Streaks

I’ve been horizontal for most of the past 48 hours, wrecked by something I caught on the redeye home from a wedding in Peru. The kind of sick where you negotiate with your body just to reach the bathroom. Fever dreams about Slack. Sheets soaked through like I’m detoxing from a decade of bad decisions.

But here I am, propped up on four pillows, laptop burning my legs, typing.

Why?

Because my newsletter platform has a golden badge announcing a 22-week streak, paired with a threat: miss a week and it disappears.

That’s the only reason you’re reading this.

I know how ridiculous that sounds. I literally build gamification systems for a living. My startup, SparkPlug, pays frontline workers to care about sales metrics. I know the psychology. I build the psychology!

And it still works on me.

My current scoreboard of shame/pride:

Each began with a noble purpose: clarity, fun, health. Now they’re rituals of compliance. I don’t write for insight; I write for continuity. I don’t work out for fitness; I close the rings because the idea of not closing them feels unbearable.

Most great companies and products know this. It turns out, scarcity and streaks are the cheat codes of human behavior.

A friend told me last month she’s been learning Mandarin for 500 days on Duolingo. I asked her to say something in Mandarin. She couldn’t form a sentence.

Five hundred days. Zero fluency. Perfect streak.

We’ve optimized for the number, not the meaning. The metric has become more real than the thing it was meant to measure.

And yet, it still works.

Without Duolingo, she wouldn’t have opened the app once. Without this newsletter, these ideas would still be rotting as half-written drafts in my notes. Without Apple’s dopamine math, I’d have worse cardio.

Loss aversion is the fuel. The pain of losing a counter outweighs the joy of progress.

I’m too crossed-up to decide which. It would be easy to name villains here: platforms, capitalism, perverse incentives, et al. But at the end of the day, I’m one of them. At SparkPlug, we debate “engagement loops” and “retention mechanics.” We design the very traps I’m stuck in.

We’ve built a world where motivation lives on servers.

Discipline isn’t internal, it’s a push notification.

Achievement is just avoidance of loss.

And I can’t tell if that’s dystopian or the best hack humanity’s ever built.

There must be a level of sickness that finally makes me skip a week.

But apparently, this isn’t it.

A more disciplined writer might stop here, deliver a clean thesis about how to know when to rest. Something clever like: “If the streak serves the work, keep it. If the work serves the streak, kill it.”

That line sounds great… but it’s a lie.

Because this week’s post only exists to feed the streak.

So I’m hitting send. Not because it’s my best work (clearly, it’s not), but because Week 22 demands a sacrifice.

The badge is earned and the streak survives.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going back to bed.

Up and to the right.