MY doctor wants numbers. Weight, logged daily. Meals, logged as eaten. Sleep, logged in hours, then again in quality, because apparently hours alone tell you nothing. This is what full health optimisation looks like now: a body converted into a spreadsheet, so a specialist somewhere can find the variable that’s failing.

I sort of did it. I watched the coloured bars fill in and empty out, felt the small private satisfaction of a green tick, the small private shame of a red one. But within a few days of logging, I asked the only useful question the whole exercise produced: optimised for what, exactly, when the city outside my window is falling apart faster than I can improve?

Because no app asks about the rest of it. Nobody is logging the stress of no water for the third day running, or the fourth power cut before lunch, or the particular exhaustion of a life lived permanently in Plan B, where the generator is the actual Plan A and everything you originally intended was the fantasy. There is no wearable for that. There is no score.

So, I started designing one, in my head, in the manner of the worst kind of joke, the kind that is only funny because it is true. A Karachi........

© Dawn