The previous chapter ended with a small tragedy — the quiet, almost anticlimactic second death of Fitbit. Not the company, not the brand, but the idea of Fitbit as I remembered it: a simple bracelet, a discreet companion, a relic from 2015 that no longer existed in the world I had returned to. The official website had shown me the truth with clinical indifference: every model now had a screen, a miniature smartphone strapped to the wrist. The bracelet had not evolved. It had vanished. And with it, the last familiar shape in a landscape I no longer recognized.
After Fitbit’s second death, the silence was almost physical. My list — the one I had so carefully narrowed down in chapter 3, the one that had once held two survivors of the great wearable purge — was now empty. Fitbit was gone, erased not by science but by evolution, swallowed whole by a world that no longer believed in simple bracelets. And Oura… Oura had been exiled long before that. Not because it failed, not because it disappointed, but because it demanded the one thing I had sworn never to give: a subscription. A monthly tithe. A lifetime of paying rent for my own data. It was perfect, yes — scientifically, aesthetically, philosophically perfect — but forbidden. A ring I could admire, but never wear.
“And now what?”
The question rose in me with the dull weight of inevitability. My list was empty. My wife’s intention still stood. But the path forward had vanished. I had no contenders left, no direction, no next step. Just a blank page and a hollow ache where certainty should have been. I should have stopped. I should have closed the tabs, put down the pen, walked away from the screen, and accepted the void for what it was: a sign to start over. A fresh search. A clean slate. A chance to rebuild the list from scratch, slowly, rationally, methodically — the way any sane person would.
Instead, I found myself drifting back — again and again — to the one device that had already been rejected. The one that violated the core criterion I had sworn never to compromise. The one that whispered to me from the top‑right corner of a scatter plot like a forbidden promise. The Oura Ring 4.
So I began searching again — not for a new device, not for a fresh start, but for a loophole. A crack in the wall. A hidden clause that would allow me to want the ring without betraying myself. I looked for exceptions, for edge cases, for stories of people who had used the Oura without a subscription. I found fragments, half‑truths, mentions of older generations 1 that still functioned in a limited way. I clung to them. I twisted them. I let them grow into possibilities that weren’t real. And the more I searched for what didn’t exist, the more the truth hurt: the subscription was real 2, immovable, absolute.
The subscription isn’t for premium extras; it’s for the basic functionality of the app, without which there isn’t much point to wearing the ring.Beth Skwarecki
But none of that mattered. Not at that moment. At that moment, I was in love with the ring — convinced that this was the object I had been searching for since 2015, the one that would finally close the loop on my long‑abandoned quest for sleep. It was absurd. Irrational. A betrayal of my own principles. And yet, the more I tried to move on, the more the ring pulled me back. Its slogan — Sleep. Health. Stress. — echoed in my mind with the solemnity of a prophecy. Its shape, its simplicity, its quiet elegance — everything about it felt like the answer to a question I had been asking for years without knowing it.
The forbidden object became the only object. The impossible became the inevitable.
I found articles claiming that the Oura Ring 4 could function without a subscription — limited, yes, but functional. I clung to that like a drowning man to driftwood. Maybe I could live with the limitations. Maybe… maybe… Maybe the Czech Republic, with its strange digital borders, would spare me from the monthly fee. Maybe the app would behave differently here. Maybe the rules would bend for me. Maybe the universe would make an exception. But none of these maybes were real. They were illusions — thin, desperate threads I kept weaving into a rope that could never hold my weight. The truth was simple, brutal, and immovable: the only way to have the ring was to betray myself. To cross the one line I had drawn at the very beginning.
And that was the moment the insanity won — when desire spoke louder than principle, and I began to imagine a world where I could pay for something I had sworn never to accept. I opened the budget like a surgeon preparing for an amputation. What could I cut? What could I sacrifice? Coffee? Books? The rare moments of pleasure that still survived the grind of my days? I started doing the math — absurd, humiliating math — carving imaginary savings out of a life already stripped to the bone. I even tried to explain it to my wife, as if reason could be found in this madness. It’s for my health, I told her. If I walk more, if I sleep better, if this helps me survive the stress… isn’t that worth bending the rules? I heard myself speak, and yet the words felt foreign, spoken by someone who had already crossed a line I didn’t remember stepping over. Trying to rationalize the irrational. Trying to bend reality around a desire that had no place in my life.
The stronger the desire, the deeper the corruption.
The descent was not slow; it happened over the span of a single weekend — a weekend that should have been for rest, for my son, for breathing. Instead, it became a tunnel. Hour after hour, tab after tab, video after video, I sank deeper without noticing the slope. It felt almost gentle, as if I were sliding rather than falling. A soft erosion of will. A quiet unraveling of logic. A man losing his grip not through drama, but through longing — a longing so persistent, so strangely tender, that it hollowed me out from the inside. By Sunday evening (April 26th), I had reached a place I didn’t recognize: a point where reason no longer mattered, where principles no longer anchored me, where the world had narrowed to a single object glowing in the dark. I had touched the very bottom — the point where desire becomes gravity, and gravity becomes fate. And then — at the bottom of that spiral — came the video.
It was not science anymore. Not from The Quantified Scientist, not from validation studies, not from anything resembling the careful, methodical world I had been clinging to. This was something else — a video probably assembled by AI, stitched together from scraps of marketing and outrage, designed to trigger clicks, not thought. But I was not myself anymore, so who cared that it was clickbait. I clicked. And the worst part? It delivered exactly what the title promised — Smart Rings: 6 To Avoid (And 2 That Are Worth Your Money) — but nothing I didn’t already know. The fact that wearables attempt to infer your sleep quality from indirect signals; educated guesses at best.
The video investigates which smart rings actually produce validated, trustworthy health data—and which ones rely mostly on marketing, unvalidated algorithms, or questionable business practices. The global idea was simple: most rings were trash. Not metaphorically — literally. One by one, the narrator marched them to the gallows. Ironically, the first device was not even a ring. WHOOP — subscription trap, already struck from my list 3. Samsung Galaxy Ring — locked ecosystem, no algorithm upgrade, dead on arrival. Circular Ring 2 — buggy app, probable bankrupt, unreliable. Amazfit Helio Ring — overestimates sleep, weak ecosystem. Unbranded and Generic Smart Rings — privacy nightmares, no validation, no jurisdiction. Any ring marketed primarily around “Readiness Scores” — proprietary, unvalidated algorithms, health decisions based on numerology. A whole category dismissed with a single sweep of the hand.
But the real wound came next. The salt on the wound. The confirmation I didn’t want but couldn’t look away from. The shiny one. The one I already knew too well. The one I had tried to bury and kept digging back up. Oura Ring 4 — the best, again. Most independently validated smart ring on the market. Featured in 72% of all smart‑ring research. Strong accuracy for sleep. Continuous feature development — cycle tracking, stress, circadian tools, blood‑test integrations. It had it all. Everything I wanted. Everything I couldn’t have. And seeing it crowned once more, in a video that wasn’t even scientific, felt like watching someone else wear the life I had imagined for myself.
And then — just when I thought the video had nothing left to offer — a tiny light appeared at the end. A name I had never seen before, a possibility I had not even imagined: RingConn Gen 2. A non‑subscription ring. A contender. A spark. And the video didn’t stop there. Slimmest ring in the category (2 mm thick). Ten to twelve days of battery life — better than Oura. Rapid feature development. Sleep‑apnea detection in beta. Sleep apnea? Oh my! It was too beautiful to be true.
“How had I not seen this one before?”
I ran back to The Quantified Scientist — the one with the scatter plots, the validation studies, the truth. I typed “RingConn Gen 2” with the trembling hope of a man who has already lost too much. And there it was. A single dot on a scatter plot, sitting in the bottom‑left corner like a verdict carved in stone:
- X‑axis (average stage agreement): 46%
- Y‑axis (worst stage agreement): 18%
And where’s the Ringcon Gen 2? It’s all the way down here. So it’s really not doing very well. It’s really one of the worst performing devices out there. […] So, it’s really not a device I would recommend for sleep stage tracking. It’s a lot worse even than Garmin for instance, which I always say have mediocre sleep stage tracking.The Quantified Scientist
But I wasn’t done. Not yet. Not after coming this far. I kept searching. There had to be something else. Somewhere. Some device overlooked by the algorithmic fog of Czech Google. And I found one. Ultrahuman Ring AIR. No subscription. A serious contender? A chance? The hope was too fragile to touch. Battery issues, yes — but I could live with that. A ring without a subscription — that alone was enough to make it glow like a lifeline. But what about sleep? Slowly, almost afraid to see the truth, I went back to The Quantified Scientist. And there it was, merciless as ever.
And you can see the results for the Ultra Human Ring AIR right here. So, it’s really amongst the poorer performing watches together with a bunch of Huawei devices for instance, a bit better potentially than some Xiaomi devices, but overall not doing very well. It’s really in the lower end of devices. Whereas the results for the Oura Ring 4 are right here, very similar to the results for the Oura Ring 3 I tested previously. So, the Oura Ring is really one of the top sleep stage strackers out there.The Quantified Scientist
The second hope died as fast as the first. Bad for sleep. Both of them. And so the dream collapsed. Two hopes. Dead one after the other. Quick. Brutal. Final. The Oura Ring 4 was unreachable — financially, philosophically, morally. RingConn Gen 2 was a mirage. Ultrahuman Ring AIR was a disappointment. And I was left with nothing. Adieu veau, vache, cochons. All that remained was the quiet, stunned helplessness of a man who had fallen in love with something he could not have — just the hollow echo of a desire that had nowhere to go.
To be continued…
1 Yes, no subscription is required for Oura Ring Gen 2. You get full access to all of the ring’s standard features and historical data without paying a monthly fee. However, it no longer receives modern software feature updates due to its older hardware. And, more importantly, it was not as good as the more recent model to track sleep (according to the The Quantified Scientist video). ^
2 The Oura Ring subscription is not legally mandatory to use the ring, but practically speaking, it is required for Gen 3 and Oura Ring 4 if you want any actual health data. If you choose not to pay the subscription fee, the app blocks almost all of your metrics, leaving you with just three basic, non-clickable numbers. More importantly, you cannot see your sleep details: sleep stages (REM, Deep, Light), sleep latency, or nighttime restlessness. You still get an Explore tab, which contains guided meditations, though. ^
3 And here is what my rational brain could have articulated — if it hadn’t already dissolved into the fog of obsession: “Wait. If you reject WHOOP for locking your data behind a subscription, then be consistent.” Because the argument used in the video — “Your data becomes inaccessible if you cancel the subscription” — applies just as brutally to the Oura Ring 4. The irony is almost painful. Spoiler alert: the video might have been suffering from the same corrupted logic as mine… or perhaps from a very strong monetary incentive. Either way, neither of us was thinking clearly. ^