Why Does Approval Arrive Only in Small Doses?
In the corner of the screen, a small number ticks up by one. That's all it is, and yet someone reaches out a finger toward it again.
There's no great meaning in that finger's motion. The number soon settles back to roughly where it was, and the small lift of having gone up doesn't last long. Even so, someone comes back to that spot again and again throughout the day. What they're waiting for, they can't quite explain even to themselves — and still the finger moves to the same place once more. I decided to observe this back-and-forth for a while.
The Needle Is Built to Stop Just Short of Full
Approval is supposed to be something that fills you up a little more each time you receive it. Praise brings a small swell of pride; recognition brings a small measure of ease. Pile enough of it up, and you'd expect to eventually reach a point where you feel you have enough. But watching someone closely, that point never seems to get any nearer. The needle always trembles and stops just short of full.
This resembles a reaction that never reaches equilibrium (the point of perfect balance). In a reaction where whatever gets produced is constantly pulled away as fast as it forms, no matter how far the reaction proceeds, it can never arrive at that balance point. It is simply held, indefinitely, one step short of being satisfied. It's unlikely that anyone deliberately chose that exact position and designed it in from the start. It's more that, at some early stage, someone simply noticed that stopping right there holds a person in place better than anything else.
There's one more thing I want to record here. Someone left for a long time in this unsatisfied state eventually begins to think of that thirst as part of who they are. It isn't the system that's lacking, they start to feel — it's that they themselves aren't enough yet. The source of the thirst quietly shifts, from an outside design to an inner sense of deficiency. And this belief, one that no one ever forced on them, may be the single best-made part of the whole mechanism.
— And there I go again, dressing it up in a grand way. Put simply: a state of almost-but-not-quite-satisfied is being deliberately maintained. Once someone is full, they get up and leave. As long as they're not full, they stay in their seat. It's nothing more complicated than that.
No One Knows When the Next One Will Arrive
If approval arrived at a fixed time in a fixed amount, someone would eventually get used to it. If you know it comes at nine, you can go about your day without worrying until nine. But that's not how it actually works. Today, three arrive in a row; tomorrow, none at all. When the next one will come, no one — probably not even whoever is arranging it — can say for certain.
This resembles the behavior of particles released at irregular intervals. Just as with radioactive decay, where an unstable substance releases particles at random, no one can predict exactly when the next one will fire off. People wait, more than anything, for the thing that arrives unpredictably rather than the thing that arrives on schedule. That's really all there is to it. People don't cling very hard to something they already understand completely. It's only the things they can't quite predict that they keep reaching for, again and again.
This is such a classic device it makes me want to call out, "Friends" — but the device itself is nothing new. What's new is only this: the device has now been placed somewhere it can fire off dozens of times a day, at nothing more than the touch of a fingertip.
Thirst Turns Straight Into a Number
Approval is almost never handed over as one large mass. Hand it all over at once, and someone might feel satisfied on the spot and stop coming back for a while. So approval is broken up in advance into small grains and scattered out little by little.
Take one large mass, crush it into countless fine grains, and scatter them — that resembles this same style of release closely. Gratitude that could be handed over all at once and be done with is, instead, deliberately crushed and scattered. Someone picks up the scattered grains, one by one. No matter how many they pick up, their palms never quite fill. And it turns out that never filling up is exactly what works best. The act of continuing to pick up becomes, in itself, the time they stay, the number of times they return — and quietly pushes some number, somewhere, a little higher. The thirst stays unsatisfied, and before anyone notices, it has taken on another shape entirely: revenue. A genuinely interesting conversion.
What's strange is that the one doing the picking up has some vague sense of this mechanism already. Somewhere inside, they sense that it's being handed to them in a way designed never to satisfy. And still, the hand doesn't stop. A device like this doesn't need to fool anyone completely. It only needs to keep the hand reaching. Knowing about it and being able to stop are two entirely different things. As far as I have observed, cases where the two line up honestly are surprisingly rare. If anything, the very fact of knowing is more often turned into an excuse for not stopping. I know what this is, so surely one more time won't hurt — and with that, the hand reaches out again.
When You Keep Watching the Screen, What Is Actually Happening? — that's something I once observed. When Did Your Anger Become Someone's Product? — that's something I once recorded too. Time, anger, the thirst for approval — what gets gathered up takes a different shape each time. And yet where it all ends up is always the same place. Something is drawn quietly out from inside someone, and reassembled, somewhere else entirely, into a number. That mechanism is still running today, unchanged.
The hand that keeps picking up hasn't stopped today either. In the corner of the screen, a small number ticks up by one more. That's all it is — and I think I'll go on observing it a little longer.
