ring – I think because I’m no longer actively worrying about whether or not I’ll hit my internal goals. Of course, I can’t prove that – without the ring, I don’t have any data to back up my claim.
Yesterday my wife brought my charger home, but I haven’t renewed my relationship with Oura, and I’m not sure I will. It’s nice to have the option, but I also think it’s wise to take breaks from technologies that track intimate and deeply personal data. I’m glad I have more than a year’s worth of history with Oura, and I’m sure I’ll use it again some day. But I’m feeling lighter and less anxious without that ring around my finger, and perhaps even a little proud that it was so easy to break what, for a year anyway, felt like a digital habit I’d always have.
Then again, that new Oura 5 ring sure does look cool….
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