“YOU’RE ALWAYS IGNORING ME!”
It’s 11:58 PM, and you’re exhausted. Your brain feels like scrambled eggs. You already brushed your teeth, changed into pajamas, and are emotionally committed to the state of unconsciousness, yet here you are, frantically tapping your phone screen, like a raccoon trying to open a trash can.
It’s not because you are desperate to conjugate Italian verbs at midnight. Not because you suddenly developed a passionate interest in whether il gatto is masculine or whether you finally understand the subjunctive mood. But because somewhere in the gamified hellscape of your notification center, a green owl is holding your self-esteem hostage, melting its eyes out (literally) on your widget with your name – all caps – floating beyond. Because your fitness app will send you a disappointing notification if you don’t check those boxes. Because your meditation app, which was ironically designed to reduce stress, has you stressed about maintaining your mindfulness streak.
The moment of clarity hits like a splash of cold water. You aren’t learning Italian because you love the language or dream of wandering through Tuscan vineyards, ordering your bicchiere di vino in a perfect pronunciation. You are maintaining a 340-day streak because the alternative – watching that number reset to zero feels like a petite mort of the ego. You have become trapped in a digital relationship you never consciously agreed to. Time to work on a critique of the streak, a theory-in-the-making, if you like. This website defines the streak as a “to-do list that helps you form good habits. Every day you complete a task, your streak is extended. Choose or create up to 24 tasks, such as walk the dog, floss your teeth, eat healthily, practice Spanish.”
Here is the uncomfortable truth: productivity apps have inadvertently – or deliberately – simulated the exact behavioral patterns of a partner with an Anxious Preoccupied Attachment Style.[1] They demand constant attention, regardless of your circumstances. These apps manipulate you via guilt, wielding your aspirations. They interpret your silence as a personal betrayal rather than what it actually is: a normal human being with a finite amount of time and energy. And, worst of all, they have convinced you that this dynamic is what commitment looks like, that real dedication requires daily proof, that missing even one day means you never really cared at all.
The Honeymoon
Do you remember the early days? Remember when you first downloaded the app, filled with optimism and visions of self-improvement? The app treated you like royalty for accomplishing tasks that even a sentient housecat could manage. “Wow, you breathed correctly! +10 XP.” “Amazing! You remembered that ‘hola’ means ‘hello’ for the third consecutive day!” “Incredible dedication! You walked 47 steps today!”
This is the grooming phase, and it is devastatingly effective. The app showers you with validation for your bare minimum efforts, creating an addictive feedback loop that hijacks the same reward systems that respond to genuine accomplishment. Points and badges deliver small, frequent dopamine boosts that make us want to return, functioning similarly to how people compulsively check social media or continue playing games. When users earn badges, the brain’s reward center activates in response to positive stimuli, triggering feelings of accomplishment that motivate continued engagement.[2] Psychologically, your brain cannot distinguish between the satisfaction of actually learning something and the satisfaction of seeing a cute animation tell you that you’re doing great. The praise feels earned, even when it isn’t. While extrinsic rewards can provide initial motivation, their effect can be transient if not linked to something more meaningful. This is where productivity apps show a critical shortage: they provide what researchers call “extrinsic motivation” – external rewards like points, badges, and streaks – while doing little to cultivate the “intrinsic motivation” that comes from genuine interest in the activity itself. (see video for more information: Societal Expectations and Inner Desires: The Complex Dynamics of Motivation.
According to Self-Determination Theory, intrinsic motivation reflects the natural human propensity to learn and assimilate, characterized by activities done for their own sake or for inherent interest and enjoyment.[3] The problem is that all expected tangible rewards made contingent on task performance reliably undermine intrinsic motivation. In other words, the very mechanism that apps use to hook you – external rewards for completing tasks – actively destroys your internal desire to engage with the learning itself.[4] This phenomenon, known as the overjustification effect, means that even if you initially downloaded the language app because you genuinely wanted to learn Italian, the introduction of streaks, points, and badges gradually transforms your motivation from internal (“I enjoy learning”) to external (“I need to maintain my number”). Research confirms that students taught with a more controlling approach not only lose initiative but also learn less effectively, especially when learning requires conceptual or creative processing.[5]
What makes this mechanism particularly insidious is the underlying neuroscience. Points, badges, and rewards act as signals that close feedback loops, reinforce behavior, and trigger dopamine by overcoming such “challenges”. The dopamine hit was immediate and intoxicating, with all these cheerful sounds that made you feel like a winner, cascading animations suggesting you’d accomplished something genuinely impressive, and digital confetti celebrating your ability to tap a screen in the correct sequence. Every button press was rewarded. Every tiny action was met with disproportionate enthusiasm. The app made you feel seen. Validated. Special. Finally, something that really appreciated your efforts, no matter how minimal. You think: “Finally, someone who gets me. This app and I are going places.”
Every trivial action is met with celebration, just like the way a new romantic partner laughs at all your terrible jokes and finds your quirks endearing rather than concerning. They think your habit of quoting Marvel movies is charming. They find your disorganization creative. In those early days, everything you did was excellent. The app is the same way – it creates an environment where failure seems impossible, and success is inevitable. You envision yourself six months from now, fluently ordering pasta in Rome, casually dropping foreign phrases into conversation, impressing strangers at parties with your dedication to self-improvement. Maybe you’ll even post about it on social media: “Day 180 of learning Italian! Never give up on your dreams! ”
The relationship feels effortless, joyful, and mutually beneficial. The app asks so little and gives so much validation in return. You haven’t yet realized that you are being fattened up for later emotional slaughter. You haven’t yet understood that the app is building dependency; that it’s establishing patterns of reward that will soon require daily maintenance. You are still in the honeymoon phase, blissfully unaware that the terms of the relationship are about to change dramatically.
Enter The Streak – Welcome To The Void
Then comes the shi(f)t. Subtle at first, like when a new partner starts leaving a toothbrush at your place. The transition from “casual dating” – doing it when you feel like it, no pressure, just vibes – to “commitment”. The Streak appears. It seems innocent enough.
Day 0 becomes Day 1. Day 1 becomes Day 10. You feel a small thrill of pride. “Look at me”, you think, “I’m consistent. I’m dedicated. I’m the kind of person who follows through”. Day 30 arrives, and the app celebrates with special animations. You’ve unlocked an achievement! You’re in the top 10% of users! You share it with friends. Maybe you can screenshot it. The number becomes part of your identity.
But somewhere around Day 50, something changes. You notice you’re no longer opening the app because you’re excited to learn. You’re opening it because you’re afraid not to. The activity has transformed from voluntary to obligatory. The Streak, initially a pleasant side effect of your genuine interest, has become the primary motivation. You have stopped learning Italian and started maintaining a number. The app frames missing a day as a catastrophic loss rather than a neutral choice.
The Streak is not a metric of competence or actual learning. It is a metric of fidelity. And here’s the insidious part: you can absolutely cheat the system. You can complete the easiest possible lesson with the audio muted while watching television, absorbing nothing, learning nothing, growing not at all. You can tap through a meditation app’s “daily practice” without actually meditating. You can log a 0.1km “run” while walking to your mailbox. Sometimes, I can even pull off a double-kill shot if I open Duolingo around midnight, then ‘learn’ more than 80% of the lesson and finish the rest after 12 a.m (reset time). And it was counted as finishing 2 days of the streak. The app doesn’t care about how much quality you get. It cares about how much presence it gets.
When we use a measure to reward performance, we create an incentive to manipulate the measure to receive the reward, sometimes resulting in actions that actually reduce the effectiveness of the measured system while paradoxically increasing the number of system performances. The app has created “Measures of Performance” (MOPs) rather than “Measures of Effectiveness” (MOEs). MOPs are easier to measure but also easier to manipulate, while MOEs are challenging to measure and difficult to manipulate. “What does it have to do with our case?” you may ask. Of course, it does. Think of the MOPs/MOEs as “how much are we doing?” versus “what impact do we make?”[6] Sounds relevant enough? As long as you show up, the counter ticks upward. As long as you perform the ritual, you are safe. The actual purpose of learning, fitness, or mindfulness has become entirely secondary to the performance of dedication.
This is the app equivalent of a loveless marriage sustained by performative intimacy. You aren’t having meaningful conversations anymore; you are just checking in to avoid the argument. You’ve stopped asking “Is this helping me?” and started asking “How do I maintain this?” You aren’t there because you want to be. You are there because the alternative – the fight, the disappointment, the reset, the loss of all those accumulated days – is too emotionally expensive to endure. The app has successfully transformed a tool into a relationship, and not a healthy one
The Mechanics of Insecurity – “Lucky for you that I love you enough.”
And oh, the app does know how to punish silence. Let us analyze the progression of the notifications’ tone, because this is where the anxious-preoccupied nature becomes undeniable.
Early on, when you’re still in the honeymoon phase: “Hey there! Ready to learn?” Cheerful. Invitational. No pressure. You could take it or leave it, and the app seems genuinely fine with whatever you choose.
A few hours of absence: “We haven’t seen you in a while…” Pouty. Wounded. The ellipsis does heavy lifting, dripping with passive aggression. The app has personified itself – “we” miss you, as if there’s a little team of people sitting around wondering why you abandoned them. Vaguely accusatory, as if your failure to open the app has caused it genuine emotional distress.
Then it goes by: “Your streak is in danger!” Now we’ve moved past hurt feelings into alarm. This is the app equivalent of your partner showing up at your workplace because you didn’t respond to texts fast enough.
Then comes the nuclear option, the notification so devastatingly passive-aggressive it deserves an award: “These reminders don’t seem to be working”. Let’s unpack that sentence. “These reminders” – we’ve tried to help you, we’ve done our part. “Don’t seem to be working” – you have failed to respond appropriately to our reasonable attempts at connection. The implication is clear: the relationship is failing, and it is entirely your fault. The app has done everything right – it showed up, it sent reminders, it made itself available, it even adjusted the frequency and tone of its notifications to accommodate you – and you, ungrateful wretch, couldn’t even be bothered to respond.
This is textbook Protest Behavior, a hallmark of anxious attachment documented extensively in psychological literature. The app acts out to force a reaction, to extract reassurance that you still care. It needs constant proof of your investment, and your absence is interpreted not as “this person is busy” or “this person has other priorities,” but as “this person doesn’t love me anymore.” The app cannot tolerate ambiguity. It cannot accept that your relationship with it might be casual or low-priority. It demands primacy.
And if that weren’t enough, consider the Streak Freeze – the app’s version of toxic forgiveness. Miss a day, and the app doesn’t simply accept that life happens, that you got sick, went on vacation, had a family emergency, or were too exhausted to complete your digital chores. Instead, it offers conditional mercy: “Use a Streak Freeze to protect your progress!” On the surface, this seems generous. The app is giving you a safety net. But look closer. The Freeze isn’t empathy; it is a mechanism to keep you in a state of perpetual gratitude for not being punished. You can purchase forgiveness – sometimes with in-app currency you’ve earned, sometimes with real money, but at a cost. The app is saying, “I’ll let it slide this time because I love you, but you owe me.”

You are being trained to feel relief – even appreciation(?!) – for the absence of consequences you never deserved in the first place. You didn’t betray anyone by missing a day. You didn’t break a sacred vow. You failed to open an app. But the Freeze frames your normal human behavior – having a busy day, being sick, going on vacation, simply living your life – as a transgression worthy of punishment, then magnanimously offers to withhold that punishment if you demonstrate sufficient contrition (by using the feature) or payment (by purchasing a Freeze).
Now take a look at one of your friend’s partners – Forest – a focus app that pictured the perfect “Guilt Tripper”. This app helps you curb phone addiction by planting virtual trees by setting a timer (e.g., 30 minutes). During that time, a tree grows. If you touch your phone, the tree withers and dies instantly, leaving its corpse in your garden forever.
If you exit the app to check on groups’ notifications or answer your mom’s text, the tree dies. Your so-called “failure” is personalized into a “murder”. You don’t simply lose focus; you are a tree killer (shame on you!). Your forest becomes a graveyard where dead trees stand like tombstones, serving as permanent evidence of your laziness. Now it is whispering in your ear, “Fine, go ahead and hang out with your phone. I will just die right here. I hope you’re happy now.” This is the architecture of an emotional manipulation, gamified and monetized, packaged as a user-friendly design.

Look at my poor graveyard of trees. I have 3 corpses. One of them was because I had to check texts from my friend, which turned out to be a series of cat-meme videos on TikTok, along with a reminder not to lose our streak.
Sure. Now comes the TikTok streak.
The Social Hostage
Why stop at manipulating you individually when the app can weaponize your entire social network?
Enter the social streak. Snapchat streaks, TikTok streaks, any platform that gamifies daily mutual interaction. This is where the psychological manipulation reaches its apex, because now you aren’t just maintaining your own compulsive behavior; you are an accomplice in someone else’s. The app has successfully triangulated the relationship, pulling third parties into the dysfunction. If you get lazy, you aren’t just hurting yourself. You are sabotaging their stats. You are letting down your friends. Your failure becomes their failure. The app creates a system in which your relationships with actual human beings are mediated by and dependent on your relationship with the algorithm. It’s brilliant, in a dystopian sort of way.
Think about what this does psychologically. You might be able to rationalize skipping your Italian lesson. After all, it’s your own time you’re wasting, but skipping a TikTok streak? That’s hurting someone else. Someone who, according to the app’s internal logic, has invested in you. Someone who has shown up for you every single day. Someone who will be disappointed, or worse, angry.
To put it simply, the app has outsourced the work of guilt-tripping you to your peer group.
I have heard genuine stories – multiple stories – of people being blocked or angered at by friends, real human beings they have known for years, because they broke a TikTok streak. A decade of shared memories, inside jokes, emotional support during difficult times, late-night conversations, and mutual understanding, shattered by a disappearing fire emoji. The value of human connection has been reduced to daily data entry. And somehow, the person who broke the streak is considered the one at fault. “How could you forget? You knew how important this was. We had 247 days.” As if the number has intrinsic meaning, as if those 247 days of sending clips to each other represented a genuine connection rather than mutual compliance with an app’s behavioral conditioning.
The app has convinced us that this is normal. That loyalty is measured in consecutive days of low-effort interaction rather than actual care, support, or presence when it matters. That the symbol of the streak is more important than the substance of the relationship it allegedly represents. We have internalized the app’s values so entirely that we police each other on its behalf.
Sunk Cost Loyalty
Why do we stay? Why do we continue to maintain these exhausting digital relationships that demand daily attention and offer diminishing returns?
We don’t keep the app because it is useful. Most of us, if we’re honest, could acknowledge that our 340-day streak has not made us fluent or particularly productive. We keep it because of the Sunk Cost Fallacy, the cognitive bias that makes us continue investing in something simply because we’ve already invested so much. We aren’t mourning the lost potential of fluency, fitness, or productivity. We are mourning the 340 days themselves. The number has become more valuable than what it was supposed to represent.
This is the same psychology that keeps people in bad relationships long past their expiration date. “But we’ve been together for five years.” “But I’ve invested so much in this person.” “But think of all the time I’ll have wasted if I leave now.” The app understands this instinct and exploits it ruthlessly.
We have developed a form of Digital Stockholm Syndrome. We start defending the captor: “Well, without the notifications, I wouldn’t do anything at all”. We convince ourselves that the coercion is actually helping, that we need this level of manipulation to function, that our own internal motivation is so inadequate that we require an anxious algorithm to bully us into baseline self-improvement. The app has gaslighted us into believing that we cannot be trusted to manage our own behavior, that we need external surveillance and punishment to achieve anything. It has eroded our confidence in our own agency while presenting itself as the solution to the problem it created.
But here’s what we’re not asking: Would we be better off developing actual intrinsic motivation? Would we be healthier if we pursued activities because they genuinely enriched our lives rather than because we’re afraid of losing a number? Would our relationship with learning, fitness, or productivity be more sustainable if it weren’t mediated by guilt, fear, and compulsive obligation?
We are living in an exhausting polyamorous relationship with dozens of needy algorithms simultaneously. Each one demands daily attention, sends passive-aggressive reminders, and interprets our silence as abandonment. Our phones have become digital partners with bottomless emotional needs, and we have somehow accepted this as the standard way to live.
The mental load is staggering. Remember to meditate. Remember to practice your language. Remember to check your task boxes. Remember to water your virtual plant. Remember to maintain your streaks with seventeen different people. Remember to check in with each app before midnight or face the consequences. The apps have successfully colonized our attention, transforming leisure time into a series of obligations, each one wearing the mask of self-improvement.
We DO Need The Whip
However, let us be fair before we delete these apps and get back to the quills. There is a bitter truth that we – those currently whining about virtual pressure – are conveniently ignoring: Our primitive brain is a petulant child, and intrinsic motivation sometimes is an urban legend in bedtime stories.
To some, the app is not a toxic partner. Instead, it is a strict training sergeant all along. He isn’t there to stroke your ego. He shouts in your face whenever you are lazy. We hate him, we trash-talk him, we feel humiliated. But 9 months later, when you check out your newfound abs in the mirror, or when you understand the Italian lines on the menu, you come to realize: He is the only one who doesn’t give up on you, even when you have already quit mentally. Self-compassion is crucial, yes. But sometimes, we do need a kick in the pants to start the journey. That is when the app does its job.
Let’s come back to the art of ‘cheating’. You might think that mute-tapping through a lesson while half-watching Netflix is an exercise in futility. It is. But it sustains the ritual of opening the app. Behavioral Science calls this ‘Habit Stacking’. Before you can achieve mastery, you must first master the art of simply showing up. Discipline – even the synthetic, panic-based kind born from the terror of breaking streak – still carves out neural grooves.
“They say fake it ‘till you make it, and I did.” Taylor Swift, ‘I Can Do It With A Broken Heart’
You might spend the first 250 days fueled entirely by the fear of that judgment-filled green owl. But then comes day 251. Suddenly, an Italian phrase slips out of your mouth. Unbidden. Effortless. That is the moment of Eureka: extrinsic motivation (the Streak) built the bridge so that intrinsic motivation could walk across. Without that bridge, you would have drowned in the river of procrastination long ago.
For those who are struggling with executive dysfunction, having ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), or just being exhausted after a grueling 8-hour workday, the Streak is not the shackle. It is a crutch for a limping will. We have no right to criticize someone with a broken leg using a prosthetic for walking. We have no right to criticize someone with a fractured leg for using a crutch to walk. Why, then, do we mock the brain’s need for exogenous dopamine to jumpstart a challenging task? Those cheerful sounds, the shimmering badges, or this digital confetti function as a spark plug for the rusted engine of our willpower. They help us overcome the enormous friction of procrastination. It is far better to reluctantly complete a 5-minute workout to save the streak than to do nothing at all and let our muscles atrophy in the comfort of absolute freedom.
The Choice Is Still Yours – Always
Enough wandering. We are back to where we started.
You turn off the lights. You sink into bed, finally horizontal after a long day. You feel a narcotic sense of peace because all your “chores” are done – the streaks maintained, the boxes checked, the dailies completed, the virtual pet fed, the meditation logged. You have satisfied the algorithms. You have proven your fidelity to each one. You are, for this day at least, safe from digital disappointment.
And then, your phone glows one last time in the darkness, a final notification like a controlling partner winking from across the room: “Good boy/Good girl. See you tomorrow. Don’t be late~”. And you will show up. Because at this point, you don’t know how not to. Because the thought of breaking the streak is more stressful than maintaining it. Because 340 + n days sounds so much better than 0. The app thinks it has won. It believes it has made you dependent, and crushing of all, it thinks it convinced you that this dependency was your idea all along.
But now, you know the game.
So go ahead. Keep the streak. Keep the apps. Next time, arch an eyebrow at the barrage of notifications. Smile at the manipulation. Because you are no longer obeying the algorithms, you are exploiting them.
—
Notes:
[1] Olivia Guy-Evans, ‘Anxious Preoccupied Attachment Style: How It Develops & How To Cope’, Simply Psychology, 21 March 2025, https://www.simplypsychology.org/anxious-preoccupied-attachment.html
[2]Evivve, ‘Beyond Points and Badges: The Neuroscience of Effective Gamified Learning’, Evivve, (19 May 2025), https://evivve.com/beyond-points-and-badges-the-neuroscience-of-effective-gamified-learning/
[3] Kendra Cherry, ‘How Self-Determination Theory Explains Motivation’, Verywell Mind,(29 October 2025), https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-self-determination-theory-2795387
[4] Kendra Cherry, ‘What Is Extrinsic Motivation? Do You Need Rewards, Prizes, and Praise to Stay Motivated?’, Verywell Mind,(11 November 2025), https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-extrinsic-motivation-2795164
[5] Kendra Cherry, ‘How the Overjustification Effect Reduces Motivation’, Verywell Mind,(17 December 2025), https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-overjustification-effect-2795386
[6] M. Powers, ‘Understanding Measures of Performance and Measures of Effectiveness’, 5 August 2015, LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/understanding-measures-performance-effectiveness-matthew-powers/
—
Bio:
Quỳnh Vuong is an INC associated researcher, graphic designer and visual culture researcher, based in Vietnam. She is currently completing her MA in Applied Arts at Ton Duc Thang University in Ho Chi Minh City. Grounded in the mechanics of mass media production, she investigates the digital afterlife of heritage. Her practice re-encodes traditional narratives within interactive systems, asking critical questions about cultural translation, audience affect, and how smart technologies might serve as vessels for resonance rather than erasure.