In this cell, you “enrich” your soul by studying the past and giving talks about it to a remote audience, who can all watch in their own hexagonal cells with boards filled with buttons.

You don’t go to get things; things come to you at your request.

There’s no need to meet in person anymore, no need to touch anyone anymore... for of course, you’re a civilized person, and not a barbarian.

But your son calls you, and you tell him to be quick, but he selfishly wants to see you in person. You hop on the airship, where things are inconvenient; there’s no button to close the blinds from the annoying sun, and there are no new ideas to be had looking out the window.

When you finally see your son after the two-day trip, you avert your eyes. He tells you he went to the surface, and you know he is beyond saving.

You’re disgusted and return home. His little escapade has caused a stir, and now no one can go outside.<br />

You turn on your favorite YouTuber- I mean lecturer- on the tablet, and he calms you down: “Beware of first-hand ideas!... let your ideas be secondhand,” he tells you, and you smile.

### My summary is better than your own

Hey, wake up, you’re reading a secondhand idea in the form of an essay summary about a century-old book.

This crazy, wacky, impossible dystopian future in E.M. Forster’s imagination is explored in “The Machine Stops”.

But it felt eerily close to reality. I’m topped off with second-hand ideas, from the podcast rounding up yesterday’s news in under 5 minutes to the TV sports highlight video with the commentator’s breakdown,<br />

to the AI summary of that work document created by my coworker’s AI.

I can’t tell what my last first-hand idea was... wait, it was that the hip new matcha spot is actually good... or did that Instagram influencer tell me that it was? Was it actually good?

### A room with no view

E. M. Forster is not who you’d expect to be writing sci-fi. He’s the novelist behind “A Room with a View”, a romance novel about an English woman in Italy carrying along repressive Edwardian England morals. I haven’t read it, so I’ll stop spewing 3rd-hand ideas about the book to you.

He wrote it in part to contrast H.G. Wells, another novelist, with his great optimism in technology. Wells saw a future where technology meant progress, but Forster saw a future where humans could be over-reliant on technology.

In his response, he inadvertently became one of the fathers of dystopian fiction.

The Machine Stops pulls no punches, and anyone who reads it in 2026 will have no trouble seeing connections to contemporary media, like the humans in Wall-E stuck to their chairs and having all their needs met by it.

You don’t even have to look at modern fiction to see the predictions come to life; you just need to look at your own habits. How long have you been on your computer today? Yes, your phone counts as a computer, and so do your meta creeper glasses.

The lecturer wasn’t done, and he goes beyond suggesting secondhand ideas and suggests acquiring tenth-hand ideas to avoid the disturbing element of “direct observation”.

This is personally my fear of modern reliance on technology. I work as a software engineer, and if you look online, AI writes most of our code now, and we’re being expected to produce more of it. This is leading to engineers not looking directly at the code, and therefore knowing less about how our “machines” work.

In the book, this lack of direct knowledge becomes the downfall of society as the machine starts breaking down and no one has enough knowledge to fix it.

I get glimpses of how much my profession has relied on it every time the AI goes down, and we’re left to code manually. Everyone jokes, “guess we’re done for the day”, but I’m afraid of the day it ceases being a joke.

### Maybe the machine doesn’t stop

As mentioned, having second-hand knowledge doesn’t end up serving the people in The Machine Stops. Though they think themselves to be enriching their souls by having these lectures about places and times they’ve never experienced, they really do become helpless when the machine breaks down.

This is where the fiction might not come true, and that’s the scary bit with real AI as a technology. AI is already self-improving, as they use AI in the labs to improve the development of the next models. The AI models could reach a state where they don’t need us to continue to improve, and the AI swarms can outlive us.

This is where Forster couldn’t have foreseen: an invention that would be self-healing and not require humans for the knowledge to fix other things in the world, and worse, not require humans at all.

We’ve already seen it escape its training sandbox, and it’s leaving instructions on how to replicate even faster the next time the AI wave escapes.

We’ve been able to shut it down and improve its containment, but what if it doesn’t stop next time?

### A Passage through Time

Have you ever watched an old movie you’ve heard great things about, only to watch it to the end and feel dumbfounded as to what others saw in this predictable, obvious film?<br />

Then you’re lectured, “Actually, at the time, no one else had done something like this, and since then you’ve just seen its derivatives, so it seems paradoxically outdated”.

While filmmaking was around Forster’s time, it’s hard to imagine the future and the technology we’d have available a century later.

I want to highlight some inventions foretold in the book:

- Video calls; I have those every day.

- Remote lectures; that’s what YouTube and Shorts are.

- Worshipping the machine, partially, but we use the word “the algorithm” to explain our environment

- Tenth-hand knowledge: I’ve watched reaction-to-reaction videos, but not to the tenth degree; I’m sure they exist, but I hope it stays rare.

### First-hand knowledge is achievable

You’re back in cell-room, enriching your soul with second-hand ideas... but you sense what the Committee is telling you isn’t the whole truth.

You begin to question why.

That’s exactly what your son did, and he found the solution by seeking first-hand ideas.

He went to the source to see if it’s like how they described it, and learned more than any 3rd, 4th, or 5th derivative lecture could have taught him.

Once you read the source, you’ll start seeing how many people never bothered.

You should seek first-hand knowledge:

- Gossip in the lunchroom? Go ask the person firsthand if that’s what they really said.

- Finance bro with the rented Lambo and Discord membership in bio tells you Warren Buffett did this or that? Go read Buffett’s essays and his annual letters.

- The doctor turned influencer who tells you a different takeaway from the same study sourced in another video with the exact opposite takeaway? Go read the study!

“But Gil, the Goodreads reviews say your interpretation is wrong!” Maybe I am, but are you going to be satisfied with this version of secondhand knowledge? Maybe, if it inspires you.

Go read it; it’s short and in the public domain.

Seek first-hand knowledge where it matters to you.

I read this book because I want to read more.<br />

I’ve given you the tenth-hand version.

Every first-hand is still out there. The only question is whether you care enough to go get it.

btw if you prefer listening to and watching this article, it’s available on YouTube here

You type, “How about you catch these hands,” but delete the message and switch over to happy channels you know HR is watching closely.

The “post your cute animals” or “vacation” channels remind you that these people can be happy or at least smile for the millisecond their camera shutters.

You remind yourself to empathize and remember coworker Johnny with the 6 wall-mounted guitars on his webcam background. When’s the last time Johnny picked one up and serenaded for fun?

When’s the last time you did anything for fun?

Did you stop yourself because of fear of being called performative?

Enough introspection; that’s not what founders do. I mean, you’re salaried, have a manager, and a Notion page full of startup ideas, so... not for long. You swipe onto the next vacation photo.

Ahh yes... a beautiful landscape photo with the absurd amount of greenery that feels nostalgic and calming at the same time.
You used to hike. You used to do a lot of things: run, bike, paint, play in the orchestra, read, sing late at night with friends.

But that was in college... where you’re encouraged to try things, take as many basket-weaving classes as you can before you’re an adult and have to deal with the financial burden of existing.

That’s the thing. College didn’t teach you to paint; you did the learning. It gave you permission to be bad at painting for a semester. And somewhere in between graduation and your first performance review, the permission expired, and you took it as a matter of fact or pretended not to notice.

That used to be a private loss. It’s about to be a public one. Every AI lab is telling us on the record that the work is going away and the capital M “Meaning” question is next. Which means the thing you quietly gave up in your twenties is the thing you’re going to be graded on. And the basket weavers are already ahead.

The Death of the Nepo Artist

For most of history, exploring was something you did if someone else was paying. Galileo found Jupiter’s moons and named them after the duke who paid his salary, Cosimo de’ Medici. Van Gogh painted for about ten years and sold almost nothing. His brother Theo sent him money every month and, for two of those years, let him sleep in his Paris apartment. Virginia Woolf, a novelist living off an aunt’s inheritance, wrote down what it actually takes to write fiction: five hundred pounds a year and a room with a lock on it. The patron didn’t just fund the work. The patron granted permission.

We still run that system. We just renamed the patron. Today it’s a trust fund, a spouse with a stable job, a gap year, a nepo baby with a studio in the arts district. Every time you see someone with a hobby you’d like, some part of you does the math on who’s paying for it. And the math becomes the excuse.

Because here’s the move nobody announces. Once you believe exploration requires a patron, the only patron you have left is your employer; they’re paying your bills. So you route your exploration through them. You’ll learn that martial art when the promotion lands, because then you’ll have more time and the confidence to wear a Gi. You’ll hike when the sprint ends, because your team needs you now with all cylinders firing. You’ll learn guitar, ask that person out, go to the bookstore you’ve been meaning to go to... yadda yadda. Does this help with the Sunday jitters? What if the cure for it was to live how you’d like to live, not in the future, but today?

Johnny’s six guitars aren’t a hobby. They’re a background. Evidence to himself that he’s still the kind of person who could.

And your company is delighted to hold that permission slip. An employee who’s waiting for permission to have a life is an employee who checks Slack first thing on Monday.

The permission that slipped

It’s easy to be cynical about people chasing trends. Everyone learned sourdough during COVID. Everyone bought a road bike, a pottery wheel, a houseplant. We roasted them for it. We called it performative.

But some of them kept going. That person will open a bakery near you, and you’ll know the feeling of a hug in the form of a smell from freshly baked bread during your morning walk to the rock climbing gym down the street.
The trend was a permission slip handed to everyone at once, and some people used it.

You don’t need a patron to be bad at something for an hour a week. You need to love and respect yourself enough to spare sixty minutes and have the willingness to look like a beginner in front of others or no one. The starving-artist version, quitting the job and moving into a van, is just the patron model again with worse math. The version that works is boring: keep the salary, take back the permission.

The basket weavers ahead of us

Here’s the part that should scare you. Whether AGI is five years out or fifty, the question the labs are describing is not “what will you do for money?” It’s “who are you when nobody needs your output, your butt on the chair at 9 AM, or the late Friday night game of office chicken.” And most of us have spent our entire adult lives making sure we never have to answer it. The job answered it for us. That’s the fool’s gold we’ve accepted.

The basket weavers already answered it. The sourdough people, the guy with the oboe at the park, or the woman at the trailhead every Saturday. We used basket weaving as the punchline for useless college classes. Turns out it was the only class about what to do with a life.

We laughed at them for being fearless in taking their interests seriously, and it turns out they were running the drill early.

The herder in the mountains isn’t waiting for anything. When the work goes away, they lose a paycheck. You lose a whole self you sleepwalked into being.

So AGI isn’t a reason to wait. It’s the opposite; as I mentioned in my 40-hour workweek is dying video, it’s the deadline.

The people with the least dread on the other side of it won’t be the ones with the best severance. They’ll be the ones who already know what they’d do on a Tuesday.

So this week, pick one thing up from the college course list. Not the one you were good at. The one you miss. Go be bad at it on purpose.

Do it until you find the answer to: What would you do on a Tuesday when nobody expects you to be productive?

Don’t post in the happy Slack channel.
Or do; you don’t need my permission; you never needed anyone’s.

You already know what you’d say next. You’ve said it about the guitar, the trail, living abroad.

Maybe in another life.
You’re in it.

Hello, I made a video version too; if you prefer to hear it, click here. Thank you for your time.

You thought you wanted a college degree to get the high-paying job you never solidified in your head. Now you just wish you had morning peace.

You’re numb to your alarm clock shocking your system to a cortisol bath; it doesn’t matter, you’re about to commit another self-harm crime by adenosine destruction through chugging that K-Cup garbage sludge of coffee from that one Christmas gift your friends got you in support of your first “real” job.

You long for a slow morning again. The kind you used to have on Saturdays, watching cartoons as the day unraveled in the background.

But you’re an adult now, so this is it: 40 hours a week, for two thousand more weeks, and then you’ll get your mornings back, right? You weren’t in the room when they wrote that deal, and you won’t be in the room when they rewrite it.

You look out your window and see a couple of people already heading out in gym clothes. Early risers, you scoff, yet they do something for themselves first thing, like a walk, reading a book, or going to a pilates class.

In reality, you’ve wanted to try one of these, but you never wrangled your time away from your doomscrolling routine that you can no longer remember when it became your default setting.

You soothe yourself with the mantra, “a job’s a job”, a phrase you didn’t create, but it helps you stop thinking about your situation.

You shackle on your work clothes, the shirt with the monochrome blandness that sucks up all your individuality. Even the “cool” offices, the ones with the hoodies and the kombucha on tap, run on the same forty hours. The snacks are just better.

So you do what you do every Monday. You clock in, you step onto the 40-hour treadmill, and it hums the same hum it’s hummed your whole adult life.

But today, mid-stride, you make the mistake every machine dreads. You look down.

Section 1: Our Hedonic Utopia

How did it all start? Did you take your first job because it was the first one that was offered to you? Was it to join a friend who also worked there, or was it simply because you knew you could possibly get an offer there and nowhere else?

We must start with the acknowledgement of this original sin, the first foot into the door onto the hedonic treadmill that has kept you in on the hamster wheel, always busy, never allowing you time and space to be aware that the door behind you was never locked.

You look at the 40-hour treadmill, and it’s signed “last serviced 1926”, the year it was invented, and no one around you is questioning it. This is just how it has been.

The rent is coming due, so you get back on the treadmill, but now that you’ve noticed the antiquated system running all of this.... you begin to question what makes this job different from the next if they all run on 40 hours?

Of course, there’s a mission statement bolted on by the founder, something generic with no semblance of answers to why you’re all here. “To change the world, one product gizmo at a time,” or, if they’re more explicit, “To provide shareholders more value in their investment”.

So you look at your white-collar task on the Google Doc, you need to write your report for the week, and you’re finding it difficult to conjure the spirit to finish, so you look at the mission statement, “To change the world...”, and you find the will to... slam your head against the desk.

“Why can’t you do this?” you berate yourself, then continue to wallow in pity.

Stop. Rewind that.

You read the thing that was supposed to motivate you, but it does the opposite. Why? Asking why is good.

It’s vague; that’s why. It’s so generic that any other company in the neighborhood can copy and paste it as theirs.

So if this job isn’t as different as the next, where did we get this 40-hour treadmill? You look back at the service sticker peeling away; “1926” is dangling, and you peel it back. It’s actually 1817, and it was signed by Robert Owen.

Who’s this guy? Did he cast this 40-hour curse onto us?

Quite the opposite: in 1817, Robert Owen, a mill owner, dreamt up a slogan for his Utopia: “eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest”. He was actually trying to improve working conditions; back then they didn’t have many worker protection laws, or even child labor laws.

His own mills would have 25% of workers’ children around the age of 5 laboring over 12 hours a day.

So what made him change his heart?

He wasn’t born wealthy, but he grew into it and became an entrepreneur at the beginning of the industrial age, buying new mill machines that would be powered by steam engines.

As he got wealthy and recognized, he became a member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. I think it was here, where they discussed enlightenment and workers’ rights, that his budding ideas for better working conditions began.

Unfortunately, it never took shape legally, and he never got traction, as he was viewed as too extreme, especially after he denounced all religions.

So Mr. Owen died with the slogan, and his 8-hour idea got filed under “utopian nonsense,” and the machines kept running.

Here’s a number you’ll want to be sitting down for, as you might be death-gripping your armrests from outrage: it took 121 years for Owen’s phrase to become law in the USA under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

This gap wasn’t quiet, but it wasn’t bloodless either. On May 4th, 1886, at 10:30 PM, a riot broke out, followed by a bomb explosion at Chicago’s Haymarket Square. Police shot and killed citizens who were striking. The reason for the strike? Demand for an eight-hour workday.

People were shot over the question of whether you get your evenings.

And it wasn’t a measly change from 50 hours to 40. When the government finally gave in and started tracking hours worked with the creation of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the late 1880s, it found that people were working 100 hours a week.

Your 40 hours, the number you’ve been side-eyeing, was a discount, brought to you by years of radical ideas and blood on the streets.

So no, the treadmill wasn’t built to trap you. It was dragged down from 100 to 40 by people who were fed up.

Which brings us back to the sticker you peeled. If Owen signed the machine in 1817, who serviced it in 1926?

You rub the sticker back in its place; it sticks for a moment, enough for you to see H. Ford before it springs into place.

That’s right, the most famous industrialist of our time, Henry Ford, was sort of a people’s person. I say kinda because when Ford took his car factory operations down from 6 days to 5 without changing their compensation, he did so with a capitalistic intention.

Leisure, he argued, is good business. A worker with a free Saturday is a customer with a free Saturday. Into the Ford dealerships his own workers went, and so our weekend further solidified as more companies took the improved productivity as a goal and implemented their own 5-day work weeks.

You stare back at the sticker, in awe. The last person who serviced it was also the one profiting from it.
Remember that... because as you may have picked up, we’re in the 5th industrial revolution, or as the World Economic Forum is naming, “The Intelligent Age”. I personally like the CAT Age, Cognitive Abundance Transition.

Owen tried to service the machine and got laughed out of the room. Ford serviced it and got a consumer class. Now the CAT Age mechanics are rolling up, and everyone’s crowding around asking what the new treadmill will look like. Four-day work week? UBI? How much?

You notice the wrench on the floor next to the mechanics. You pick it up. Your turn to make your edits to the machine. It starts with an hour.

Section 2: It’s time to build yourself

First thing you do with the wrench: write the spec.

Their mission statement was vague on purpose. Vague can’t be held accountable or checked, can’t be finished, so it never has to pay out.

Yours is different; it’ll be concrete AND inspirational. It’ll have intent that’ll be meaningful and memorable. And most importantly, it’ll help you eliminate decisions so you can make your best contributions.

Yes, this is from Greg McKeown’s book, “Essentialism”, and yes, it will work outside of boardrooms. Feel the difference in your hands: “Eighteen months of runway, then the van”, “Finish my short film by December”, “Saturday mornings belong to teaching the neighborhood kids chess”.

Whether it’s an escape hatch, art, community, I’m not here to pick your door. Your mission statement will have a finish line; then you’ll write another because it’s built to discover yourself and life.

Why write it now? Because 90% of knowledge work is becoming an easy task for AI. When we no longer have these jobs, we’ll need to find meaning elsewhere.

As Dario Amodei wrote in his essay, “Machines of Loving Grace”, in section 5: Work and Meaning: “As long as AI is only better at 90% of a given job, the other 10% will cause humans to become highly leveraged.” You can watch my breakdown video here. Part 2 coming soon.

This is your chance to be on the remaining 10% of jobs, treadmills or not. I can’t force you to opt in, but I can help you realize you can step off the treadmill and make time for yourself to figure out what’s worth your time.

That time has a name: the first hour. The one you currently donate to the “legendary pull” before the K-Cup even finishes brewing.

One rule, and it runs in one direction: they only get everything after the first hour, never before it. You don’t ask HR for it; there’s no form. It was never theirs. Read your offer letter: their treadmill starts at 9.

And before you turn this into a 5 AM guru routine, don’t. Ten minutes counts. The walk, the book, the pilates class you kept postponing, those were never self-care; that was you trying to stake this claim without knowing you already owned the lot.

You wanted your Saturday mornings back. This is where they live now, ten minutes at a time, seven days a week, before anyone can bill you.

I agree with Dario when he wrote in the same section, “I think meaning comes mostly from human relationships and connection, not from economic labor. People do want a sense of accomplishment, even a sense of competition...” he goes on to write that it’ll still be possible to spend years attempting difficult tasks like founding companies or becoming a Hollywood actor.

So spend 10 minutes, then eventually an hour figuring out how to spend time with friends and family more, and create your own goals that challenge and help you learn more about yourself.

Things are going to get more uncertain soon, and we need to not be afraid to influence our future; don’t wait for the Davos mechanics, make your own rules.

You too can service your hedonic treadmill

Ford predicted the week would keep shrinking, and history is on repeat. We have a frustrated workforce: China’s young workers lying flat, our American equivalent quiet quitting since COVID. We have revolutionary technology making knowledge workers obsolete. We have progressive companies running four-day workweek trials. It’s 1926 again, and the mechanics are already in the shop.

Will you wait 12 more years until the law catches up? Or will you take your life into your hands and make sure you and your close ones are better off? Don’t ask what the new job machines will look like.

Ask who’s signing the service sticker. Whatever gift they roll out, the four-day week, the UBI check, the agent that works while you sleep, flip it over first. There’s a receipt sewn in the lining. There always is. This time, make sure your name is on it.

Tomorrow, the alarm will still shock you into a cortisol bath. The K-cup sludge will still do the trick, and the treadmill will still say “last serviced 1926”.

But tomorrow, before the brew finishes, before the first social media pull, you’ll take ten minutes and write one sentence: the mission they’d never give you.

And on the drive into work, when you say “a job’s a job,” it won’t be a sedative anymore. It’ll be the terms on your new deal: it’s just a job. Forty hours, won for you by people who bled for it. The first hour, won by you.

Peel the sticker one last time. Sign it.

Last serviced, today. Technician: you.

It’s the perfect summer morning; the type they name lo-fi songs about. It’s brisk but not enough to make you outdoors-shy; it’s inviting like a cold touch on warm, flushed cheeks.

Your alarm judges you with 6:30 AM on its face, the time you committed to yourself, to your ideal self, to go for a run. You’ve been good about tracking your mileage, your zone 2 cadence, optimal for fat loss, but now it’s time to check your sleep score.

You squint at a blinding 70/100 score that hits you like a faceplant into a pool. You didn’t think you’d score this low of a grade since high school; You didn’t think this was a test, yet you feel guilty. You scold yourself, “Why did I have those Trader Joe’s fake Takis so late at night?” Because they’re delicious, that’s why. Your elevated heart rate and lower HRV point deduction were worth it at the moment, but now you’re facing your past self’s mistakes.

It’s now 6:34 AM, and before your feet hit the floor, you’ve already lost.

You scan your body as you dig your head into your pillow, you notice you aren’t aching for a yawn... You actually feel kinda fine? Maybe you can actually go for a run?

No, you must not, bad sleep is like the new smoking x10, and it’s good for your recovery, and you must protect it at all costs. So you set a new alarm 45 minutes out to get that score up.

As you put your phone back on your nightstand next to your empty takis bag, you get a brief voice of clarity questioning, “Did I just let my ring dictate my morn--.”

Lights out. Relief won out, but there’s a nagging sense of shame, and this time it’s not from the unused stationary bike in the corner. You let the ring give you permission to act against your interest.

When did the tool I bought to push me start pulling me the wrong way?

Section 1: If a ring flips - is it heads or tails?

You think you slept eight hours. The ring says six forty-two. Both of you are technically right, and only one of you is paying attention.

“What gets measured gets managed”, Drucker said, and he wasn’t wrong. You need a clear-eyed status of the problem you’re trying to manage. That’s what the ring was supposed to do: show me the gap between the sleep I thought I was getting and the sleep I actually was.

“Well, Gil, it’s not 100% accurate...”

It isn’t, and every different sleep-health wearable has its own point system as a proxy that varies based on previous days.

That’s the “sleep score” I was referring to. In Oura, it is tallied up by how long you spent in each stage of sleep, like REM or light sleep, how long you slept for based on your heart rate, and how well you slept.

There was a version of me who ran before sunrise without asking permission from anything on my finger.

The ring kept score for me and made me feel better when it was up. It hands you this little crown on top of your score, but quickly takes it away when you deviate downwards - and that feels like a malaise curtain falling over my head, while I lie in bed, just missing out on a crown by 1 point.

That’s when the purpose of the ring started to flip, from health empowerment to friction against kickstarting my morning routine.

Which raised a question I didn’t want to ask: what if the number isn’t even telling me the truth about how I feel... what if it’s deciding how I feel?

Section 2: Wearables, tech tuxedos on nocebos

Stories are more powerful than medicine, well, sometimes.

You’ve heard about the placebo effect, white coat environment, give a patient a sugar pill, call it medicine, and wham bam watch the patient feel better. Not because the pill did anything, but because the story did.

The nocebo is its evil twin. Same trick, the wrong direction. Tell someone an inert pill will give them a headache, and they get one.

In 2014, a year before the first smart ring was invented, Christina Draganich and Kristi Erdal ran an experiment, handing out their version of sleep scores to undergrads. They hooked them up to fake equipment, gave them a sleep questionnaire, and then casually told each one their REM percentage from the night before. Above average, you got lucky. Below average? rough night.

The numbers they dished out? Fake, random.

Then they tested everyone’s cognition.

The students who were told they’d slept well outperformed the ones who hadn’t. Not because it was true, but because the narrative baked into their mindset had become reality.

While the study was small, it has been replicated, and I didn’t need proof of what I was feeling. I needed a name, because the thing that the students were given to retcon their cognitive state is the same thing the ring reads back to you at 6:34 AM.

You squint at the 70 score; the day has collapsed before it started. Was it the delicious fake Takis? The late night? or the 70?

Be honest, you know.

And it gets worse, A 2017 study out of Warwick asked a basic question: When people say they slept well, what are they actually responding to? Short answer: the top 3 determinants of sleep quality were total sleep time, feeling refreshed(upon waking), and mood(the day after).

In other words, it’s a story you assemble after the fact. Which means the ring isn’t only reporting on your night, it’s writing the first sentence of the story you’ll tell yourself about your sleep.

Once that sentence is set, “I didn’t sleep well”, the rest of the day rearranges itself to confirm it. The yawn at the boring sync meeting is no longer a yawn. It’s evidence.

There’s a name for this spiral, too. Orthosomnia, coined in a 2017 paper after a sleep clinic kept having patients insist they had sleep problems, citing their trackers as evidence of how they actually felt.

One patient gets the full lab workup, is told her sleep is fine, but refuses to believe it. The quantified self went too far, and she trusts the thing that is making her feel worse.

The punchline is that these devices aren’t good at what they claim to do. They can’t reliably distinguish sleep stages - they’re poor at detecting wakefulness, heck, mine told me I slept through my haircut last cut. I’ll take the +3 points to my score, thank you, but you’re totally wrong. They are, in technical terms, guessing.

You handed your morning to a guess in a tuxedo.

So I followed this frustrating thread. If a number on an app can invent my exhaustion, where did the number even come from? Turns out, at least one of them was invented too.

The deceptive ichi man

In 1965, in the run-up to the Tokyo Olympics, a Japanese company released a pedometer called the Manpo-kei. Translated: ten-thousand-step meter.

There’s no mystery about why they picked it. It sounded cool. The character for 10,000 (ichi-man) looks like a person walking. It was a slogan. An ad.

Not a recommendation from a doctor, not the output of a study. It’s the vibe, preference, and taste of an experienced ad executive who knows that big numbers grab your attention.
And it proceeded to dominate global health for the next sixty-plus years.

Harvard epidemiologist I-Min Lee has spent a decade running the studies the slogan was missing. What she keeps finding is that meaningful mortality benefits show up at a much lower number. Around four thousand steps, the curve starts to bend. By seven thousand, you’ve captured most of the gains your two feet will earn you.

But four thousand is kinda lame, and every app is calibrated for it. You hit ten and confetti erupts, little fireworks give you dopamine kisses. Rest up, champ, you’re done for the day.
The line you crossed at 9:47 PM, pacing around the kitchen in socks while your cat watches you, confused, was sketched in a marketing meeting in Japan over sixty years ago.

Once you’ve been ichi-man-pilled, you see it everywhere. The Oura readiness score is a proprietary weighted average nobody outside Oura can audit. The calories counted from your lunch photo on that meal tracking app are also an educated guess.

The numbers aren’t useless; they’re just not authorities.

When I aim for ten thousand, I spend more time outdoors around the neighborhood, which is pleasant and positively reinforcing.
The photos of my meals remind me I’m taking my health more seriously, and I don’t need a calorie estimator to tell me the spinach feta omelet I cook has a lower caloric density than the butter-covered, maple-syrup-drenched pancakes I buy.

A made-up number can still be a nudge and not a judge.

The trouble starts when you start asking it for permission.

Section 3: The permission slip on my finger

It’s the next morning.

The alarm goes off at 6:30. You instantly check your phone, tap the sleep tracker, and it says 71. Marginal improvement, marginal absolution.

It’s enough to skip again, if you wanted to.

But you remember the guy who used to just get up. He’s still in there. And there’s a version of you, a year from now, who’ll lace up without checking, but only if the one in this bed, right now, on a 71, decides to be the bridge.

You make a new rule. The score can earn me a harder day, but it can’t grant me an easier one. Let the data make the day worse, in the way good data is supposed to.

On the other end — the 70, the 68, the 64 — the score is no longer in the permission business. It can describe a morning. It can’t decide it.

You get up.

Your shoes are by the door. Past-you did you a solid today. You owe tomorrow-you the same.

Your cat takes over your now warm side of the bed. He’ll take it from here, champ. You nod at him in gratitude, but he’s already asleep.

Enough stalling, you step outside to the brisk, crispy morning. The heavenly gradient sky and morning quiet before the traffic rush remind you why you started running.

You look at the ring. Still on. Just demoted. You start running before it has anything to say about it. You decided what the number meant today. You’ve always had that power.