Streaks Are Broken

Lex Friedman, writing at Lex on Tech about streaks in apps and games:

A streak is a loss-aversion machine you carry in your pocket. Every day you extend it, it gets a little more painful to lose, which is exactly why day 500 is harder to skip than day five. Apps with streaks aren’t building habits. They’re building hostages.

As someone who’s addicted to checkmarks, I feel the pain of being bombarded by streaks acutely. They’re everywhere, and they’re alluring.

I play six short games as part of my daily morning routine (Wordle, the Apple News+ Mini Crossword, Good Sudoku, Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune, and Family Feud), and each one of them has some kind of streak mechanic meant to keep you coming back every day. They’re built into social media (thanks, Snapchat), fitness apps, and habit trackers. At one point, even my banking app encouraged me to build a daily streak of checking my balance by literally paying me to do so. (Joke’s on them; I would do that anyway because I’m a budgeting maniac.)

I believe there are specific instances where streaks can be beneficial, such as when you’re just starting to build a new habit and need all the motivation you can get. But before long, the point of any streak becomes keeping the streak alive, not actually improving your life or having fun, and that’s when they become a problem.

This is yet another example of companies trying to hack our natural brain processes for financial gain. Using positive reinforcement, they shift our motivation away from the initial intent (such as learning a new language) to a goal that benefits them (opening the app every day to continue the streak, thus boosting usage metrics and company profits). On the surface, it seems like a fun mechanic, and maybe that really is the intention behind some who implement it, but the impact is detrimental to users in the long run.

It was a hard-fought battle, but I’ve gotten to a place where I actively choose not to care about streaks of any kind. (The one exception is my 2,300-day Snapchat streak with my spouse, which in my heart of hearts I wish would break so I could get out from under the weight of it.) I ignore them as much as I can, and if I ever notice that I’ve broken one, I just move on and let it go without even looking for a loophole to restore it. I’ve had to do this for my own mental health; otherwise, I’d spend my days obsessively extending streaks that do nothing to make my life better.

This dynamic has also led me to cut down on the tracking apps I use. Habit trackers are amazing for forming new habits from scratch, but after a certain amount of time, any good habit tracker should render itself obsolete. If an action is truly a habit, you don’t need any external signal to perform it. At that point, tracking becomes all about streaks, and that’s where I say, “Thank you, next.”

Streaks aren’t required to have a successful app or business. I’m grateful for developers like Rebecca Owen of Chronicling who purposefully exclude streaks so users don’t feel pressured or guilty when tracking events. And I also appreciate what Florian Grossmann has done with On This Day, where streaks are available but can be hidden completely with a single toggle. I turned streaks off the day I downloaded it and haven’t been bothered by them since.

The fewer streaks in my life, the better. May it be so for each of us.

My thanks to Lex for writing about this subject, which I obviously feel passionate about as well. If you haven’t yet, check out his new website, Lex on Tech, where he's doing some really interesting writing every day.

There Is No “Them”

Stephen White, writing for Red Letter Christians:

Us versus them. It is one of the oldest sentences the human heart knows how to say, older than language, certainly older than scripture. Us is the circle drawn warm and close, the people whose grief is our grief, whose children we would run into a burning house to save. Them is everyone on the far side, the ones we have decided, somewhere below conscious thought, we are allowed not to love…

There is us. There is them. Everybody knows that. And then a man came walking out of Galilee, dust on his feet, and said the single strangest thing anyone had ever said about it, a thing so strange that two thousand years later we still have not really begun to believe he meant it.

He said: Love your enemies.

Removing the us-versus-them mentality from my worldview is something I am constantly working on, because there’s no room for it in the heart of someone who has compassion for the world. If I truly believe – as I claim – to see everybody I come into contact with as a full person deserving of the same dignity, consideration, and respect that I desire for myself and my loved ones, then I can’t really see anyone else as “other.”

We are all people with feelings, desires, dreams, needs, and full inner lives, and we each deserve to be treated as such. We each deserve to have our needs met. My faith teaches me that every human being is created in the image of God, and it’s my job to recognize that divine reflection in every person I encounter, whether they’re similar to me or not.

I highly recommend reading White’s piece in full because it beautifully illustrates how Jesus serves as an example of what loving our enemies and crossing us-versus-them lines looks like, as well as how we can follow his example today. Making the world a better place starts with empathy, and it requires that we tear down the walls we’ve built in our heads between ourselves and those we don’t see as part of our in-group.

There is no them, only us.

OS Beta Pros and Cons

With the public betas of iOS 27 and its corresponding updates on Apple’s other platforms now available, I broke down the reasons for and against installing the betas on your devices for the Club MacStories Monthly Log. It’s a question I’ve thought about a lot over the years, and there are compelling reasons both for and against jumping on the beta train, so if you’re on the fence, I invite you to check out the story.

visionOS 27 Preview

With the public betas for iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, macOS, and tvOS 27 releasing yesterday, the team at MacStories shared a collection of preview stories to offer a glimpse at what it’s like living with the updates. visionOS 27 is only available as a developer beta, but I previewed the new version nonetheless. Early adopters – like Vision Pro owners – are also prime candidates to be beta testers because they like to get the latest and greatest before anyone else.

If you’re considering jumping on the beta train, check out my preview and those from the rest of the team to see how they’re working out in day-to-day use.