I have a small morning ritual I did not choose, which is that I look at the number on my wrist before I ask myself whether I actually feel rested, and on the days the number is good I walk into the office feeling like I have already won something, and on the days it is bad I start the morning a little behind, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to notice that I had handed my own body over to a scoreboard that I did not build and do not run.

I have circled this ground before, since I wrote a couple of months back about the token leaderboards at work and how the units of work quietly became the work, and before that about GDP as the biggest scoreboard we ever built and how a measure turns into the thing it was only ever supposed to describe, so I will skip the measurement argument here and go to the machine underneath it, which is a small cage with a button and a food dispenser.

The experiment is old and famous and it comes down to three findings strung together. A pigeon pecks the button more when the reward lands immediately rather than later. It pecks more when the reward arrives at random rather than every single time. And the third finding is the one that still stops me, which is that once the food had run out the pigeon kept pecking as long as it could hear the click, because the click had stopped being a signal for the food and had become the reward itself. That is what people mean by a conditioned reward, and the reason it beats the real one is simple, because a full stomach stops wanting food and a learned desire never quite fills.

Once that was understood the built world quietly turned into a game, since the airline flying you on miles and the toy hidden in the cereal box and the tenth coffee that arrives free are all selling you the click, and then somebody asked the better question, which was whether the same trick could make people do things they did not want to do at all. The answer arrived in the workplace, where the paycheck comes once a month and the review comes once a year and both are so far away that they barely move anyone, so the fix was the daily target and the points and the leaderboard, which turned a job into a status game that the employee plays for nothing.

I want to be fair to the idea before I turn on it, because gamification began as something close to lovely. There was a quiz website where every correct answer turned into rice for people who were hungry, and it moved something like twenty billion grains in six months. There was a game a university lab built around a protein structure it had failed to solve for fifteen years, and a crowd of players cracked it in ten days. There were stairs in Stockholm that played piano notes so people took the stairs because the stairs were fun. For a while it genuinely looked like we could get a fitter and greener and kinder species by making the right thing the fun thing, and I should say that out loud before I say what happened instead.

What happened instead is that the easiest strong reward on earth turned out to be other people’s approval, and the moment one platform put a like button under every post it turned each published sentence into a wager, because you press send and you have no idea whether it lands on silence or on a jackpot, which is a slot machine wearing the costume of a conversation. The notification arrives instantly and the like is a conditioned reward and the amount is random, so the three findings from that little cage were written straight into an app, and somewhere along the way we stopped being the people who use the phone and became the pigeons pecking for the click.

India is the best place I know to watch this, because we turned the exam into a national scoreboard long before the phone arrived, since one number decides the rest of a life and an entire coaching industry exists to maximise that number, and a student who would have made a fine engineer at eighty percent is quietly ruined by the eighty. The same machine then runs all the way up, because the appraisal arrives with a rating and the delivery rider lives on an acceptance rate and the driver is reduced to a star and the bank keeps a number that grades my whole existence, and even our cities learned to game the rankings they are judged on, so the cleanliness survey becomes a scramble for the photograph and the business ranking becomes a folder of papers that exists to be inspected. In plain English; when the number becomes the goal, the work bends to feed the number, which is a lesson I first learned the hard way in my own metric driven years when I optimised a page beautifully and forgot the person standing on it.

There is an old name for the trap this sets, and the cleanest example I know is a war that was run by a man who measured it in bodies, because the count climbed on his chart every week while the thing that was actually failing was the belief of the people at home and the soldiers in the field, and belief does not fit on a chart, so it went uncounted, and the war was lost along the axis that had no number. The temptation is to keep score of the thing we can count until the counting quietly becomes the point, which is why my ring can tell me I slept badly on a morning I woke up feeling fine, since it can measure motion and cannot measure rest, and I keep choosing the number I can see over the thing I can feel, which is the whole disease sitting on my wrist.

The deeper reason has almost nothing to do with the phone, because we solved most of the problems that used to occupy an entire life, and a mind built to hunt and fix and build does not retire when the hunting is over, so it starts inventing goals just to have goals, and much of what we now call hustle or self improvement or the grind is an invented goal wearing a noble hat. The invented win feels exactly like progress and tastes like victory, and none of it stays, and I know that because I have spent whole weeks collecting small wins on my own little dashboards while the thing I actually cared about sat untouched, and the more the fake win feeds me the more of it I need, which is how the trap closes around you.

These games also refuse to stay small, because the ones that matter are the ones everybody is forced to play at once, and the cleanest way I can put it is a valley full of rival kingdoms where every kingdom can grow more food by clearing more forest, so each one has to clear more than its neighbour or be overtaken, and the strategy is perfectly rational for every single one of them right up until the morning the last tree is gone and they all starve together. Put that on a phone and you get the beauty contest where every filter and every filler makes everyone real feel uglier, and the stunt war where each video has to be crazier than the last to avoid being buried, and the political fight where nobody can actually kill anybody and everybody just gets angrier, which is a game that is negative sum and quietly knows it. Who exactly is winning that one? I don’t think anybody is!

None of this gets me out of playing, because I cannot sit it out, so the only real choice is whose game I am in, and I have been trying the five things that seem to hold. Take the long game over the quick one, and when I am unsure I ask the ninety year old version of me, who I am fairly sure will not remember a single progress bar but will remember exactly how many evenings I spent in Bagdogra. I try to pick the hard game over the easy one, since a prize you had to fight for teaches you what it is worth and a prize that was handed to you does not. The game where my winning does not demand your losing is the one worth being in, because teaching and building and making wealth are games where the table gets bigger for everyone. If I would not play it with the scoreboard switched off, then it is not the game for me, since the moment I am only playing for the badge the play turns into work. And the unmeasurable prize is the one I keep, because freedom and love and meaning do not arrive in numbers, and the second I try to score them I have already lost them.

The pigeons only kept pecking that button because they were in a cage with nothing else to do, and that is the part the designers keep forgetting, which is that the door was open and I can walk out. So I am trying to build a few games of my own instead of joining every game that arrives at the door, and honestly I am not good at it yet, since I still check the number first. What I am sure of is that the chasing is the only part worth having, and a life spent inside somebody else’s leaderboard is a life spent being played while you are certain you are the one playing. Tweet to me the scoreboard you finally walked away from, I am @troysk704.