Great idea. Related: My wife and I have been sending each other video game achievement style images (with ChatGPT) to celebrate our little wins and keep us going in a busy household. I've also recently been planning goals for next year, and hit upon making my goal tracker look like the old Quest for Glory V character UI. Instant major (recurring) motivation boost.
Takeaway: Try mining your own past for the easy things that bring you joy, and weave those in. Personal UIs are free now, so do the fun thing.
I can't imagine anything more unappealing than exchanging AI generated images with my wife every time one of us cleans the kitchen or finishes reading a book on time. Goes to show, people really are different!
This strikes me as pretty similar to gamification, honestly. You went to the gym this week 1/7
I guess if it works, but man I think we need to do some work as a society and species to untangle how messed up we've become that we need a little jingle to motivate us to do good things for ourselves and make healthy choices.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Humans have been well and truly figured out, and we’ve built an ecosystem for ourselves that is predatory to every single one of our desires and weaknesses. For many, the reward signal received when doing a good and healthy thing is a whisper compared to the fog horn of brain chemicals just perusing through social media gives you. Humans are desensitized, and I think things like this article are people re-hacking their reward mechanisms to try and take back control.
Life is tangled. "Healthy choices" are now choices, previously they were side effects of trying to not die.
Exercise, for example, is bullshit make-work that only some subset of people are wired to enjoy for some reason (never worked out how, I'm gonna guess they're either wired to receive reward signal for this, or it's social activity; half of life's motivation is low-key sexual drive anyway). I don't. So I have to find whatever proxy that works for me.
100 years ago this wouldn't be an issue, because I'd naturally get fit, because daily life required substantial amount of physical labor that we've since automated away.
If you're actually doing the thing who cares how achieve it.
The problem isn't when people do things, it's when they spend all their time coming up with the game and then stop playing, which makes it just a form of procrastinating yet far too common.
Takeaway: Try mining your own past for the easy things that bring you joy, and weave those in. Personal UIs are free now, so do the fun thing.
I guess if it works, but man I think we need to do some work as a society and species to untangle how messed up we've become that we need a little jingle to motivate us to do good things for ourselves and make healthy choices.
Exercise, for example, is bullshit make-work that only some subset of people are wired to enjoy for some reason (never worked out how, I'm gonna guess they're either wired to receive reward signal for this, or it's social activity; half of life's motivation is low-key sexual drive anyway). I don't. So I have to find whatever proxy that works for me.
100 years ago this wouldn't be an issue, because I'd naturally get fit, because daily life required substantial amount of physical labor that we've since automated away.
If you're actually doing the thing who cares how achieve it.
The problem isn't when people do things, it's when they spend all their time coming up with the game and then stop playing, which makes it just a form of procrastinating yet far too common.