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!
Personally I don’t want to see any image generated by AI as it is just all fluff and adds no value. A simple text saying you did the thing would be sufficient
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.
I also thought I naturally didn't enjoy exercise and had resigned myself to at best forcing myself to go to the gym and grind out a session on a rowing machine or something. I then, in one of the best impulse decisions I've ever made, decided I'd go check out the climbing gym nearby and it turns out I just hadn't found the exercise that clicked for me.
On topic for the wider thread of gamifying doing things that are good for you, bouldering in particular works perfectly with my brain. Every few weeks there's a whole set of new things to try and climb to the top of, and its often as much about working out a sequence of moves that works for as it is about brute strength.
I've never really been able to make exercise stick for an extended period but this time round I'm on about 18 months of consistently making it to the gym twice a week or so and pulling on plastic holds for a while. Its (mostly, unless I have a bad session) fun while doing it, the combination of exercise and problem solving means my system is flooded with endorphins and dopamine afterwards, and I'm fitter than I've ever been.
If you can find exercise that's "play" for you, that's the trick.
I like hacky sack and kettlebells. I can play hacky sack for 15 minutes, wherever I am, and easily keep my heart rate between 160 and 190 bpm. I can do kettlebells in my bedroom in 15 minutes, and stay pretty strong and capable. They're both genuinely fun for me, and leave me feeling better (lower stress, more alert, stronger, more agile, more attractive, less like a lazy slob).
I never could spend 10 minutes to and from the gym, and another 45 there, or anything like that. I feel lucky to have found these things I do like.
IME a huge proportion of people who exercise do so (at least at first) because they enjoy the results (including how they feel afterwards, eg endorphins), not doing the exercise itself. The idea that only some people are wired to enjoy it and you're not one of them sounds like an excuse not to endure some discomfort to reap the benefits.
I for one know I don't enjoy the benefits - not enough to trigger any reward loop anyway. It's a known limitation for me, making it hard to consciously form habits in general. Many people have this.
(It's probably a matter of degree as well as kind - in my case, whatever the intensity/delay critical threshold is, it's sufficiently low to allow functioning, but high enough that exercise doesn't stick.)
> 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.
I honestly think nobody enjoys the exercise itself. The real motivation is second order effects like becoming more appealing to other people.
Are we in some sort of historical outlier in this regard? What do you know about this? Like were people in medieval times way more motivated than we were today or something?
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 dunno, that feels like an unproductively strong disdain towards AI. But like you said, people really are different, I guess!
edit: I realise I'm assuming AI is the issue here, maybe it's not?
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.
On topic for the wider thread of gamifying doing things that are good for you, bouldering in particular works perfectly with my brain. Every few weeks there's a whole set of new things to try and climb to the top of, and its often as much about working out a sequence of moves that works for as it is about brute strength.
I've never really been able to make exercise stick for an extended period but this time round I'm on about 18 months of consistently making it to the gym twice a week or so and pulling on plastic holds for a while. Its (mostly, unless I have a bad session) fun while doing it, the combination of exercise and problem solving means my system is flooded with endorphins and dopamine afterwards, and I'm fitter than I've ever been.
I like hacky sack and kettlebells. I can play hacky sack for 15 minutes, wherever I am, and easily keep my heart rate between 160 and 190 bpm. I can do kettlebells in my bedroom in 15 minutes, and stay pretty strong and capable. They're both genuinely fun for me, and leave me feeling better (lower stress, more alert, stronger, more agile, more attractive, less like a lazy slob).
I never could spend 10 minutes to and from the gym, and another 45 there, or anything like that. I feel lucky to have found these things I do like.
(It's probably a matter of degree as well as kind - in my case, whatever the intensity/delay critical threshold is, it's sufficiently low to allow functioning, but high enough that exercise doesn't stick.)
I honestly think nobody enjoys the exercise itself. The real motivation is second order effects like becoming more appealing to other people.
I, actually, do enjoy the exercise itself. Although, it doesn't prevents me from procrastinating going to the gym and being in terrible shape.
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.