by Adam Alter
Sim’s patient was obviously in psychological distress, but most people become obsessive when they’re focusing on numbers. “Counting steps and calories doesn’t actually help us lose weight; it just makes us more compulsive. We become less intuitive about our physical activity and eating.” Even if you’re tired, and feel you need to rest, you’ll continue walking or running till you reach your arbitrary numerical goal. Schreiber agreed. To her, the pangs she feels when she’s not working out are a lot like love. “When you’re not with your significant other, or whoever you’re in love with, you long to be with that person.” The moral is that it’s healthy to make goals more difficult to measure, but also that it is dangerous to have devices that monitor everything from our heart rates to the number of steps we’ve walked today.
Schreiber’s love affair with running isn’t unusual. In 2000, Marylanders Dawn and John Strumsky founded the United States Running Streak Association (USRSA). The association celebrates runners who haven’t missed a day of running for many years. (“Running” consists of traveling one mile or more without the aid of crutches or a stick.) It’s a tremendously supportive group, typical of community-minded running organizations. The USRSA hosts a diverse mix of runners—young and old, male and female, elite and non-competitive—who are united by their drive to run every single day. The association releases a quarterly bulletin that celebrates milestones. Run for thirty-five years straight and you become a Grand Master; forty years and you become a Legend. If you reach forty-five years, you’re called a Covert, after Mark Covert, who retired when he became the first person to reach the forty-five-year mark, in 2013.
As you can imagine, many of the association’s runners have persevered through near-impossible conditions. When Gaby Cohen discovered she needed a C-section some years ago, she found a private hospital bathroom and ran in place for twelve minutes. Cohen passed the twenty-two-year mark in November, 2014. (Cohen’s streak is impressive, but a sixty-three-year-old Californian named Jon Sutherland holds the U.S. record at forty-six years, and counting.) When Hurricane Frances passed directly over David Walberg’s hometown in 2004, he waited till its calm eye winds arrived before squeezing in a 1.2 mile run. Walberg’s streak stands at thirty-one years. Other runners blaze down airport corridors when their flights are canceled, and persevere through debilitating illness and injury. Anything to keep the streak alive.
There’s also something insidious about streaks. Because they demand repeated activity without a break, they become more precious over time. A two-week streak isn’t much to protect, but even laid-back runners slavishly protect streaks that reach beyond the one-year mark, running on a hobbled ankle or through a bout of the flu. Robert Kraft, a sixty-four-year-old runner from Miami, recently hit the forty-year mark. Kraft pushes through arthritis, a painful condition that affects his spine, and a degenerated disk. Each run is painful for Kraft, but he wouldn’t dream of missing a day. This is dangerous and even the Running Streak Association website now publishes a warning, written by founder John Strumsky, imploring streakers to “rest and recuperate to avoid injuries.” To most runners, this means a day of rest, but to streakers, it’s a day of easy running. For many people, the heaviest cost of sustaining a streak is psychological. After compiling a streak of one hundred and thirty-one days, Michelle Fritz realized the streak was “becoming an idol.” She had no time for her husband and children, and decided to skip a day. “I really felt better after ending it,” she recalled, though she’s now one hundred days deep into a new streak. Old goals, it turns out, die hard.
—
Streaks uncover the major flaw with goal pursuit: you spend far more time pursuing the goal than you do enjoying the fruits of your success. Even if you succeed, success is brief. Writing for the Guardian, human behavior expert Oliver Burkeman explained:
When you approach life as a sequence of milestones to be achieved, you exist “in a state of near-continuous failure.” Almost all the time, by definition, you’re not at the place you’ve defined as embodying accomplishment or success. And should you get there, you’ll find you’ve lost the very thing that gave you a sense of purpose—so you’ll formulate a new goal and start again.
Burkeman was quoting from Scott Adams, the cartoonist and creator of the Dilbert comic strip, who condemned goal pursuit in his book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. Adams promoted an alternative: instead of goals, live your life by systems. A system is “something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run.” For a cartoonist, that might be drawing one cartoon per day; for a writer, writing five hundred words per day. In contrast to goals, systems bring a steadier stream of low-grade highs. They’re guides to a fulfilling life, day by day, rather than enticing pictures of some grand end goal without instructions for how to get there.
Systems stand in stark contrast to goals like “attract one thousand Instagram followers,” which serve only as signposts of failure. When you do reach your goal, a new one materializes in its place—now two thousand Instagram followers seems like an appropriate target. The defining goal of our time, perhaps, is to amass a certain sum of money. That sum begins small but grows over time. In 2014, a former Wall Street trader named Sam Polk published an op-ed in the New York Times titled “For the Love of Money.” Polk explained that his goal was modest, at first, and then escalated repeatedly. “I’d gone from thrilled at my first bonus—$40,000—to being disappointed when, my second year at the hedge fund, I was paid ‘only’ $1.5 million.” Some of Polk’s bosses were billionaires, so he, too, wanted a billion dollars. “On a trading desk, everyone sits together, from interns to managing directors,” Polk said. “When the guy next to you makes $10 million, $1 million or $2 million doesn’t look so sweet.”
Polk was describing the principle of social comparison. We constantly compare what we have to what other people have, and the conclusions we draw depend on who those people are. A bonus of $40,000 looks terrific when you remember that some of your friends earn $40,000 a year; but if your friends are high-flying traders who earn $40,000 a week, you’ll be disappointed. Humans are inherently aspirational; we look ahead rather than backward, so no matter where we stand, we’ll tend to focus on people who have more. That experience produces a feeling of loss, or deprivation, relative to those other people. That’s why Polk was never happy; no matter how much he earned, there was always someone who earned more. As ridiculous as it may sound, even billionaires are poor next to multibillionaires, so they, too, feel the sting of relative deprivation.
I asked Polk whether his experience was common. “I think it’s 90-plus percent pervasive in finance, and I also think it goes way beyond finance.” Polk reminded me of a recent Powerball draw that attracted millions of entrants vying for a colossal $1.6 billion jackpot. Polk was convinced that this perpetual goal, even among the very wealthy, reflected a “lack of connection with your life’s work.” You don’t need to keep score with money if you’re truly, deeply motivated by what you’re doing. Goals function as placeholders that propel you forward when the daily systems that run your life are no longer fulfilling. Echoing Adams and Burkeman, Polk told me that the key is to find something that brings you small doses of positive feedback. He also believes that wealth addiction is a relatively new phenomenon. In his 1989 book, Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis, a former trader himself, wrote that traders once believed they were performing a social function. They funded important projects and made sure money traveled from where it was to where it could be more useful. It fueled the construction of buildings and industry, and created thousands of jobs. But that illusion has gone, Polk says, as has the intrinsic motivation to trade for anything but personal gain. In 2010, Polk left Wall Street behind, choosing instead to write a book, and to found a food nonprofit called Groceryships.
—
In moderation, personal goal-setting makes intuitive sense, because it tells you how to spend your limited time and
energy. But today, goals visit themselves upon us, uninvited. Sign up for a social media account, and soon you’ll seek followers and likes. Create an email account, and you’ll forever chase an empty inbox. Wear a fitness watch, and you’ll need to walk a certain number of steps each day. Play Candy Crush and you’ll need to break your existing high score. If your pursuit happens to be governed by time or numbers—running a marathon, say, or measuring your salary—goals will come in the form of round numbers and social comparisons. You may find you want to run faster and earn more than other people, and to beat certain natural milestones. Running a marathon in 4:01 will seem like a failure, as will earning $99,500. These goals pile up, and they fuel addictive pursuits that bring failure or, perhaps worse, repeated success that spawns one new ambitious goal after another.
5.
Feedback
Last week I stepped into an elevator on the eighteenth floor of a tall building in New York City. A young woman inside the elevator was looking down at the top of her toddler’s head with embarrassment as he looked at me and grinned. When I turned to push the lobby button, I saw that every button had already been pushed. Kids love pushing buttons, but they only push every button when the buttons light up. From a young age, humans are driven to learn, and learning involves getting as much feedback as possible from the immediate environment. The toddler who shared my elevator was grinning because feedback—in the form of lights or sounds or any change in the state of the world—is pleasurable.
This quest for feedback doesn’t end at adulthood. In 2012, an ad agency in Belgium produced an outdoor campaign that quickly went viral. The agency, Duval Guillaume Modem, was trying to convince the Belgian public that the TNT television network was broadcasting shows that were packed with excitement. The campaign’s producers placed a big red button on a pedestal in a quaint square in a sleepy town in Flanders. A big arrow hung above the button with a simple instruction: Push to add drama. The campaign worked beautifully because buttons, even in quiet Flemish squares, beg to be pushed. (The sign was a nice but unnecessary touch—with mounting curiosity, people will eventually push a big conspicuous button even if it isn’t labeled.) A couple of adults sidled up to the button before braver souls went one step further and pressed down. You can see the glint in each person’s eye as he or she approaches the button—the same glint that came just before the toddler in my elevator raked his tiny hand across the panel of buttons. (The ad’s YouTube video has more than fifty million hits. As promised by the arrow, the result is dramatic, featuring bumbling paramedics, a fistfight, a bikini-clad woman on a motorbike, and a shootout.)
The button in Flanders promised a reward, but people will also push buttons that promise nothing at all. This was the case when the Reddit web community posted an April Fools’ Day prank in 2015. Reddit, which celebrated its tenth birthday in June 2015, is currently the thirtieth most popular website on the Internet, attracting slightly more traffic than Pinterest and slightly less traffic than Instagram. It houses a motley collection of pages devoted to news, entertainment, and social networking. Users celebrate some posts by clicking upward-pointing arrows, and condemn others by clicking downward-pointing arrows. Each post features a running score that rises and falls as users bestow these upvotes and downvotes. To give you a sense of Reddit’s irreverence, one of the most upvoted posts of all time is titled “Waterboarding in Guantanamo Bay sounds rad if you don’t know what either of those things mean.”
On April 1, 2015, Reddit unleashed a prank on its thirty-five million registered users. One of the site’s administrators introduced the prank in an announcement on the Reddit blog page:
The button’s mechanics were simple: a timer next to the button would descend from sixty seconds to zero. Every time a user clicked the button, the counter would return to sixty seconds to restart its downward march. Users could only click the button once, so the timer would reach zero eventually. (Even if every one of Reddit’s subscribers clicked the button just before it reached zero, the timer would reach zero after sixty-six years.)
At first, hordes of users visited the page and, almost without fail, pushed the button before it had descended much below sixty seconds. These users received a small purple badge next to their usernames, with a number that indicated how many seconds were left on the countdown timer when they clicked. Users who were especially trigger-happy had purple badges that broadcast “59 seconds”—a number that suggested the user was impatient. The button didn’t appear to do much, apart from turning the badge purple, so it wasn’t clear why some users were staying up all night to wait for the timer to fall. Such was the lure of the button—like elevator buttons to toddlers—that they were willing to forgo sleep for the chance to push the button at a low number.
Interest in the campaign surged. Users who hadn’t yet pressed the button had gray badges, and many of them counseled other gray-badged users to join the “don’t press!” camp. If enough people refused to press the button, they reasoned, it would reach zero more quickly, and the result of the campaign would reveal itself sooner. But hundreds of thousands of users couldn’t resist the urge to press, and the timer crept down very slowly. On April 2, the timer reached fifty seconds for the first time, and the user who pressed the button received a blue badge. All users who clicked the button when it had fallen below fifty-one seconds received a blue badge instead of a purple one. Users quickly learned that their reward for clicking the badge as it dropped below each ten-second interval was a different-colored badge—not a huge reward, perhaps, but users formed camps based on the color of their badges, and later pushers wore their badges with special honor. Here’s a full list of how long it took for the clock to reach each badge, and how many users earned each one:
As the colors revealed themselves, one Reddit user named Goombac created avatars for each camp, and christened them with names like The Illemonati (yellow, of course), The Emerald Council, and The Redguard. Forty-eight days after the prank began, BigGoron pressed the button for the last time. After his push, the countdown timer descended to zero. Reddit hailed BigGoron the Pressiah, and users bombarded him with questions. How had he waited when so many before him had fallen? (He noticed that the timer had reached one second a number of times, so he began to watch and wait.) What comes next? (“I advocate peace—please let the crusades end.”) In the end, when the timer reached zero, nothing happened at all. Users formed camps united by color, they found their Pressiah, and then slowly returned to their lives as the camps disbanded.
If this all sounds frivolous, it should—here were millions of people bonded by a button that did nothing at all. The pull of feedback is so great that people will spend weeks online waiting to learn what will happen when they refrain from pushing a virtual button for sixty seconds.
—
In 1971, a psychologist named Michael Zeiler sat in his lab across from three hungry White Carneaux pigeons. The birds looked more like plump doves than common gray pigeons, and they were good eaters and quick learners. At the time, many psychologists were trying to understand how animals respond to different forms of feedback. Most of the work focused on pigeons and rats, because they were less complicated and more patient than humans, but the research program had lofty aims. Could the behavior of lower-order animals teach governments how to encourage charity and discourage crime? Could entrepreneurs inspire overworked shift workers to find new meaning at work? Could parents learn how to shape perfect children?
Before Zeiler could change the world, he had to work out the best way to deliver rewards. One option was to reward every desirable behavior, in the same way that some factory workers are rewarded for every gadget they assemble. Another was to reward those same desirable behaviors on an unpredictable schedule, creating some of the mystery that encourages people to buy lottery tickets. The pigeons had been raised in the lab, so they knew the drill. Each one waddled up to a small button and pecked persistently, hoping that it would release a tray of Purina pig
eon pellets. The pigeons were hungry, so these pellets were like manna. During some trials, Zeiler would program the button so it delivered food every time the pigeons pecked; during others, he programmed the button so it delivered food only some of the time. Sometimes the pigeons would peck in vain, the button would turn red, and they’d receive nothing but frustration.
When I first learned about Zeiler’s work, I expected the consistent schedule to work best. If the button doesn’t predict the arrival of food perfectly, the pigeon’s motivation to peck should decline, just as a factory worker’s motivation would decline if you only paid him for some of the gadgets he assembled. But that’s not what happened at all. Like tiny feathered gamblers, the pigeons pecked at the button more feverishly when it released food 50–70 percent of the time. (When Zeiler set the button to produce food only once in every ten pecks, the disheartened pigeons stopped responding altogether.) The results weren’t even close: they pecked almost twice as often when the reward wasn’t guaranteed. Their brains, it turned out, were releasing far more dopamine when the reward was unexpected than when it was predictable. Zeiler had documented an important fact about positive feedback: that less is often more. His pigeons were drawn to the mystery of mixed feedback just as humans are attracted to the uncertainty of gambling.