Creating Worthwhile Addictions - Leveraging Casino Psychology to Build a Better Life
Making easy things hard and hard things easy.
Hey there,
I hope you’re enjoying your Sunday afternoon. It feels like winter is almost here and the end of the year is sneaking up on us.
I hope today’s newsletter helps you take stock of how you’re spending your time and reflect on the way you’ve been spending your time.
Thanks for reading!
Kevin
Creating Worthwhile Addictions - Leveraging Casino Psychology to Build a Better Life
Addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you–it’s the cage you live in.
Johann Hari
There are 3 ingredients that make us do almost anything over and over again whether we like it or not:
Opportunity
Unpredictable Rewards
Quick Repeatability
The best example is a slot machine. There is an opportunity to win money, the reward can be a few cents or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and you can pull the lever repeatedly in quick succession.
Author Michael Easter coined this behavior pattern the Scarcity Loop. This loop drives the addictive nature of everything from social media, gambling, video games, etc.
It’s hardwired in our brains from foraging for food. Those susceptible to this pattern of behavior foraged for longer than others and went on to survive, thrive, and pass down their genes to all of us.
Like most evolutionarily optimized behavior, what was once useful for survival has now been co-opted by corporations to earn our time, attention, and money.
Casinos are the most obvious culprits for leveraging the Scarcity Loop, but even Jelly Belly has found a way to capitalize on the phenomenon. Their “Bean Boozled” pack of jelly beans includes a mix of disgusting and delicious flavors that look exactly alike. There’s an opportunity for a delicious snack, an unpredictable reward from the jelly bean you choose, and it can be quickly repeated by grabbing another and trying again.
Whether intentional or not, companies and institutions use this framework to take our time and money, but we can use it to our advantage.
I recently joined a new gym that I’ve become obsessed with it. I’ve always been consistent with my fitness, but I still had many days when I had to drag myself out of bed to get the work done.
Now I’m checking my phone multiple times a day to review the details of my next workout and after I finish each class it feels like tomorrow can’t come fast enough until I get to do it again. This shift happened (whether intentionally or not) because the new gym has all 3 elements of the Scarcity Loop built into its structure.
Each class has an opportunity to post a new personal best and gain the respect of others in the class. The rewards of each class are unpredictable because the workout changes every day. Some days you crush the workout, other days the workout crushes you. Finally, there’s quick repeatability because there is a new class every day.
Combined with the accountability of a coach/instructor and peers in the class, it’s the perfect recipe for a worthwhile addiction.
Rather than trying to fight against the scarcity loop, we should look for opportunities to lean into it. If we can leverage our own psychology to our benefit rather than to our detriment, we can make the path to becoming a bit better each day the path of least resistance.
Worthwhile pursuits and the process of creating a fulfilling life will require some form of sacrifice and hardship, but as much as we can, we should make things easy. If we can leverage the same tricks that get us to eat junk food and gamble our money way to work out regularly and eat healthy, then we can make our desired behavior our default behavior.
We should be obsessed with the most important things in our lives and create patterns of behavior that keep us coming back to them over and over again to move ourselves in the right direction.
We choose the cage we live in. If we become addicted to the things we care the most about, then we can build a better life without reliance on willpower and discipline.
Prompts
Where have you become victim to the scarcity loop in your life?
What area of your life would you most like to have a worthwhile addiction?
How can you introduce some of the factors of the scarcity loop into your worthwhile pursuits?
Deep Dive
Relax for the same results - Derek Sivers
A short blog post (2 min read) looking at effort vs outcome.
Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.
Kevin