The first part of this summer story took place at the very beginning of the year — a moment suspended somewhere between exhaustion and resignation, when my wife gently suggested that, for my fiftieth birthday, she would like to offer me a wearable. Not for fun. Not for trends. Not a simple gift, but a way to push me to resume some sort of activity. My health was slipping away under the weight of a job that devours more life than it pays for. Maybe a device that tracks my activity would be a nice kick‑in‑the‑ass motivator. If you missed that first chapter, it ended with me nodding along — a quiet “Whatever” that summed up the state of my body and my mind.
So I nodded to my wife. “Okay.” Not because I was convinced. Not because I suddenly believed in step‑counting salvation. I nodded because, somewhere deep inside, I had already rejected the idea without even realizing it. A quoi bon!CogitActive
That weekend was supposed to be off — no work. I needed it 1. The week leading up to it had been the usual descent: from bad to worse at work, and the fall was not over. My meditation habit 2 had crumbled under the weight of fatigue — too tired to sit, too tired to breathe, too tired even for five minutes of stillness. Nights were a battlefield of nightmares, pain, and stress; mornings were a negotiation with a body that no longer responded when the alarm went off. One function after another was shutting down, like a slow‑motion episode of Dr House where the patient is me.
So, I had promised my son I would stay home, and I had even promised myself a few minutes of personal time — a luxury I barely remembered existed (unseen since July 2020). And so, on that rare day off, I pulled what I call the emergency plug. No work. No guilt. A day for my boy. And if he allowed me a minute or two, maybe I would even tidy up my camera notes — the ones about how to take a picture and how to use my camera, a hobby I keep trying to resurrect from the rubble of my schedule. But as soon as my son was satisfied with his daddy time, my wife slid back into the room with the same gentle insistence as months before:
“Did you check the bands? You should start to look at what you will want. I know you are picky, and I want you to like it.”
I sighed and grabbed the nearest thing that vaguely resembled paper. Not a notebook. Not a clean sheet. Not even a respectable scrap. No. I reached for half a torn page, the amputated corner of something that had already lived another life. And that choice — that miserable, wrinkled, half‑dead piece of paper — said everything about my motivation. If I had cared, truly cared, I would have taken a full sheet. Or even better, created a proper project in my GTD system. But no. Half a page. Quarter of a page, really — the other side was already filled with something else. The physical embodiment of “whatever.” The kind of scrap that indeed tells you how unmotivated I was — and yet I still wrote a heading at the top:
Watch / Band
Now, I hadn’t followed the wearable market since that whole Fitbit episode more than ten years ago. Now, I don’t live like a monk — I knew the Apple Watch existed, maybe that’s even why I wrote watch first — but that was pretty much the extent of my knowledge. So when I began drafting my criteria, you have to imagine a guy operating with a 2015 brain, not someone who had kept up with the latest trends or the latest hype cycles. My understanding of wearables was frozen in amber.
I began with the basics — the obvious criteria, the ones even a zombie version of myself could articulate: Waterproof. That was an obvious call indeed. Not because I planned to dive or do anything remotely heroic; I know perfectly well that “30 m” or even “100 m” printed on a device doesn’t mean you can explore the Mariana Trench. It means you can wash your hands with it, or — if you’re lucky — go to the pool without killing it. But if my only activity — the only one my knee still allows — is swimming, then that band had better track me in the water. Whenever I manage to find the time to go into the water, that is. There is no such thing as a sea or an ocean in the Czech Republic.
The next criterion came almost automatically, as if my hand wrote it before my brain caught up: No subscription. And that, right there, wasn’t just a line on a list. It was a principle. A philosophy. A whole worldview condensed into two words. Because if there is one thing I refuse — viscerally, instinctively — it’s the modern trend of renting your own life. Everything today is a subscription. Everything is a monthly fee for the privilege of using something you already bought. Subscriptions are the digital equivalent of leeches: small, silent, and always hungry.
Ownership is not outdated. If it is, then I am outdated too — and proud to be. Let me walk through a few examples.
I use Microsoft Office — the real one — the one you install once and keep forever. Not the Office 365 cloud‑based rental model that wants to charge you every month for the privilege of typing a sentence. Sure, I don’t have all the shiny new features the latest version may offer, but that’s a blessing more than a curse. My version works. I know how to use it (I read manuals — you know, those artefacts from the past). New updates don’t crash my settings, remove the niche feature I rely on, or simply change the whole interface 3 so that I no longer know how to use it.
I still buy CDs and DVDs — physical discs, with covers, booklets, and that satisfying click when you close the case. I don’t understand Spotify or its cousins. Streaming feels like borrowing music from a stranger who can take it back whenever he wants. Yes, you can explore more with that model than you could ever own — especially with my limited budget — but I want the object. It’s like books: it’s more than the text. I want to hold the object. I want to keep it. I want to pass it on.
So I take care of my things. I preserve them. I maintain them. I keep them alive. My Playmobil? The ones with 1974 engraved under their feet? Still pristine. Still loved. Still played with — by my son now, who can’t believe toys used to be built to last. They’re collectors’ items now, actually. And, to be honest, far better looking than the cheap plastic crap the brand produces today. I wanted to buy new ones for him, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it — it would have been a shame object compared to the glorious old collection.
Collecting is not a hobby. It’s a way of being. Ownership is not nostalgia. It’s identity. And yes, I know how ridiculous that sounds in 2026, but it’s who I am. A man who still uses his BlackBerry — daily — the one I bought in 2011. A man whose first laptop from 2004 still boots, still works, still carries the ghosts of old projects and forgotten dreams.
And yet — and here comes the irony sharp enough to cut glass — I take better care of my objects than I take care of myself.
The next line I wrote on my miserable quarter‑page was Long battery. Simple. Obvious. Almost boring. But essential. Because if there is one thing that hasn’t changed since 2015, it’s this: I don’t want to charge yet another device every night. I already sleep with enough stress, and unfinished tasks — I don’t need a dying battery whispering low power into my ear like a passive‑aggressive reminder of my own exhaustion.
And as I wrote those two words — Long battery — something in my brain shifted. A tiny click. Barely audible. But unmistakable. It was the moment the fog lifted, just a little. The moment the “whatever” of January quietly morphed into a “why not.” The moment the list stopped being a chore and became… something else. Because battery led to night. Night led to sleep. And sleep — that old obsession, that unfinished quest from 2015 — came rushing back like a ghost tapping on my shoulder.
“Sleep. Of course. How had I not seen it earlier?”
This was about reclaiming something I had lost long before my move back to Europe, long before my job started crushing me, long before I stopped meditating and my nights turned into battlegrounds. This was about the one thing that had always mattered: sleep. And with that realisation, the spark ignited. The shift was instant — the kind of mental pivot you feel in your spine, like a compass needle snapping toward true north.
A sleep tracker — that was a different story.
The thing I had wanted all along. The thing I had been denied when Fitbit killed the real trackers. The thing I had abandoned out of frustration. The thing I had buried under years of stress, work, and survival. Sleep tracking was back on the table — cautiously, quietly, but undeniably. So I added “prioritising sleep” just below the “Watch / Band” title, dropped my pen, and immediately started looking for wearables and sleep.
I typed my search terms into YouTube. Not expecting much. What used to be a useful platform has been invaded by “Top 10 whatever you NEED in 2026” videos — and worse, not even empty content assembled by someone, but emptiness generated by AI, stitched together by algorithms that don’t even pretend to care. But then — like a lighthouse cutting through fog — I stumbled upon a video titled: “Best Wearables for Sleep: Scientific Rankings.” The title alone stopped me. Not the “Best”, but “Wearables for sleep”, of course — still, that wasn’t what mattered. Scientific. Not “top 10,” not “coolest,” not “most popular,” but scientific. I clicked, and the very first sentence hooked me: I went through hundreds of scientific publications to find the best sleep trackers…
This wasn’t a guy waving his wrist and saying, “It works for me.” This was someone who had actually read the literature, dug through the data, compared validation studies, and ranked devices based on evidence, not marketing. A rare species on YouTube. An endangered one. And suddenly, my torn quarter‑page started to fill frenetically 4.
To be continued…
1 I call this moment pulling the emergency plug. It’s the point where you finally admit the fight is pointless — whatever you build keeps getting destroyed anyway. There’s no need to match their model and sacrifice your health even further. Sometimes the only sane move is to stop before they break what’s left of you. ^
2 I originally started meditation years ago to fix my sleep. Back then, I couldn’t fall asleep at all — turning for hours, thinking, re‑thinking, spiralling. Meditation solved that. Flip the coin, though: remove the cure, and of course, the sleep collapses. Add the overstress at work, the overthinking at night, the nightmares when I finally manage to drift off, and the stress‑induced stomach pain that refuses to let my body rest… It’s an explosive combo. And when my body finally gives up under all that, it’s always at the exact moment the alarm rings. ^
3 I survived the 2007 update. That was a trauma. Admittedly, the new Office with the ribbons ended up better. But “good enough” is good enough. And while I’ve upgraded since, I refuse to move to Office 365. ^
4 For the record, that entire weekend vanished into research. I didn’t do anything but search for info, then more info, then even more info — interrupted only by my boy, by meals, and by my attempts to sleep. It was the purest form of obsession: the kind that feels productive, even when you know it’s probably not. And yes — this is exactly where the next chapter begins. ^