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 app. It logs the potholes you drove around, the rubbish you stepped over, the things that were supposed to work and did not. Each one adds a point to your stress score. By breakfast you’d be in the red zone the wellness apps warn you about, the one usually reserved for people running marathons or grieving.
Nobody is logging the stress of no water for the third day running.
It would not survive a week, for the same reason nothing else here does. A shark bites a cable somewhere off the coast and the app goes with the rest of the internet. The power drops mid-log and you start again from memory, because memory is what’s left. Even the cloud, it turns out, has a limit, and Karachi would find it. Somewhere, a server in another country would simply run out of room for our complaints.
Lately, there’s a new entry that doesn’t fit anywhere on the old scale. A friend visits from Lahore for a week and tells you that she feels she has arrived in another South Asian city. Not ours anymore, she means. You nod, because arguing with her costs more energy than you have logged for the day, and because some small treacherous part of you agrees.
Optimisation culture, whatever it promises, begins with a hidden assumption: that your only obstacle is you. That the water runs, the power holds, the road is paved, and all that’s left to fix is the self.
That assumption has a postal code. It belongs to the person whose generator switching on is a mild inconvenience, not the actual infrastructure of their day. It belongs to whoever can afford the tracker, the supplements, the eight uninterrupted hours it takes to get a ‘sleep score’ worth discussing. Optimise your morning routine, the Tech Bros say, as if the morning were a neutral canvas and not already spent anticipating our next crisis.
I can log my numbers because I have the luxury of numbers to log. Somewhere less air-conditioned than my lounge, a woman is also managing her health today, without an app, without a specialist, without the option of treating the body as a problem to be solved in isolation from everything pressing on it. Her exhaustion isn’t a data point she declined to track. It’s the whole condition. The discourse has no column for her, because the discourse was never written with her in mind.
I have stopped logging. Not because my doctor is wrong, but because the log was always aimed at the wrong patient. I am not the one who is unwell. The grid is not broken because I ate badly one Tuesday. It is broken because the power went, and then the water, and then the internet, and none of that was mine to fix or mine to have caused.
So, log something else instead. Log the hours the transformer sat unrepaired. Log the tanker mafia’s prices against the pipeline that was promised and never laid.
Log the minister’s motorcade, uninterrupted by the load-shedding schedule the rest of us live inside. Log the days an activist has spent in a cell for saying something out loud, waiting on a justice she has long since stopped expecting.
There is a body that needs monitoring here, and it isn’t mine, and it isn’t yours. It’s the one that runs on our taxes and answers to nobody’s tracker but ours, if we ever bothered to build one.
Until then, keep your sleep score. I’m done submitting mine. The people who should be counting something are the ones who’ve never had to.
The writer is a journalist and conducts writing workshops in Karachi.
X: @LedeingLady
Published in Dawn, July 26th, 2026