We All Envision a Life OS

In October, I rode my motorcycle into Arunachal Pradesh for 45 days.

There were no Slack pings, no dashboards, no stand-ups checking in, and most of the time, no network. But it was blissful. Camping at random spots along the way, biking through thick forests and the borders of Tibet, through landslides and rain that looked like it would flood everything. All of it left an everlasting impact because it was the kind of silence where you hear your own nervous system for the first time.

By the end of it, my head was clear for the first time in months. My body felt reset, physically and mentally. As I reflected, camping near Mechuka with nothing to optimise, it hit me:

I'd been treating my life like ten separate dashboards. Fitness over here. Work over there. Sleep in one app, nutrition barely planned, finances in a spreadsheet I opened once a month. Every tool was doing its job, just that none of them were talking to each other.

And the thing is, when you try to optimise for one, you slip on the others. I know this because I lived it. I'd go hard on fitness for three weeks, and my work would quietly suffer. I'd grind on a project for a month and then look up and realise I hadn't called my parents, hadn't cooked a real meal in weeks, hadn't slept more than five hours in I-don't-know-how-long.

The worst part? The feedback is slow. Your fitness drops, and weeks later it shows up in your mood. The hobbies you usually do, you stop doing. The joy you normally feel at work dulls. Your screentime goes up, you're doom-scrolling at midnight, and the next day your sleep quality tanks, your mental state is off, and every decision you make is slightly worse. Sleep gets worse, which makes food choices worse, which makes energy worse. By the time you notice the pattern, you're three spirals deep and you can't even tell where it started.

We have more data about ourselves than ever. We're worse at using it than ever.

Your watch tracks your heart rate. Your bank tracks your spending. Your calendar tracks your time. Strava tracks your runs, Healthify tracks your meals (when you remember to log), Headspace tracks your streaks. You've never had more information about yourself.

And yet.

I bet you have some version of this right now:

Some people use sticky notes on their monitor. Some have an entire Notion workspace with databases and rollups. Some text themselves reminders on WhatsApp and never open the chat again. I've done all of these. The instinct is right. You know you need a system. You're already trying to build one. It's just eleven disconnected fragments pretending to be a whole.

The reason none of it works is simple: every tool sees one slice of your life and optimises for that slice alone.

Let me give you a real example. Last year, I had a stretch where my fitness app was screaming at me for missing workouts. What it didn't know was that I'd been sleeping four hours a night because I was closing a project with a brutal deadline. The sleep deprivation killed my meal prep. I was ordering in every night. The junk food tanked my energy, which made the next day's work harder, which pushed bedtime later, which made the sleep worse. By the time I noticed, I'd gained weight, my mood was off, and I couldn't figure out why everything felt broken at once.

My fitness app's advice? "You're behind on your weekly goal. Try a quick 20-minute workout!"

Thanks. Very helpful.

That's not a fitness problem, a sleep problem, or a nutrition problem. It's a system problem. And no single-purpose app can see it, let alone help.

The Mirror Problem

So I kept thinking about this. If the problem is that no tool sees the full picture, the obvious question is: who does?

And the honest answer is, nobody. Not completely.

Here's a thing I've noticed about feedback. When I look in the mirror after weeks of skipping workouts and eating garbage, there's this flash of "okay, I need to fix this." It's uncomfortable, but it's mine. I can work with it.

Now imagine a friend says the same thing. "Bro, you've really let yourself go." Even if they're right. Even if they care about you. It lands completely different. You get defensive. You avoid that person for a while. The same truth, coming from someone else, feels like an attack.

I think AI sits in a weird, useful space between these two. It's not you lying to yourself, and it's not a friend risking the relationship to tell you something hard. It's just... your own data, reflected back. No ego attached.

An AI system doesn't get tired. It doesn't worry about hurting your feelings. But it also doesn't have a sting. It's not trying to be right. It's not passive-aggressive about the fact that you ignored its last suggestion. It just sees the pattern and tells you.

I want to be clear: this isn't about replacing people. That would be a sad, stupid product to build. It's about filling a gap that no person can fill, even if they wanted to.

What this would actually look like

I've been thinking about this for months now, and I keep coming back to nudges. Not dashboards you check. Not weekly reports you skim and forget. Small, contextual nudges that connect dots you'd never connect on your own.

Here's a few I wish I'd had during that spiral last year:

The thing every one of these has in common: they connect at least two parts of your life. That's the whole point. A vertical app can say "you missed your target." A system that sees everything can say why you missed it and what's actually worth doing about it.

Why I'm not building another vertical app

I thought about it. Seriously. A fitness app with better context. A habit tracker that's smarter.

But the more I sat with the problem, the more I realised that's exactly what makes all the current tools fall short. Healthify will push your nutrition goals on a week when you're barely holding it together at work and haven't slept properly in days. Strava will guilt you about a broken streak when the real issue is that your energy is in the gutter because you've been eating junk because you've been too stressed to cook.

Think about what a nutrition app should tell you during a week when:

The difference isn't intelligence. Both apps could be powered by the same AI. The difference is context. And context means seeing across the walls that vertical apps build around themselves.

So, that's what I'm building

I'm calling it Meridian. In cartography, a meridian is the line that connects every point on the globe to a single coordinate system. That felt right. Not another app for one part of your life. A line that runs through all of it.

I don't have it all figured out. I don't know how many nudges a day before it stops feeling helpful and starts feeling like a nagging parent. I don't know if the right number is three or one or sometimes zero.

But I know the problem is real. This is day 0 of building towards it.

Referenced

Meadows, D.H. (2008). Thinking in Systems: A Primer. Chelsea Green Publishing.