Going into my bible.
Source here: https://www.gurwinder.blog/p/why-everything-is-becoming-a-game
All below are copied verbatim:
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Skinner’s three key insights — immediate rewards work better than delayed, unpredictable rewards work better than fixed, and conditioned rewards work better than primary — were found to also apply to humans, and in the 20th Century would be used by businesses to shape consumer behavior. From Frequent Flyer loyalty points to mystery toys in McDonalds Happy Meals, purchases were turned into games, spurring consumers to purchase more.
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We humans are harder to manipulate than pigeons, but we can be manipulated in many more ways, because we have a wider spectrum of needs. Pigeons don’t care much about respect, but for us it’s a primary reinforcer, to such an extent that we can be made to desire arbitrary sounds that become associated with it, like praise and applause.
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Kaczynski believed modern society made us docile and miserable by depriving us of fulfilling challenges and eroding our sense of purpose. The brain evolved to solve problems, but the problems it had evolved for were now largely solved by technology. Most of us can now obtain all our basic necessities simply by being obedient, like a pigeon pecking a button. Kaczynski argued that such conveniences didn’t make us happy, only aimless. And to stave off this aimlessness, we had to continually set ourselves goals purely to have goals to pursue, which Kaczynski called “surrogate activities”. These included sports, hobbies, and chasing the latest product that ads promised would make us happy.
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Kaczynski observed that surrogate activities rarely kept people contented for long. There were always more stamps to collect, a better car to buy, a higher score to achieve. He believed artificial goals were too divorced from our actual needs to truly satisfy us, so they merely served to keep us busy enough not to notice our dissatisfaction. Instead of a fulfilled life, a life filled full.
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We’re easily motivated by points and scores because they’re easy to track and enjoyable to accrue. As such, scorekeeping is, for many, becoming the new foundation of their lives. “Looksmaxxing” is a new trend of gamified beauty, where people assign scores to physical appearance and then use any means necessary to maximize their score. And in the online wellness space, there is now a “Rejuvenation Olympics” complete with a leaderboard that ranks people by their “age reversal”. Even sleep has become a game; many people now use apps like Pokemon Sleep that reward them for achieving high “sleep scores”, and some even compete to get the highest “sleep ranking”.
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On Instagram, the main self-propagating system is a beauty pageant. Young women compete to be as pretty as possible, going to increasingly extreme lengths: makeup, filters, fillers, surgery. The result is that all women begin to feel ugly, online and off.
On TikTok and YouTube, there is another self-propagating system where pranksters compete to outdo each other in outrageousness to avoid being buried by the algorithm. Such extreme brinkmanship frequently leads to arrest or injury, and has even led to the deaths of, among others, Timothy Wilks and Pedro Ruiz.
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First: choose long-term goals over short-term ones
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Second: choose hard games over easy ones
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Third: choose positive-sum games over zero-sum or negative-sum ones
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Fourth: choose atelic games over telic ones. Atelic games are those you play because you enjoy them. Telic games are those you play only to obtain a rewar
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Finally, the fifth rule is to choose immeasurable rewards over measurable ones. Seeing numerical scores increase is satisfying in the short term, but the most valuable things in life — freedom, meaning, love — can’t be quantified.