A few months ago, my wife came to tell me something. She caught me on one of those late-working nights, the kind where the day has long since ended for everyone else, but my screen is still glowing, and my brain is still grinding, chewing on problems that don’t deserve this much of my life. Outside, the world was trying to sleep; inside, I was still negotiating with deadlines and disasters. She stood there for a moment, watching me type, then said that for my “big” birthday to come 1, she wanted to offer me something to track my activity—a wearable, as they call them nowadays. It sounded simple enough, almost casual, like suggesting we buy a new frying pan. Yet beneath her words, I could hear the real message, the one she didn’t quite dare to phrase bluntly: you need to start moving, and you need to start caring about your health before it’s too late.
And I knew exactly why. She has watched me deteriorate over the past six years — watched my health unravel under the weight of a job that drains more life out of me than any bad habit I ever had in the US. She has seen the exhaustion, the frustration, the stress that never leaves, the way I come home already defeated by a system that seems designed to break people like me. So yes — when she said she wanted to give me a bracelet, it wasn’t about steps or calories or trends. It was about survival. It was about her fear of losing me (the life expectancy of men in the Czech Republic lag several years behind Western European nations, by the way) to something far more dangerous than inactivity: the slow erosion of a man crushed by his own responsibilities. It was her way of saying: I see what’s happening to you, even if you pretend you don’t.
And that’s when the irony hit me — because I had been offered a bracelet once before, long before things got this bad. Back in 2015, during that bittersweet departure from the US, my closest friends handed me a Fitbit as a goodbye gift. They meant well. They were thoughtful. They knew I had been desperately searching for a sleep tracker. But here was the catch.
My obsession wasn’t steps or calories or “activity.” It was sleep — or rather, the absence of it. I wanted to understand why my nights felt like battles and my mornings like defeats. And to track sleep properly, you need electroencephalogram (EEG) waves drawn from your skull — not one of those “you moved, therefore you must be awake” toys, but a proper EEG‑based device. Something scientific. Something accurate. Something that could help me understand why my nights were collapsing into exhaustion. Not some cheerful wristband that guessed my consciousness based on whether my arm twitched.
But I was already too late. All the attempts at proper EEG‑based devices had been discontinued; dead in the egg, smothered before they even had a chance. Killed by the rise of these new toys that claim to understand your sleep by measuring how much your arm wiggles. The law of the market — not the science, not the physiology, just the collective misunderstanding of the masses. Fitbit had indeed wiped out the serious sleep‑tracking devices, replacing them with the wearable equivalent of a fortune cookie: You moved, therefore you were awake; you didn’t, therefore you slept. Brilliant logic. Revolutionary science. Except not.
I was furious at the industry, frustrated at the timing, and — let’s be honest — a perfectionist asshole. So when my friends — good friends, generous friends — handed me a Fitbit as a goodbye gift, I didn’t see their kindness. I saw the absence of the one thing I had been hunting for. And like the stupid, uncompromising, not‑politically‑correct, socially tone‑deaf asshole I was, I gave it back. Directly. Immediately. As if returning a sweater that didn’t fit. No tact, no gratitude, no awareness of the moment. Just pure, unfiltered me — the version of myself I now look back on with a mix of regret and disbelief.
So when my wife stood there, months ago, telling me she wanted to offer me a bracelet for my fiftieth birthday, the irony hit me so hard I almost laughed. Almost. Because beneath the irony was something heavier — the realization that the gift I once rejected out of arrogance was now being offered out of concern. Not because it was trendy. Not because it was cool. But because she was scared of losing me. And suddenly, the whole story wasn’t funny anymore.
She wanted to offer something that would push me to move. Her idea had nothing to do with sleep — I had fixed that problem with meditation long ago. No, this was about those step‑counting gadgets, the ones that buzz on your wrist like a tiny personal trainer reminding you to stop dying at your desk and go outside. Maybe, she thought, if something nudged me out of my computer chair and forced me to walk, maybe it could slow down the process.
Go for a walk! The infamous 10,000 steps.
My knee — with its heroic screw 1 trying to escape like a prisoner of war — wasn’t helping. I had to stop sports entirely a couple of years ago. Nothing glorious, nothing competitive, just a simple daily jog — well, more often weekly, because time is a luxury — but even that became impossible. Every step was, and still is, a negotiation with pain. And that clock, clock, clock at every impact, a metronome of misery. The culprit: that screw. More than a centimeter out of its original location, eating my patella one step at a time.
Oh, I’ve seen doctors. Many specialists. In this new country of mine. But the doctors here, in their infinite wisdom, kept refusing surgery — refusing to remove the screw, refusing to screw it back, refusing to do anything remotely logical — and instead injected oil into my knee as if I were some kind of squeaky door hinge. Expensive. Not reimbursed. And, of course, useless. A brilliant idea, really, if your goal is to make the screw slide out faster. Physics, apparently, is optional in this country.
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! That quiet, familiar surrender: the kind where you nod to someone you love, not because you agree, but because you don’t have the strength to fight. And I went back to work — because of course I did — drowning again in the same stress that started this whole mess, the same pressure that has been grinding me down year after year.
To be continued…
1 We weren’t celebrating anything (quite the contrary). My fiftieth birthday was still months away, safely distant on the horizon. But she knows me too well: I will never pick anything without dissecting every option from every angle first—reading every review, comparing every feature, cross-checking every specification, until the simple act of choosing a bracelet turns into a small, obsessive research project. So she started early, not because the date was close, but because my overthinking always is. ^
2 That screw is the relic of a cross‑ligament surgery I had thirty years ago — a basketball aftermath from a time when I was young, French, and still convinced my body was indestructible. In truth, it wasn’t just the ligament; my whole knee was a wreck. My surgeon told me he would try to do his best so I could walk again, but he couldn’t promise anything given the damage. And yet, somehow, after three surgeries, I came back. Basketball, snowboarding, running — everything. I rebuilt myself. Which makes the current situation even more absurd: after surviving all that, I’m now being undone by a country that thinks injecting oil is a medical strategy. ^