There are studies (that of course I can’t find now) that show that if you pay someone to do something they were doing for free, because they loved it, their motivation actually diminishes, because the motivation of the pleasure of doing the thing is replaced by the motivation of money. And now the pleasure is gone.
I know this isn't the point of your essay, but it's not unrelated. Reading this on my laptop, because as of about a week ago, I've taking steps to reduce my phone screen-time. I have WAY more energy than I did just two weeks ago. I wasn't expecting that result - it wasn't my motivation or goal - so it's all the more shocking for being unexpected.
For me, the entire phone experience is gameified like a slot machine. The past few years have found me zombie-scrolling from app to app, half-asleep on the sofa. I was always *so* tired. EXHAUSTED!!! I'd accomplish the bare minimum, laundry, cooking, work, then collapse on the sofa. I wanted to ask my doctor if I had long covid or some other medical problem, but who has the energy to make an appointment?
ONE WEEK of reducing phone time, and I don't feel exhausted anymore. I don't know if my new higher energy levels will last, but dammit! I'm so angry at the people who actively decided to make phone addictive, and part of that addiction is gamification.
Not that I recommend opting out of the financial rat race because I only was able to because of a divorce settlement that I never touched as I knew I would need it after age 70. But I did decide early on not to pursue further education, due to the expense but also because I saw the end result. Over achieving older brother who got sucked into the world of business and lost his footing and died believing in the patriarchy and the rule of law, ha ha. I also learned that men told women anything they want to hear, but really have no intention of integrating a feminine perspective into the mainstream male ethos, except when they use tidbits to trick women into thinking they are simpatico. So once you accept ambition as a goal for living, you are pretty much tuned into a life of measurement. My experiences cover teaching, selling houses, raising 2 children and politics. Being poor and ignored is far preferable to being plugged in to success in my experience.
Hate to be the bearer of bad news but the gamifying, seeking behaviors also wreak havoc with your sex life. Nan Wise at Rutgers has been studying the neuroscience of sex and all the little rabbit holes we are wired to relentlessly pursue really do a number on our libido. Dissatisfaction from seeking makes the seeking behavior even more compelling which really sucks.
“I refuse to get sidetracked by extrinsic motivators for my creative endeavors” certainly sounds better than “the numbers of plays on my songs are too few to be a source of motivation”
I think about Nguyen's work on value capture frequently, so I'm really glad to hear this book is coming out and that it's riveting! I'd love to hear you develop value projection more. I wonder if it's going to rely on a conflict between first-order and second-order desires--or perhaps a difference between reflective and unreflective desires will suffice, or perhaps one comes to develop a desire for (e.g.) health while being part of diet culture even though one started with a desire for social status. (As you note, this is different from, but related to, Nguyen's points.)
I think often of Schneider and Hutt's work on the history of grading in America, which Nguyen mentions as a sort of value capture (not sure if he does so in the book). I'd love to hear your reflections on grading in educational contexts! (FoR: early-career philosopher very interested in alternative grading.)
Oooh this is such a good one, Kate. It applies to so many aspects of modern life. I suspect this desire to quantify is shaped by many things: capitalism, but also science and medicine, the way we use technology. Eager to read more of your thinking on this topic, and maybe I'll chime in with some of my own thoughts in a piece eventually.
I spent my college career--many decades ago, carefully navigating core requirements so I didn't have to take philosophy or psych. Yet here I am, in my 70's, reading your post with great pleasure and interest. You write beautifully. I understand Nguyen's point and will check out his work, but I don't think it's possible to address the monetization of everything without recognizing how consumer capitalism drives the transactional life, where human endeavor and experience have lost all intrinsic value. But what else is there, really? We are here and then gone. Capitalism is the great doomsday machine, grinding along and crushing everything that matters in our brief but beautiful voyage. Perhaps this is why I love Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek, and its aspirational future Earth no longer weighed down by money.
Thanks Kate! I'm hugely competitive with myself AND I sometimes get distracted by the leaderboard of...life. This book sounds like one I really need! Especially when you say "Nguyen resists pat solutions". That's one of the areas where I think authors sometimes lose me. (See: Cal Newport saying "don't be on social media", BIG eye roll) Also: I love that you value surprising yourself, and us! Thanks for this one.
To answer - I pay to read to be inspired to think of things I'm not thinking of and to share a bit of the output therefrom.
Postmodern disassociation on smartphone steroids. Tuning in to the self from the outside.
That same feeling, sans the smartphone, inspired Tim Leary's famous "turn on, tune in, drop out" and Ram Dass née Dick Alpert's "Be, Here, Now". Be whole in yourself and others' observations can fade as drivers.
As a fellow psychonaut I was more a fan of Ken Kesey's Grateful Dead vibe. Ecstatic communion with a crowd as means to find self. "Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world."
It's a dilemma getting worse and worse. Our sense of self run through multiple observed observer iterations like running through a Hall of Mirrors maze.
I don't know where this goes but I have a nagging suspicion it's nowhere good.
As a species we are quite successful. We finally figured out how to keep more than 1 Billion people alive some 2 Centuries ago and the adoption of counter cyclical fiscal policy and international cooperation broke the 2 billion barrier that the 2 world wars had imposed for 50 years.
But that's likely not what you meant.
I wonder sometimes if part of the postmodern disassociation is a reaction not just to the tech but to ALL the people.
Yes, we are very smart, and our species will continue to exist, but look at the state of the world today. How many wars going on at this moment? They may be wars most of us in the West don't have to experience personally, but they are devastating to millions of people. At the same time, as income and wealth inequality grow in our privileged West because we can't bring ourselves to evolve our economic system that creates ridiculous wealth for so few, we are losing the middle class and the only thing that protects our "Republic, if we can keep it." Maybe we can't keep it, because we are stuck in a malaise. If you are talking just numbers, ants are far more successful, as are mice and rats, our distant cousins.
I'm not so sure about us avoiding Darwin's rule for more than a few 1000 years and probably not in anything resembling our current organizational mode.
My point (which I didn't flesh out at the time) was more that we, as a species, are at a high point for cooperative existence in recorded and archaeologically discoverable history, which may be confusing to us current humans who drink from the same millennia deep linguistic cultural well as we don't see ourselves reflected therein. We ARE self-destructive. Usually there are many more births and deaths per unit population than manifest now. It's confusing.
The current jump to 8 Billion may well prove to be a flash in the pan. FDR's New Deal which, when combined with Keynesian international financial architecture produced the greatest and most broadly shared economic boom in the West (from 48-73 or so) is behind us.
We have turned our back on that view preferring markets to people.
Perhaps we will relearn the virtues of progressive taxation and international economic cooperation when the current credit cycle's contraction proves more disastrous than the oligarchs currently in control foresee.
Or maybe the predatory nature of man on man depopulates the world.
It seems a 50 50 bet to me at the moment.
ps very much getting my money's worth today in the inspired thoughts I would not have thought but for this substack way
I really relate to the inherent tension of wanting to write and create things that you think people will want to read or consume vs. playful experimentation designed to surprise myself. Glad to hear there are no unique experiences, lmao.
My refusal to get a smart watch is a microcosm of knowing I'll get lost in keeping score if I literally strap a data capture and notification tool to my person. Though I do wonder how out of step I'll end up as these become more common.
This is so interesting (what a dull thing to write, huh?). I've read a bit about humans and their obsession with games. Somehow that seems to tie into the "need" to keep score. Is there any speculation about some evolutionary advantage this might provide? Balance, perspective, distance--they're very difficult to maintain.
In 2018 Simon Kuper published an article in the FT called "The speakers' circuit is where original thinkers go to die"(https://www.ft.com/content/0380eb28-1c17-11e8-aaca-4574d7dabfb6) and it’s a neat description of how getting famous for one idea and riding the wave of that fame for too long compromises your ability to come up with new ideas. It's so good that economics Bluesky (usually me) resurrects it every couple of years, and it makes me appreciate so much those people who get public recognition out of proportion to their usual academic sphere, but then go back to their academic roots and start afresh with a new research idea. I think it may not be as lucrative but it’s so much more intellectually rich - and I think the variety in your work, Kate, reflects exactly that integrity and creativity and I appreciate it more than I can say.
I find this discussion fascinating and adding that book to my reading list (thx Kate!). For context, I am a researcher in big tech and my role is focused on understanding the “user experience” aka the human experience. I can attest to how often tech companies (and many others) start chasing the imperfect but easily grokkable metrics of said human experience rather than digging deeply into the actual (messy, complex and qualitative) experience itself. Don’t get me wrong, there is value in having a single number or set of numbers for certain evaluations or contexts, but it is a slippery slope into a focus solely on the numbers without continually checking on the holistic experience that those numbers imperfectly describe. Qualitative data are messier but so much richer, and at the end of the day, all the quant metrics may look fab while the human experience is decidedly not (or vice versa for that matter). In my experience you cannot get an accurate picture of something with only the gamified quantitative metrics.
Wouldn't it be great if these companies gave us the option to toggle off the visibility of that kind of data? I wrote repeatedly to Peloton to recommend they give users the ability to opt out of the default "calorie-burn summary" at the end of a workout (I don't use their app anymore, so I don't know if they ever did change that setting option.)
Your essay is helping me think more deeply about a piece I've been working on about how we're being pushed to outsource so many of our feelings and decisions to a device or app. Diet culture trained so many of us to have this mindset—tracking weight, points, calories, steps, etc. and now people (without a medical need) are bombarded with data on their blood sugar, heart rate, and sleep. Particularly in this new era of AI, the risks of surrendering our inner wisdom and intuition to technology seem even higher.
There are studies (that of course I can’t find now) that show that if you pay someone to do something they were doing for free, because they loved it, their motivation actually diminishes, because the motivation of the pleasure of doing the thing is replaced by the motivation of money. And now the pleasure is gone.
I suspect that gamification does the same thing.
I know this isn't the point of your essay, but it's not unrelated. Reading this on my laptop, because as of about a week ago, I've taking steps to reduce my phone screen-time. I have WAY more energy than I did just two weeks ago. I wasn't expecting that result - it wasn't my motivation or goal - so it's all the more shocking for being unexpected.
For me, the entire phone experience is gameified like a slot machine. The past few years have found me zombie-scrolling from app to app, half-asleep on the sofa. I was always *so* tired. EXHAUSTED!!! I'd accomplish the bare minimum, laundry, cooking, work, then collapse on the sofa. I wanted to ask my doctor if I had long covid or some other medical problem, but who has the energy to make an appointment?
ONE WEEK of reducing phone time, and I don't feel exhausted anymore. I don't know if my new higher energy levels will last, but dammit! I'm so angry at the people who actively decided to make phone addictive, and part of that addiction is gamification.
Not that I recommend opting out of the financial rat race because I only was able to because of a divorce settlement that I never touched as I knew I would need it after age 70. But I did decide early on not to pursue further education, due to the expense but also because I saw the end result. Over achieving older brother who got sucked into the world of business and lost his footing and died believing in the patriarchy and the rule of law, ha ha. I also learned that men told women anything they want to hear, but really have no intention of integrating a feminine perspective into the mainstream male ethos, except when they use tidbits to trick women into thinking they are simpatico. So once you accept ambition as a goal for living, you are pretty much tuned into a life of measurement. My experiences cover teaching, selling houses, raising 2 children and politics. Being poor and ignored is far preferable to being plugged in to success in my experience.
Hate to be the bearer of bad news but the gamifying, seeking behaviors also wreak havoc with your sex life. Nan Wise at Rutgers has been studying the neuroscience of sex and all the little rabbit holes we are wired to relentlessly pursue really do a number on our libido. Dissatisfaction from seeking makes the seeking behavior even more compelling which really sucks.
“I refuse to get sidetracked by extrinsic motivators for my creative endeavors” certainly sounds better than “the numbers of plays on my songs are too few to be a source of motivation”
I think about Nguyen's work on value capture frequently, so I'm really glad to hear this book is coming out and that it's riveting! I'd love to hear you develop value projection more. I wonder if it's going to rely on a conflict between first-order and second-order desires--or perhaps a difference between reflective and unreflective desires will suffice, or perhaps one comes to develop a desire for (e.g.) health while being part of diet culture even though one started with a desire for social status. (As you note, this is different from, but related to, Nguyen's points.)
I think often of Schneider and Hutt's work on the history of grading in America, which Nguyen mentions as a sort of value capture (not sure if he does so in the book). I'd love to hear your reflections on grading in educational contexts! (FoR: early-career philosopher very interested in alternative grading.)
Oooh this is such a good one, Kate. It applies to so many aspects of modern life. I suspect this desire to quantify is shaped by many things: capitalism, but also science and medicine, the way we use technology. Eager to read more of your thinking on this topic, and maybe I'll chime in with some of my own thoughts in a piece eventually.
I spent my college career--many decades ago, carefully navigating core requirements so I didn't have to take philosophy or psych. Yet here I am, in my 70's, reading your post with great pleasure and interest. You write beautifully. I understand Nguyen's point and will check out his work, but I don't think it's possible to address the monetization of everything without recognizing how consumer capitalism drives the transactional life, where human endeavor and experience have lost all intrinsic value. But what else is there, really? We are here and then gone. Capitalism is the great doomsday machine, grinding along and crushing everything that matters in our brief but beautiful voyage. Perhaps this is why I love Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek, and its aspirational future Earth no longer weighed down by money.
Thanks Kate! I'm hugely competitive with myself AND I sometimes get distracted by the leaderboard of...life. This book sounds like one I really need! Especially when you say "Nguyen resists pat solutions". That's one of the areas where I think authors sometimes lose me. (See: Cal Newport saying "don't be on social media", BIG eye roll) Also: I love that you value surprising yourself, and us! Thanks for this one.
Thanks for the rumination.
To answer - I pay to read to be inspired to think of things I'm not thinking of and to share a bit of the output therefrom.
Postmodern disassociation on smartphone steroids. Tuning in to the self from the outside.
That same feeling, sans the smartphone, inspired Tim Leary's famous "turn on, tune in, drop out" and Ram Dass née Dick Alpert's "Be, Here, Now". Be whole in yourself and others' observations can fade as drivers.
As a fellow psychonaut I was more a fan of Ken Kesey's Grateful Dead vibe. Ecstatic communion with a crowd as means to find self. "Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world."
It's a dilemma getting worse and worse. Our sense of self run through multiple observed observer iterations like running through a Hall of Mirrors maze.
I don't know where this goes but I have a nagging suspicion it's nowhere good.
Alas, we are a self-destructive species. Too smart but not smart enough.
As a species we are quite successful. We finally figured out how to keep more than 1 Billion people alive some 2 Centuries ago and the adoption of counter cyclical fiscal policy and international cooperation broke the 2 billion barrier that the 2 world wars had imposed for 50 years.
But that's likely not what you meant.
I wonder sometimes if part of the postmodern disassociation is a reaction not just to the tech but to ALL the people.
Yes, we are very smart, and our species will continue to exist, but look at the state of the world today. How many wars going on at this moment? They may be wars most of us in the West don't have to experience personally, but they are devastating to millions of people. At the same time, as income and wealth inequality grow in our privileged West because we can't bring ourselves to evolve our economic system that creates ridiculous wealth for so few, we are losing the middle class and the only thing that protects our "Republic, if we can keep it." Maybe we can't keep it, because we are stuck in a malaise. If you are talking just numbers, ants are far more successful, as are mice and rats, our distant cousins.
Apropos to our thread here but from a global perspective: Berlin Forum on Global Cooperation 2025 - Keynote Adam Tooze
https://youtu.be/NHn9dSQ05JU?si=G0YfeTma4sdTLIzv
I left my thought incomplete. My apologies.
I'm not so sure about us avoiding Darwin's rule for more than a few 1000 years and probably not in anything resembling our current organizational mode.
My point (which I didn't flesh out at the time) was more that we, as a species, are at a high point for cooperative existence in recorded and archaeologically discoverable history, which may be confusing to us current humans who drink from the same millennia deep linguistic cultural well as we don't see ourselves reflected therein. We ARE self-destructive. Usually there are many more births and deaths per unit population than manifest now. It's confusing.
The current jump to 8 Billion may well prove to be a flash in the pan. FDR's New Deal which, when combined with Keynesian international financial architecture produced the greatest and most broadly shared economic boom in the West (from 48-73 or so) is behind us.
We have turned our back on that view preferring markets to people.
Perhaps we will relearn the virtues of progressive taxation and international economic cooperation when the current credit cycle's contraction proves more disastrous than the oligarchs currently in control foresee.
Or maybe the predatory nature of man on man depopulates the world.
It seems a 50 50 bet to me at the moment.
ps very much getting my money's worth today in the inspired thoughts I would not have thought but for this substack way
I really relate to the inherent tension of wanting to write and create things that you think people will want to read or consume vs. playful experimentation designed to surprise myself. Glad to hear there are no unique experiences, lmao.
My refusal to get a smart watch is a microcosm of knowing I'll get lost in keeping score if I literally strap a data capture and notification tool to my person. Though I do wonder how out of step I'll end up as these become more common.
This is so interesting (what a dull thing to write, huh?). I've read a bit about humans and their obsession with games. Somehow that seems to tie into the "need" to keep score. Is there any speculation about some evolutionary advantage this might provide? Balance, perspective, distance--they're very difficult to maintain.
In 2018 Simon Kuper published an article in the FT called "The speakers' circuit is where original thinkers go to die"(https://www.ft.com/content/0380eb28-1c17-11e8-aaca-4574d7dabfb6) and it’s a neat description of how getting famous for one idea and riding the wave of that fame for too long compromises your ability to come up with new ideas. It's so good that economics Bluesky (usually me) resurrects it every couple of years, and it makes me appreciate so much those people who get public recognition out of proportion to their usual academic sphere, but then go back to their academic roots and start afresh with a new research idea. I think it may not be as lucrative but it’s so much more intellectually rich - and I think the variety in your work, Kate, reflects exactly that integrity and creativity and I appreciate it more than I can say.
I find this discussion fascinating and adding that book to my reading list (thx Kate!). For context, I am a researcher in big tech and my role is focused on understanding the “user experience” aka the human experience. I can attest to how often tech companies (and many others) start chasing the imperfect but easily grokkable metrics of said human experience rather than digging deeply into the actual (messy, complex and qualitative) experience itself. Don’t get me wrong, there is value in having a single number or set of numbers for certain evaluations or contexts, but it is a slippery slope into a focus solely on the numbers without continually checking on the holistic experience that those numbers imperfectly describe. Qualitative data are messier but so much richer, and at the end of the day, all the quant metrics may look fab while the human experience is decidedly not (or vice versa for that matter). In my experience you cannot get an accurate picture of something with only the gamified quantitative metrics.
Wouldn't it be great if these companies gave us the option to toggle off the visibility of that kind of data? I wrote repeatedly to Peloton to recommend they give users the ability to opt out of the default "calorie-burn summary" at the end of a workout (I don't use their app anymore, so I don't know if they ever did change that setting option.)
Your essay is helping me think more deeply about a piece I've been working on about how we're being pushed to outsource so many of our feelings and decisions to a device or app. Diet culture trained so many of us to have this mindset—tracking weight, points, calories, steps, etc. and now people (without a medical need) are bombarded with data on their blood sugar, heart rate, and sleep. Particularly in this new era of AI, the risks of surrendering our inner wisdom and intuition to technology seem even higher.