The “motivation” is just the symptom of losing a battle that a normal person can’t be expected to win anyway. We’ve all been dropped into the most well-funded

The “motivation” is just the symptom of losing a battle that a normal person can’t be expected to win anyway. We’ve all been dropped into the most well-funded and technologically sophisticated casino of all time, built and maintained by armies of engineers and ML models that continuously optimize a ~infinite number of useless but highly varied casino games that are then made accessible to you 24/7 via a device in your pocket. Also all your friends are in the casino and even the ones who hate it are actually having a pretty good time. They are more than happy to send you links/offer you a seat at their particular game of choice (such as these comments on HN). Normal people have way too many everyday concerns to be (successfully) engaging in a 24/7 battle-for-attention against the most advanced attention-grabbing systems ever created. It’s so ludicrously asymmetric it seems unfair to even ascribe “motivation” to users, but the motivation for the casino designers is pretty obvious.