This past week, Oura Health Oy, the company that sells the famous Oura ring, which tracks sleep, menstrual cycles, stress and more, reported raising $875 million in Series E funding, which is the fifth round of fundraising from a startup that has not declared for an initial public offering yet. For a private company, achieving Series E funding is exceptional, and for it to do so at such an exponential rate is even more unprecedented.
Oura’s pioneering rise should encourage us to reflect not only on how the field of health is changing, but also on how our values are. The exacerbating growth of this company reflects the rising trend to quantify everything we do, and our growing (and concerning) addiction to relying on metrics to measure our lives.
Beli logs our food recs, Goodreads counts our books, Oura and Whoop obsess over health metrics, Strava times our runs and calorie trackers record our meals. We’ve gotten really good at quantifying our lives, so good in fact, that some of us (myself included) often make the mistake of thinking tracking is the same as living.
Here’s the thing: Tracking can become highly addictive because it provides numerical validation for what we deem “progress.” Put simply, tracking tricks us into believing we’re moving forward simply because the numbers keep rising: more steps walked, more books read, more miles logged. There’s an inevitable dopamine hit in seeing the graphs climb upward, a sense of control in the accumulation of data points. Each metric offers comfort: “Look, you’re improving. Look, you’re doing life right.” But are we?
This trap of measured “progress” convinces us that the steady accumulation of numbers is synonymous with meaning. So much so that we risk starting to believe the graph itself is the point, as though life were a game of infinite levels, each one unlocked by another run, another streak, another completed checklist. Always moving, never stopping. This culture of productivity — though I’m all for getting things done — reveals a darker side. It suggests we might have misplaced our sense of value, trading presence and meaning for the empty comfort of accumulation.
But what if the moments that make life worth living refuse to fit into charts or streaks at all? The late-night talks with friends, the long walks around the lakes where no one checks the time or the morning debrief after a successful (or not so successful) night out. Even the way your mom’s voice sounds on FaceTime when she tells you she misses you.
These things resist measurement. You won’t be able to track them in any given app or gadget (no matter the technological advancements), yet they are the very fabric of a life well lived.
It is easy to get seduced by this tracking culture. This idea of accumulating “progress” seduces us because it offers the illusion of control. But presence asks something harder of us: to stop looking at the dashboard altogether. To notice, to feel, to actually be here. Because the truth is, the dashboard can tell us how much we did, but in the end, only we can remember how it felt. And maybe that’s the point: The best parts of life will never be data.
