Growth Ritual #88

📋 In This Issue:

• Stop Building Dopamine Slot Machines: The “Attention Recovery” Economy Is Next

• Is Your App Instantly Forgettable? The Cure Is “Emotional Design” — 🔒

• How to Build the AI Co-Pilot Every Real Estate Agent Will Pay For — 🔒

• YC Demo Day: How to Stop Chasing AI Hype and Start Building Real Revenue — 🔒

• The $100 Billion Lie Fueling the HR Tech Industry — 🔒

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Stop Building Dopamine Slot Machines: The “Attention Recovery” Economy Is Next

We have a paradox on our hands.

We are living in an era of infinite stimulation. At any given second, you can pull out a device and access every song, show, and snippet of information ever created.

By all logic, boredom should be extinct.

Yet, people are more bored than ever.

And it’s not an accident. It’s a design flaw.

A new bombshell perspective in Nature just handed us the treasure map. It argues that the very digital media we build, market, and sell is the cause of this new boredom epidemic.

For founders, indie hackers, and marketers like us, this isn’t just an academic curiosity. It’s a flashing neon sign pointing to one of the biggest, most underserved markets of the next decade.

The “Boredom Epidemic” Is Real and Measurable

This isn’t just a “feeling”. This is hard data.

I’m looking at the research right now. It highlights a “concerning rise in boredom” from 2009 to 2020.

This, of course, maps perfectly to the explosion of smartphones, social media, and streaming.

• One study of U.S. high school students found a significant, steady increase in boredom from 2010 to 2017.

• Another, even more staggering meta-analysis of Chinese college students from 2009 to 2020 found that boredom proneness went from the 50th percentile to the 94th percentile.

That’s not a trend. That’s a societal-level psychological shift.

And here’s the kicker. People use digital media to relieve boredom. It’s one of the top-cited reasons for use. But the data is brutal: it’s an ineffective coping strategy.

Worse, it’s not just ineffective—it causally increases boredom. Studies showed that using social media, and even just skipping and fast-forwarding online videos, made participants more bored over time.

You’ve built the perfect “Boredom Feedback Loop”.

How We Accidentally Built the Boredom Machine

The research breaks down exactly why this happens. As product builders, this is the “why” we need to understand.

Our current “engagement-first” playbook is built on four psychological flaws.

1. It Shatters Focus: Boredom is defined by an inability to engage, by inattention. What does our digital world run on? Notifications. The average young person gets a median of 237 notifications per day. We’ve designed a system that trains inattention, then we’re surprised when people can’t pay attention.

2. It Raises the Bar for “Fun”: We’ve all seen the content shift: text -> images -> long-form video -> high-intensity, short-form video. We are habituating our users to constant, high-level rewards. This makes normal, less-stimulating activities (like reading, thinking, or even just working) feel mind-numbingly boring. We’ve created a tolerance, like a drug.

3. It’s a Tsunami of Meaningless Crap: The paper points out that meaning emerges from coherence. But our media streams are fragmented, chaotic, and incoherent. An Instagram post about pizza has zero connection to a tweet about space exploration. This noise makes it impossible to find meaning, and a core component of boredom is a lack of meaning.

4. It Creates “Product FOMO”: Your phone always offers a more entertaining alternative than the task at hand. The research calls this “raising opportunity costs”. Because your users are aware of the 100 entertaining things they could be doing on their phone, the one thing they have to do (like work, or talk to their family) feels like a prison.

The Real Gold Rush: The “Attention Recovery“ Economy

So, what’s the play?

For 15 years, the money has been in the Attention Economy. We built dopamine slot machines. The winners were the ones who got the most hooks in, who shattered the most focus, who created the most FOMO.

That era is ending. The market is saturated, and the psychological side effects are now a documented crisis.

The next billion-dollar opportunities are not in the Attention Economy. They are in the “Attention Recovery“ Economy.

This research is clear: boredom serves an important function. It’s a signal. It’s our brain’s way of saying, “This isn’t meaningful. Find something that is”. It’s supposed to motivate self-reflection and a search for meaningful engagement.

But we’ve broken that signal. We short-circuit it by reaching for a phone, which only digs the hole deeper.

The real opportunity isn’t more stimulation. It’s the antidote.

This is the core thesis I explore in my “Black Book,” The AI Entrepreneur’s Guide—finding and building solutions to real, deep human problems.

The opportunity isn’t another social media app. It’s a new category of “Anti-Apps” that:

1. Apps That Train Focus

The paper explicitly cites research that “attention training can reduce both state boredom and boredom proneness.” Think meditation apps, but supercharged.

The goal of these apps is to actively build your attention span, turning your phone from a distraction machine into a focus gym.

• Forest: This is the classic example. You plant a virtual tree when you want to focus. If you leave the app to check Instagram, the tree dies. It’s brilliant because it gamifies not using your phone. Its success is built on a single, powerful “anti-app” premise.

• Brain Training Apps (Lumosity, Elevate, CogniFit): While you’re still “in an app”, the entire purpose is different. These are apps developed by neuroscientists with a library of games specifically designed to improve cognitive skills like attention, processing speed, and focus. You’re not killing time; you’re doing cognitive push-ups.

• Freedom / Cold Turkey Blocker: These are the “nuclear option”. They are apps whose sole function is to block other apps and websites. People are paying for a service that restricts their device’s functionality, which tells you everything you need to know about the demand for focus.

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2. Apps That Generate Meaning

This is the category I’m most excited about. Instead of serving you a fragmented, meaningless feed, these apps help you create coherence and meaning from your own life.

Apps that create coherence instead of destroying it. Think AI-powered journaling, guided self-reflection, and tools that help users connect their daily tasks to larger goals.

• AI Journaling Apps (Rosebud, Reflection.app): This is the next frontier. These apps act as an “empathetic, intelligent friend”. You write your thoughts, and the AI asks insightful, contextual follow-up questions. It helps you spot patterns in your own thinking and reframe negative thoughts, actively helping you process your day.

• Stoic: This app combines a guided journal with the principles of stoic philosophy. It doesn’t just ask “how was your day?” It asks you to reflect on what you control, what you’re grateful for, and how you can live more virtuously. It’s an app designed for meaningful self-reflection.

• Daylio / Grid Diary: These are simpler but effective. They use structured templates and mood tracking to help you quickly identify patterns. The goal isn’t to scroll, but to provide a 60-second “check-in” that builds self-awareness over time.

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3. Apps That Encourage “Doing Nothing”

This category is about creating space. It’s not about curing boredom with more stimulation, but about making boredom less jarring by reducing the noise.

Tools that help users process their boredom instead of just reacting to it.

• Blank Spaces: A brilliant “anti-app”. Its entire purpose is to make your phone boring. It simplifies your home screen, hides apps, and cuts down on visual distractions. It’s an app designed to reduce your desire to use your phone in the first place.

• Meditation Apps (Headspace, Calm, Insight Timer): These are often miscategorized. Yes, they are content libraries, but their core product is stillness. The goal of a 10-minute meditation is to practice sitting with your own thoughts—the very thing the attention economy trains you to avoid.

• Forest: I’m listing this one again because it fits here, too. The result of planting a tree for 30 minutes is that you are forced to... well, do nothing (or, more likely, do the one thing you’re supposed to be doing). You’re left alone with your work and your thoughts, which is the “productive boredom” we’ve lost.

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4. Apps That Connect to the Real World (Offline-First)

These are my favorite. Their entire value proposition is “this works without the internet”. They are designed for a world where being “offline” is a feature, not a bug.

Apps whose entire goal is to get you offline and engaged in a meaningful real-world activity.

• Organic Maps: A fantastic alternative to Google Maps. It’s open-source and privacy-focused, but its killer feature is that it’s designed for offline use. You download maps for your region and can navigate, walk, and cycle without a data connection. It severs the cord.

• Obsidian: This is a note-taking app, but its core philosophy is “offline-first”. Unlike Notion or Google Docs, your data is saved locally on your device. This makes it a powerful tool for deep, focused writing and thinking without needing to open a browser tab.

• Instapaper: A simple but profound tool. It lets you save articles to read later, and it downloads them for offline access. You can go to a park, put your phone in airplane mode, and read 10 long-form articles without a single notification or new “breaking” headline.

• MindKeep: A new-wave “offline AI” app. It runs AI models on your device to help you draft notes, manage tasks, and solve problems, all without an internet connection. This is a massive shift—giving you the power of AI without the distraction of the web.

As you can see, the “Attention Recovery” economy is already a multi-billion dollar market hiding in plain sight. The opportunity is massive.