I’ve been thinking about buying one of those smart rings. I’m constantly looking for the one thing that’s going to be THE solution that will sort my life out. Every once in a while, I buy a notebook or download an app and think, ‘This is it, this is the one that’s going to get me on the straight and narrow.’ Lately, the smart rings have been singing the siren call, luring me towards the cliffs of sleep tracking, step counting and life optimisation with the promise of chic aesthetics and none of the rash-inducing nickel that so many of the smart watches are laced with.
In an uncharacteristically non-impulsive move (thank you, ADHD medication) I’ve resisted. I remain smart ring free. When researching the Oura ring, the forerunner in the smart ring brand Olympics, I discovered two aspects of Oura ownership that raised red flags. One is the insistence that you purchase an Oura sizing kit before moving on to the ring itself. There was some extra guff about redeeming the price of the kit against your final purchase, but my swizz alarms were already blaring. The second is the monthly subscription fee you must pay for the thing to function, bearing in mind that they already cost hundreds of euro to begin with – the latest model retails for around 500 quid.
I looked at several smart ring brands – the RingConn, the Ring Air – and they’re all clamouring to be the smallest, the most discreet, the most attuned to your sleep cycles and recovery metrics and, who knows, your fart analysis probably. I felt a dystopian fog descent upon me and wondered, ‘When did we stop just ... going to sleep?’
Optimisation culture has a lot to answer for. Ever since we started tracking everything, we’ve lost our minds. First, it was calories, then it was steps, then it was macros and sleep hours and REM cycles and cortisol levels and luteal phases and stool appearances and muscle engagement and on and on and on.
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I spent some time in the smart ring subsections on Reddit and came across one person who was fretting about how to track a mindfulness session from an app on her Oura ring app and wondering if there was even any point in doing the meditation if she couldn’t track it. And look, I’ve been there. I’ve seen recommendations about going for a walk without your phone and thought, ‘But what’s the point if you can’t count the steps?’
At the start of the summer, the king of tech bro optimisation Diary of a CEO podcast host Steven Bartlett came in for some well-deserved slagging when he claimed that having a couple of glasses of wine one evening had gone on to ruin three days of his life. His rigid routines were disrupted by a shorter night’s sleep, a missed gym session, some less-than-optimal nutrition, and of course the biometric tracker on his wrist was there nagging away about recovery scores and habit changes and probably on the verge of extending a robotic finger to wag and say, ‘I know you drank the wine, Steven.’
There was considerable pushback online, the general gist of which was, ‘Have the wine, don’t have the wine, but stop turning everything into a data set and stop shilling the biometric tracker (Whoop) that you’ve invested in.’
While I was doing my smart ring research, I was served an image on Instagram that truly sums up the grim reality of hustle and optimisation culture. It was an advertisement for a workshop claiming to give attendees eight days a week via the magic of optimising their time and resources to beat everyone else in the rat race. The image included this quote from the Mary Oliver poem The Summer Day, ‘What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?’
Now, tell me this, do we think that Oliver, the woman who wrote –
‘You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves ...’
– would want anyone spending their one wild and precious life at a decrepit days-maxxing workshop?
Oliver wrote The Summer Day about intently watching a grasshopper. She posited that this wild and precious life should be spent slowly, intentionally, with nature, not scanning for improvements and hacks and fixes and rings that can monitor your heart rate and pay for your groceries but not let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
