India, Sept. 9 -- By Dr. R. Balasubramaniam

There was a time, not too long ago, when I woke up in the morning and decided for myself what kind of day it was going to be. These days, I wake up and my phone decides for me. It tells me my sleep score was 62 percent, which is apparently "fair" but not "restorative" and before my feet have touched the floor I am already feeling like a failure.

Forty-plus years of working with grassroots communities taught me that human beings are remarkably resilient. Nobody told me that resilience would eventually be measured in percentages by an algorithm that has never once walked a village road at dawn.

It began, as these things often do, with the best of intentions. I wanted to meditate more regularly,...