#76 He Tried to Escape. Tech Followed
Burnout, Reboot, Repeat and how smart health tech "helps".
Much has been promised about the future—AI-driven diagnostics, personalized medicine, seamless health monitoring. But in reality, the world is shaken. Economic instability, climate crises, political turmoil, and health uncertainties make heavy investments in new technology a challenge. People aren’t just hesitant—they’re exhausted. They don’t want more devices, more data, more optimization. They want escape.
João was one of them. Burned out, he didn’t care about the latest health tech or the newest smart home innovation. He just wanted to switch off, forget, and reboot. His sister, knowing this, booked him a quiet seaside retreat—a place where he could step away from it all. Or so he thought.
Faro, Portugal - 2035
João punched in the pin. A click, then the door swung open, resisting the cold air spilling from the rattling AC. Not this again. His first thought. The kind of place he had wanted to avoid.
He stepped inside anyway. The air was stale, artificial, carrying none of the scent of salt or sun-warmed stone he had imagined. He glanced back at the street, at the sharp brightness of the Faro sun, and exhaled.
“Welcome to my seaside retreat,” he muttered, half to himself.
He had come looking for silence. A break from—well, everything. This place was supposed to be different. A reset.
Inês barely the owner of the Airbnb looked at him. Sun-creased skin, flat, unreadable eyes. She shoved the tablet toward him, no pleasantries. “Pin. Wi-Fi.” Her voice was clipped, efficient, without warmth. He wasn’t sure if it was disinterest or something else, something more like exhaustion. Either way, it was a far cry from the forced politeness of the world he had stepped away from.
He took the device. Cold, smooth, impersonal. The weight of it sat wrong in his palm, too familiar, too tethered to everything he was trying to escape. But this was how things worked now. He’d chosen this, hadn’t he?
The apartment was old. Terracotta tiles, whitewashed walls, the scent of the sea carried in on the evening air. A space that had history, that had been lived in. But the tech was there too, threaded into the seams. A black mirror instead of a regular one. A toilet that glowed faintly blue, watching, analyzing. The tablet, silent when untouched, but waiting—always waiting. It was a strange thing, to stand in a place so solid and real while knowing the machines were still listening.
He ignored it. On the first day, he let his feet take him through the narrow alleys of the old town. The salt air, the charred scent of grilled fish, the uneven rhythm of voices—unfiltered, unscripted. He ate sardines in a place with plastic chairs and paper tablecloths, the oil running over his fingers, the taste sharp and clean. It had been a long time since he’d eaten anything that wasn’t optimized, balanced, pre-determined for efficiency.
He sat by the harbor, watching the boats move with the tide. He let the city exist around him, uncurated, uncustomized. Real.
That night, the apartment felt smaller. The quiet wasn’t the kind he had wanted. It pressed in, heavy, full of things unsaid. He turned the tablet on. The screen’s glow was cool, clinical, a hard contrast to the warm, yellow light of the bedside lamp. The mirror, he turned off entirely—some lines, even now, he wouldn’t cross. But the toilet? That stayed on. A curiosity he wasn’t quite ready to let go of.
The data was blunt. Hydration: Low. Sleep: Fragmented. No commentary, no alarms. Just the facts. The kind of truth he could neither argue with nor ignore.
The next day, he walked further. The Ria Formosa stretched out before him, the scent of marsh and salt filling his lungs, the calls of distant birds cutting through the wind. It felt untouched, separate. A place that had no need for data or optimization.
Something shifted. Small at first. A stretch in his calves from walking farther than usual. A hunger that came at the right time, not dictated by an app or a schedule. The simple pleasure of sunlight warming his skin. He hadn’t realized how much of his own body he had stopped listening to. How much he had outsourced.
Days settled into a rhythm. Water. Walking. The steady rebuilding of muscles that had forgotten their use. Sleep became easier, deeper. The tablet reflected the changes without judgment. Hydration: Optimal. Activity: Increased. Sleep: Improved. Simple. True.
The mobile clinic was parked in the Largo do Carmo, silver and functional, blending in without effort. He stepped inside, not because he was worried, but because he wanted to know. Blood pressure, a scan, the doctor’s voice level, factual.
“Normal range. Hydrate.”
That was it. No alarms. No analysis. Just a human body doing what it was meant to do.
And that was when he saw it.
The apartment, the tech, the numbers—they weren’t an intrusion at all. They weren’t the enemy. They were tools. A way of seeing himself, not as a collection of tasks to optimize, but as something real. Something alive. The data didn’t judge. It didn’t tell him what to do. It just let him understand.
When he left, he didn’t feel like he was running away. He felt like he was stepping into something new. A balance. A way to exist in the world without letting it consume him. A way to hold onto himself in the noise.
He boarded the plane. He felt the weight of the tablet in his bag and, with it, an idea for his apartment.