Struck by a market-making provocation from today: "Imagine a world where you love how you make choices and you love how you're directing your attention, because tech inventors are competing to figure out how best to help you live as you intend."
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It's not clear how to align incentives so that this becomes a relevant design question for tech co's, but I'm enjoying the prompt. It's interesting that OSes have contacts, calendars, docs, etc—yet no representation of anything purposive, of ways of being, of "what matters?"
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Funny to contrast the ubiquitous to-do app's model with intentions which might deeply matter to someone, like "I want to make sure I'm taking my ideas as seriously as possible." Tasks are such a misleading way of thinking about intention. But hey, it's easier to build a to-do UI!
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I wonder for what % of people the key bottlenecks to “loving the way one makes choices” can be influenced by consumer products at all. For me, actually, I think they can be! But it’s easy to imagine the issue being, say, family / physical health / money / etc
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Seems quite plausible, people make huge elective changes to their lives that cost a lot of money in pursuit of these goals currently in ways that are not terribly effective.
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Life coaches are an interesting reference. Certainly people spend lots of money on such services; certainly those services seem to help many people in an outsized way. What are the powerful ideas at play there?
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Is this a product people want? To what extent do people even endorse making choices they love vs. choices they "should" make such that they're sufficiently virtuous or self-sacrificial or discerning? I'm disheartened by how few people intend anything in particular for their lives
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Depressing but plausible: one benefit of a web of distracting, non-reflective dopamine hits is that people are occasionally able to get caught up in something that *isn't* about conscious life choices, the majority of which they make for every sort of purpose except their own
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