The Breaking of the Fellowship...of the Oura Ring
A cautionary tale about trauma and the role of technology in helping us cope.
Today? A palate-cleanser of a column…but we might learn about PTSD too.
It was on the sixth day of January, the 4th Age, when the fellowship finally reached the precipice of the beginning of the start of the departure gate of the next leg of their appointed journey.
The weary travelers approached a giant building, epic in proportions, made of stone and glass. It towered above them.
“Is this the port for the air that you spoke of?” Owen asked of Carlene.
“Yes, of course it is. I have pre-check, and you didn’t get it in time,” the wise, if exasperated, Carlene replied.
“Dearest me,” I explained, only now recognizing the weight of my folly.
Flashing back to the days and weeks prior, I had made a terrible mistake. When the council met in Rivendell, we decided that the ring needed to be returned. This was going to be a long trip. Elrond asked if all of us had pre-check. At the gates of the airport—the Lord Half-Elven noted, things would be much delayed without this crucial preparation.
It turns out the “Rivendell pre-check” is actually inside of a Staples, and that Staples is in the Laketown of Dale. I didn't have it in me to go all the way from Rivendale to Dale and back. I knew I needed pre-check. I was a little traumatized by the last trip I made to Dale, given the whole fire-breathing dragon situation.
For a moment, I'm going to mention post-traumatic stress disorder, and that it is very real. It can lead to symptoms like an avoidance of reminders of prior traumatic events1, and when the dragon, Smaug, flew over, and incinerated, much of Dale, it was traumatic in the “Criterion A” sense of the term. That was a horrifying thing to see, no matter how numb to experience I have become2. I didn't want to see it again—this was a coping mechanism3. I didn't feel like I had a choice4. Am I grateful that the story ended with an arrow shot into that one spot where Smaug could be taken out? Yes.
The point is, I can't go back to Dale. It's too much. When they decided to locate the TSA pre-check kiosk inside of the Staples inside of the Laketown of Dale, it just doomed my ability to get pre-check in a timely manner. I had a sense of foreboding, which is also a PTSD symptom.
So, although I said I would get a pre-check, I didn't. I avoided it. I’m not proud of this fact.
I didn't do it for an understandable reason. Still, it meant that upon arrival to the massive structure that carried modern mechanical eagles that could've taken me to my destination quickly but had a significant security check system, even though I already have CLEAR, I didn't have my TSA background check done.
It turns out, as a member of the Baggins family, this is not trivial. Bilbo shows up on my background checks. The hobbit was a professional thief. That's why I know about Dale in the first place!
Instead of getting to take the direct path over the bridge of “clear plus pre-check?” Instead, I had to take the winding route, a series of barriers and frustrations, toward a checkpoint for security.
It was at this point that I got a disturbing missive, with a push notification, on my “scrying” app.
It used to be that you could only get sucked into dangerous messaging situations if you chose to peer into a Palantir—and I’m no fool of a Took. Those scrying stones are more about a pull system than a push. Push notifications can get intrusive5. And this one told me something really disturbing:
“Owen, I think I lost the ring,” said the message from Carlene.
Oh, Lord. She only had set up one Oura Ring. We were trying to return the other ring! It wasn’t the plan to lose the Oura Ring!
The Oura ring made her internal states visible, and it was synced to her scrying device.
To think that she had lost the one Oura ring! I know a little something about rings, and they can be a real bear to find. This was going to take significant resources, which was pretty important to her, so I don't know that she will drop it.
At this point, I approached the precipice of the great scanner, which would evaluate all of my belongings.
Oh God. I had a sword with me. And a dagger. This was not going to do.
“My precious!”
The next text from Carlene said.
And then my shoes, belt, phone, computer, and the rest were dropped into the great conveyer, and I was cut off, the fellowship was, for the moment, broken.
“Next,” said a member of the security team.
I raised my hands above me while some divination scanned me. I was waved through.
“Is this your bag?” The TSA official said.
Gulp. Sting, my dagger, was inside!
“Yes, it is,” I replied.
“The iPad needs to go through the scanner separately,”
Said security.
Ok. So that was it? Moments passed— as a bag full of weapons was handed back to me—and my iPad braved the scanner again. Then, unscathed, as if a miracle, I passed through security and on the other side as Carlene—now dressed all in white.
“I took off my grey coat and felt more comfortable,” she said.
I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Oh, the Oura Ring app lets you see it on the map—it fell off in my suitcase when I was packing it, so we are all good. Ring Found. Nothing to worry about,” she informed me
.
That was less of a big deal than it might have been otherwise, I thought to myself.
Pineles, S. L., Mostoufi, S. M., Ready, C. B., Street, A. E., Griffin, M. G., & Resick, P. A. (2011). Trauma reactivity, avoidant coping, and PTSD symptoms: A moderating relationship?. Journal of abnormal psychology, 120(1), 240.
Asmundson, G. J., Stapleton, J. A., & Taylor, S. (2004). Are avoidance and numbing distinct PTSD symptom clusters?. Journal of Traumatic Stress: Official Publication of The International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, 17(6), 467-475.
Badour, C. L., Blonigen, D. M., Boden, M. T., Feldner, M. T., & Bonn-Miller, M. O. (2012). A longitudinal test of the bi-directional relations between avoidance coping and PTSD severity during and after PTSD treatment. Behaviour research and therapy, 50(10), 610-616.
Hammack, S. E., Cooper, M. A., & Lezak, K. R. (2012). Overlapping neurobiology of learned helplessness and conditioned defeat: implications for PTSD and mood disorders. Neuropharmacology, 62(2), 565-575.
Mikulic, M. (2016). The effects of push vs. pull notifications on overall smartphone usage, frequency of usage and stress levels.
Thoughts on (or from) the Oura ring?