Valuable
Or, crudest of all, here the sun might make you believe you are beautiful. And if you’re not careful, you’ll embrace the light and joyfully throw your life away to gaze at your deadly reflection. And then you’ll die while the Northern light chants that it was a trick, that you were really dust and maggots all along.
—Karen Michalson, Enemy Glory
These distraction-oholics. These focus-ophobics.
Old George Orwell got it backward.
Big Brother isn’t watching.
He’s singing and dancing. He’s pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you’re awake. He’s making sure you’re always distracted. He’s making sure you’re fully absorbed.
He’s making sure your imagination withers. Until it’s as useful as your appendix. He’s making sure your attention is always filled.
And this being fed, it’s worse than being watched.
With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what’s on your mind. With everyone’s imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.
—Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby
On the night that marked the end of back-to-school season last year my friend’s ten-year-old daughter threw a terrible temper tantrum because neither my friend nor the child’s father bought her a backpack made by the company, Sprayground. I immediately flashed back to another company, a brand I hadn’t thought about in decades—Jansport—a corporation that made backpacks kids used to stab other kids to steal when I was going to school.
Corporations have been training you to form habits that benefit them since you were old enough to dream. Much of who you think you are—your relationship to willpower even—is not even you. You have no idea where you end and where the corporations that programmed you begin.
Before the internet, before TiVo, before VCRs, the only way to watch a program you liked was to show up when it was being broadcast. If you missed it, the closest you could get was your friends talking about it at school the next day. That small situation engineered by brands and the people paid to market for them made you afraid in a way you could feel, but couldn’t identify, couldn’t cup in your hands and examine from multiple angles. A feeling that drained through your metaphorical fingers every time you tried to wrap your growing brain around it. An amorphous fear. A fear without a name. A fear you never hear discussed. A fear you won’t be able to identify until a decade of schooling passes, and you find yourself listening intently to the grey-haired man with jowls and wrinkles walking back and forth across the dais lecturing the class about Marketing 101. The fear of missing popular programs is the infant seed of Fear of Missing Out.
This appointment viewing did another very important thing. Think about what is happening to this pliable, youthful brain, eminently susceptible to being programmed by being trained. Independent of what parents and caregivers mean to teach, the child learns that an intentional action—showing up in front of the TV screen and turning it on when the hands of any clock or watch point to 4 and 12—will lead to something stimulating, something pleasurable, something that seems designed specifically for them, something they’ll enjoy. Corporations plant seeds here, in this fertile ground. Dark patterns.
Cowabunga!1
These roots, dug deep and intertwined with our earliest memories, are with us the rest of our lives.
One of the best things my mother did for me, and the most valuable, was something she withheld, not something she gave. I was only allowed to watch television for two hours every weekday. And those two hours were fixed—between four and six. The two hours weren’t retroactive either. Miss the appointment. Miss the program. Miss the fun. I chose video games. Watching TV required me to waste a third of my two hours watching ads. Playing video games, I got to squeeze out every minute of fun. Because I never got hooked on believing corporation’s schedules were important, my brain never learned the habit of being susceptible to many of the other cognitive traps corporations deploy at children. I did, however, get caught up in the vast dragnet of many others. I have more gadgets, sneakers, and motorcycle jackets than a person who doesn’t ride or do anything more athletic than lift heavy things up and put them back down again has a right to.
Brains release reward chemicals when their owners perform an enjoyable action. Dopamine, serotonin, ... You’ve heard these words before. This isn’t new to you. These chemicals are addictive and exploitable. Brain owners learn to repeat actions that get rewarded. Repeat an action long enough it becomes second-nature. You are compelled to perform that action in ways you do not understand. Those ways become a part of your personality, indistinguishable from your makeup or your character. Have you ever gifted concert tickets to an exuberant fan? If you haven’t, consider just how many people regularly bleed hours of their life away lining up for the chance to pay some company money.
This is precisely how ambitious people build habits by the way—operant conditioning—a well-understood psychological phenomenon. Corporations do everything they can to get children hooked early to the digital equivalent of heroin. But the people who run the corporations are susceptible to the same cognitive biases as the rest of us, so they overlooked the Law of Diminishing Returns. These chemicals carry inherent dangers. Use a little and you’ll want a lot. Use a lot and you’ll lose the ability to know when you’ve had enough. Eventually overdosing is the only way you ever feel anything. Joy becomes trivial if it can be repeated without cost. You chase dopamine because you never seem to imbibe enough, so what little you encounter is meaningless. To even catch a glimpse of Joy now, you need the motherlode. The burnout is built-in.
It’s not just intentional habit-forming that corporations leverage against you. They also leverage loss aversion. Loss and gain have never been proportionate for human beings. How could it be? Who among us in any age would trade one of our offspring for the promise of a future, better child? The future better child could never fill the hole of our loss.
I look around at people addicted to their digital devices because of daily login or check-in streaks. I see these dark patterns utilized by Snapchat, by Instagram. I see these dark patterns used as a core gameplay mechanic in every single genre of video games. From casual hits like Candy Crush and 20 Minutes Til Dawn to triple-A titles like Call of Duty.
Cliffhangers are a particularly effective dark pattern utilized by book publishers and media companies alike.
When I look out at the media landscape in 2026, I can see production companies resisting streaming companies’ mandate that the entire season be released all at once. Cliffhangers aren’t as effective if companies can’t make you wait for the chemicals. If they can’t dangle it just outside your reach, how will you learn to jig?
Wait for it.
You can’t have it until I say.
And the next time I’m giving them out is, ‘Same time next week.’
The things you like, you were groomed into liking them. Lamborghinis and Birkins are not very practical, much cheaper to produce than manufacturers let on, but very desirable and very expensive, and this is not by accident. Expectations about how careers should look, and how you should dress to slot neatly into these careers were created for you. The shirt you choose, the outfit you plan to wear to brunch on Sunday... You were trained to want those. Even the brands you identify as more exclusive, more desirable, more valuable than the rest. How would you know? How precisely would you determine which brands are best? Price? Quality? How do you assess those? Why is a $1200 phone better than a $400 phone? How about if you’re forced to choose between two $1200 phones? How do you know which uses quality components? Because the influencer they paid told you? Your mom? Your dad? Your friend has an engineering degree?
Habits. Training. Coercion.
Go to school five days a week becomes working five days a week.
Eventually, people get used to only being allowed to cut loose on weekends, holidays, and in the evening when the workday is done. It’s engraved so deeply into people’s character it gets embedded into culture. We’ll give it names so even the slowpokes catch on. Happy Hour. We forget that it isn’t human, and that prior to the Industrial Revolution none of the people we are descended from lived that way. Society may have been dominated by some inbred despot and his offspring in our species’ not so distant past, but at least our predecessors never suffered the indignity of living in a culture designed by their employers.
Well, not until the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.
Report cards are released on schedule. As are paychecks. As are performance reviews.
The people who study long into the night, in high school and in college, the people who put in the extra hours earn extra rewards. As do the people who work 120 hours a week, when the majority work a conventional 40.
The system was built for you, and you were trained to desire it.
But this is not what you really want. And none of it nourishes your soul.
Which is why almost everything you earn never means anything, is never valuable. And why you crave more things you won’t enjoy when you acquire them.
This is why it’s so hard for you to find the root cause of your burnout. This is what leads to depression. You know you’re suffering, but it seems like you, yourself, are the cause.
You’re not what’s wrong with you. You are just valuable to companies. So they made sure to start using you early.
The websites you visit and the apps you use are infested with dark patterns. You don’t know what they are, but you feel their coercive effect. At this point, I assume if a service uses a dark pattern it is artificially inflating the end product’s worth. Whatever the end product is worth can’t be that valuable if someone needs to inflate its value to induce me to give them my debit card. Because of my mother’s withholding, I developed the valuable habit of failing to volunteer to be exploited.
I avoid products, services, content creators, influencers, game developers when I identify a dark pattern being leveraged against me.
When I introduce this concept of value to other people, they report this is an easy way to medicate, if not cure, depression and anxiety.
I don’t consent to manipulation. It doesn’t feel good to me the way it feels familiar to you.
I wasn’t trained to want it.
Why do you know this phrase?