This one’s more unfiltered than usual, part serious, part satire—happy weekend reading :)

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Online life is a never-ending series of pings—emails, texts, group chats, Slack, Discord, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and all the not-urgent-but-pretending-to-be-urgent app notifs.1 At first, it was cool. The internet promised discovery and democratization that could make all our wildest dreams come true.

All we had to do was be available!

But not surprisingly, this isn’t efficient, specifically attention-efficient. We might not always be spending money, but we’re always spending scarce time and attention hoping for serendipitous value to come our way.

All things considered, it rarely does.

To be available is to be open to great possibility, but at the risk of great exploitation — not necessarily by individual people but rather by attention-grabbing machines that are smarter than us at laser-focusing on achieving their goals.

In 5 years, it’ll seem bizarre that we ever allowed anyone to email or text or call us AND the norm was to at least think about replying to them. Being reachable 24/7 by anyone and for anything will have been a blip in time, an absurd anomaly in the long arc of the hyperconnected digital age.

In the coming years, we’re going to aggressively revoke access to our attention.

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In case you didn’t recognize it, the title is a riff on a famous book, a memoir by Haruki Murakami — What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

Murakami writes: "For me, running is both exercise and a metaphor." He details his interest in running, training for the New York City marathon, the mental and physical process, sensations, reflections.

He muses on how running relates to creative life: “Most of what I know about writing I've learned through running every day.”

For me, reading is both a literal activity and a metaphor. When you write, people assume you read a lot. And the thing they assume you read a lot of is books. They want lists of book recommendations, names of authors.

I do read a lot, but not in the way people think. Dare I say that I think reading lots of books — like hundreds per year — is overrated. I’m a fan of more dispersed kinds of reading. Bite-sized, decentralized, conversational. My favorite kind of reading is reading betwe…

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For the past year and change, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I spend my time. And not just thinking about it but also making some blunt force changes to it.

Not to say I wasn’t thinking about time before, but I wasn’t thinking the right way. I was more worried about time from the perspective of where I was going and how fast I could go — less from a place of clear purpose, energy, alignment, and the scariness that is opportunity cost.

In this process, I’ve crystallized some truths about myself and the world. Truths that I vaguely knew before but somehow didn’t take seriously enough or thought I could work around.

There’s no rocket science in these truths. They’re as old as time. But they’re lessons that I think every single person has to learn for themself.

Truth #1: Your brain and body have a default mode that works.

I’m a highly analytical and creative person whose brain works mostly like that of a creative. Lots of starts and stops, ups and downs, nothings and then all of a sudden spectacular somethings. Understandably it’s very hard to schedule for these. I need big chunks of uninterrupted, unscheduled time to get anything meaningful done. So I’m the person who suffers on the “manager’s schedule” and relishes in the “maker’s schedule” (yet needs to self-enforce some structure).

Truth #2: If you’re not on your time, you’re on someone else’s.

And if you’re not working on your “life’s work,” you’re working on someone else’s. This has always been true (so much so that I feel silly admitting I didn’t pay enough attention to it before). And this is true for almost any kind of demand on your time. A DM asking for feedback on a product. An email inviting me to come on a podcast. A VC asking to meet just to “trade notes” on a sector. A new acquaintance asking to grab coffee. Or as significant as someone asking me to work on their startup.

Truth #3: The more things you do, the less well you do each of them.

There’s a sweet spot for the number of things — priorities, passions, people that any person can dedicate time and energy to. If it’s just one though, “work” for example, there’s paradoxically some ineffectiveness to it. You need some variety, to give rest and relief to your brain, to have new experiences that spark new thoughts. But above a certain number, all of the things start taking a hit. There’s no single perfect number, and it’ll vary by person, capacity, phase of life, and the like. But between you and me, I think the number is best between 2 and 4 things (and it’s rarely 4).

Once I accepted these truths in earnest, I started making changes to how I do things. These changes can be small and gradual or big and sudden. They can allow for gray areas or take a strictly black and white, binary approach. Perhaps because of my tendency to find myself in the gray, I’ve leaned more towards the binary. And out of processing these truths, I’ve come up with 2 new rules for myself.

3 hours or nothing.

This is for the things that always present themselves as “quick.” A quick question about something, a quick phone call, a quick coffee. They’re always billed as 30 minutes or less — never more. But I’ve realized no matter how short the on-the-line or face-to-face parts are (and usually they’re not), these always take more time and energy. There’s tangible or mental preparation. And they linger as distractions. (Introverts and creatives more often seem to experience time this way.)

Rule #1: don’t agree to anything “quick” unless you’re willing to spend 3+ hours on it.

When you follow the 3 hours or nothing rule, your priorities get clear, you procrastinate less, you’re more focused and more productive, and time management becomes a lot easier. You say “no” a LOT more. And the “yes” becomes a lot more emphatic. You find yourself less stressed, less overthinking about the past and less anxious about the future.

This is one way of calculating opportunity cost that you often don’t and embedding it in your choices. And more specifically using binaries to help. Yes and no is a binary. 3 hours or nothing is a binary. Personal vs. professional can be another. So one of my sub-rules is to look for more ways to be binary (I’ll probably write more on this later).

I’m giving examples that are mostly about other people asking me for time, but it works the other way around too. I don’t initiate “quick” things anymore either. So when I ask someone to grab coffee or grab lunch, I’m willing to spend 3 hours. (There may inevitably be conflicts or they may not have time to, but I’m willing, and I wouldn’t feel bad afterwards if it ended up being 3 hours. I’d be satisfied.)

Longer-form anything is much less transactional and more human too. Magical things don’t happen in 30 minute increments. They happen in those unexpectedly long, late night conversations when nobody has an impending deadline to impose.

I call this rule #1 because sometimes you have to scale it up. If I’m considering a job opportunity or moving to a new city or taking on a new creative interest, whether it’s 30 minutes or 3 hours makes no difference — both mean nothing. Enter rule #2.

*P.S. Analytical me wrote a ‘director’s cut’ on why 3 hours specifically in the footnotes.

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For someone to buy what you're selling, they need to perceive it as worth the cost. I’m using a transactional metaphor, but almost everything in life can be thought about as an exchange that people must decide to make — whether it’s buying and selling, giving and receiving, or seeing and believing.

We tend to talk about the tangible factors that go into this calculation but less often the intangibles. One of the most powerful of these is taste. And while there is some objectivity to taste, much of it is actually subjective. Sometimes the subjectivity is influenced by people around the decision-maker, and other times it stems from a unique opinion held by that person alone.

When something aligns with a person’s taste, the transaction or exchange is more likely to happen. And when it does, it’s more likely to feel good for both parties.

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For people in a tiny slice of the world and internet, there’s no greater canon event than the prospect of a new social app taking off. Sometimes there are multi-year droughts. In a plentiful year, there are one or two prospects that excite us. (And I wrote a stream of consciousness musing about the usual psychological journey.)

Arguably the first meaningful new prospect of this year is Airchat (version 2.0). It launched to the public 5 days ago, and it’s taken over at least the tech twitter hype train. I joined it a few hours after launch with a few hundred other people.

And since then, my mind has formed thoughts, some that I’ve decided to type out here. But this isn’t a comprehensive analysis or review or profile or whatever else will be written in spades in coming weeks. (And disclaimer, I’m not about to make comparisons to Clubhouse here.)

But if you’re another one of the few people amused by this little corner of the world, you might enjoy…

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This essay was featured in Dirt.

What is it about a new social app dropping that makes everyone remotely connected to tech go temporarily insane? Time to drop everything to go full throttle in search of an invite. But don’t seem desperate. You want an invite. But whatever, no big deal if not (but just to be clear, you do want it, and badly). Ok, you’re in.

Then everyone wants to know — what am I supposed to use this for? The same thing I already use the other apps for? That can’t be right. Is this the new Twitter? No, it’s Twitter meets Clubhouse meets Duolingo. Oh it’s memes-only? LinkedIn for gen alpha? the third Vine reboot? The Canadian TikTok killer? Oh is this the authenticity platform we’ve been promised? Oh, it’s just for close friends. Love that. Can I get a 100 invites?

And who am I supposed to be on here? The same person I am on the other apps? Or somebody else? Hmm. Maybe this is a chance to reinvent myself. To abandon the persona I got backed into when that one tweet went viral. To free myself of my mutuals that I don’t even like. To change my profile pic without seeming like I’m vain. A new you for a new season of life. Oh the possibilities. By the way, can I invest?

Who made this thing though? And what is their political affiliation? Are they for free speech? Are they rich? What are their views on bodily autonomy? You need answers before you can decide if you even like the app. No other way. But the founders are so cool, and like powerful and stuff. Maybe I should give it a try, for the sake of the art.

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I’ve always had strict rules for buying second-hand furniture. Only buy things that you can’t sleep on and that are easy to clean. This immediately rules out mattresses and couches and anything upholstered.

But once, when I was in the throes of med school, I caved.1 I bought a leather couch off Craigslist. It was small enough to get it up to my 3rd floor walk-up. It was one of those last minute deals — for $100.

I rationalized it to myself: leather is easy to clean, and it was temporary. It was just a placeholder couch. But I ended up keeping the couch until I graduated.

I’ve been thinking about the placeholders we let into our life and how long we let them stay. A placeholder is a “person or thing that occupies the position or place of another person or thing.” By nature, placeholders are meant to be temporary.

Sometimes placeholders arise from external limits (e.g. you can't get something).2 Other times, they’re driven by our internal feelings and motivations (whether we’re aware or not). I find this latter category far more captivating to dissect.

And my theory is that these kinds of placeholders fall into 3 categories:

Placeholders of exploration

“Placeholders of exploration” are bridges between curiosity and commitment. They let you feel out new interests, jobs, even identities & lifestyles. They let you experiment with unique paths before having to commit to one. People often explore new kinds of work by taking short-term contracts or apprenticeships. I could even redefine “sabbatical” as a placeholder of exploration.

Placeholders of convenience

“Placeholders of convenience” tend to be the shortcuts and side streets of our daily lives. They're convenient stand-ins. They offer utility and are cost-effective. (This could be in time, money, or some other measure.) They’re the path of least resistance and might even be sound choices for now, yet can divert you from long-term ideals. Getting takeout instead of cooking is one. Accepting a job you don't like just for the salary is another. Or, snagging that $100 second-hand couch.

Placeholders of avoidance

“Placeholders of avoidance” are things that serve as emotional bunkers. They are the people and things we cling to. We cling to them to shield ourselves from facing deeper fears, decisions, and changes. (And often we cling to something intangible too — a belief, an identity.) They may not have started out as these, but somewhere along the way they turned into them. They became barriers to your progress and growth. A classic example is a “safe” career or relationship.3

I think of these placeholders as existing on a spectrum — from proactive and intentional on one end to reactive and avoidant on the other:

Exploration is about trying new things. The main goal is to grow and discover. Convenience is about fitting things into your life efficiently. Avoidance is about fear of confrontation and change.

The risk of regrettable time spent increases as you move right on the spectrum.

It’s also a spectrum because people’s feelings towards placeholders can change. This happens naturally as you engage more with these placeholders or move into different life phases.

Hence, a placeholder of exploration today can become one of avoidance tomorrow. And one man’s placeholder can also be another man’s permanent treasure — it’s subjective.4

Let’s take a placeholder career as an example:

Maybe at first it was an exploration of a new, exciting career. You thought it could be fulfilling long-term, so you wanted to try it. At some point you realized this might not be true. But, you got comfortable in the job. You knew how to do it well and with little effort. The paycheck was great. It was just convenient.

But then you start to see that the job's negatives are starting to outweigh the convenience it offers. You feel existential angst. You want to move on to something more in line with your passions. But it’s scary to change, to think about quitting anything. So you start making excuses for why you can’t quit just yet. And you’re now in avoidance mode.

This is illustrative but I’d be willing to bet that the majority of people have been in a situation like this, whether with their career or something else meaningful.

And this arc — from curiosity to comfort and ultimately to avoidance — hides within it a profound emotional journey. At the last step of avoidance, we face the fear of leaving behind what's known for the unknown. This fear, often coupled with societal expectations, can paralyze us if we let it.

One challenge with placeholders is realizing that they’re even there to begin with.

You often celebrate placeholders of exploration. You tend to at least notice placeholders of convenience early on. But placeholders of avoidance are trickier because they involve first noticing your emotions and acknowledging them. And your emotions are things that you can hide even from yourself. Even once you discover them, these emotions can be hard to not suppress and to actually act upon.

The first thing to do is call out that the placeholders exist.

I’m sure you can think of one or two questionable placeholders in your life right now. Which person or thing in your life has been there longer than it should? Has it far surpassed its useful life? Is it something you’ve been emotionally avoiding dealing with?

For everything else that doesn’t immediately come to mind, it’s useful to think about the big categories of life that you care about. Maybe family, friends, career, relationships, health, home, lifestyle.

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“Down the rabbit hole" is an English-language idiom which refers to getting deep into something, or ending up somewhere strange. Lewis Carroll introduced the phrase as the title for chapter one of his 1865 novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, after which the term slowly entered the English vernacular ... The idiom is often used to describe a person who is researching a topic on the internet or exploring new things on the web.”1

Before I ever was in “tech,” I already knew a lot about it. I would find myself going down rabbitholes learning about it. Not because anyone was telling me to, but because it was a natural gravitational pull. I was curious about a lot of things in the tech ecosystem. Curious about the idea of creating something that scales from scratch. Curious about melding creativity with productivity. Curious about consumer as a category. Curious about what a career as an entrepreneur entailed.

Granted, after having experienced tech from the “inside,” I know a lot more than I once knew. A lot more about how to actually make something with any kind of tech in it. And I have a lot more confidence about what I know and whatever it is that I don’t yet know. But I also reflect that the rabbithole knowledge I had before was quite powerful. I was able to learn a lot from following my innate curiosity with abandon. And I’ve had this same kind of realization across a lot of different topics (namely certain niches of business, fashion, film, writing, and human behavior ).

Rabbithole knowledge is the hyperspecific stuff you learn about a particular subject without any obvious need to know it. It's not related to your field of study. It's not related to a degree you're seeking. It's not related to a job you have. It's not related to a person you're trying to impress. Rabbithole knowledge is just the result of a strong gravitational pull of curiosity that can’t easily be explained.

Good things come from going down rabbitholes. Rabbitholes have the potential to be powerful portals into worlds that you don’t yet know that you deeply care about. That you care about being a part of not just for a moment, but in a meaningful way. I'm convinced that your enduring passion lies in the rabbitholes you've been down or will go down — if you just let yourself fall.

Telling the rabbitholes apart

Trap or Portal

Some rabbitholes are traps. Because the curiosity that led you down them was the wrong kind of curiosity. Going down a rabbithole because you’re curious about a subject is good. It's about learning for no purpose other than to learn. But going down a rabbithole because you’re competitive — because there’s a game you’ve identified that you just want to win — is a weaker, more dangerous signal.

There are an infinite number of rabbitholes that you can fall down in pursuit of winning a game. If that’s the sole goal, you’re likely to keep bouncing from game to game without a healthy anchor. You're likely to get rabbithole whiplash. Traps are also dangerous because you can end up spending years in them despite not seeing a long-term vision that you want. And they’re more prone to causing burnout because there’s less intrinsic drive. I’ve probably spent years of my adult life falling down rabbitholes where I was optimizing for winning some game. Where I got sucked into the microcosm I fell into and the bigger picture got hazy.

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This one’s about something I’ve been noticing a lot and can’t seem to unsee — kind of like when you buy a red car and then all you can see on the road are red cars.1

Recently I was visiting home. My parents, who I wouldn’t exactly call social, mentioned they were going out to meet friends. As if we'd reversed roles and gone back in time, I wanted to know: to where? to meet who? at this hour?

I got the full story after they returned home safe. These friends were old acquaintances. I wondered from when. They said they’d met when they used to live in upstate New York decades ago. My mom proceeded to process aloud how non-awkward and nice it was to meet again. And they’ve gotten together several weeks in a row now.

Everyone talks about the importance of the first impression. But I’ve started to think that — in life and work — we should be optimizing more for the second encounter. The obvious rebuttal is that if you mess up the first, you may not get a second, but I think it’s an overstated fear (and there are many great firsts that lead to spectacularly failed seconds too).

I. Making new old friends

The conversation about loneliness gets louder every day. But if we do need more friends, I think we optimize too much for new — meeting new people, in new places, in new situations. The conversations tend to be superficial or simplistic. There’s limited shared context. And naturally there’s low familiarity and trust.

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Greetings fellow theorists — this is a patron-only edition of Working Theorys // If it resonates, please ♡, share, or comment (i.e. tell the Substack algorithm gods to let more people read it).

Attention is a zero-sum game. When the world’s population grows, the total attention available in the world grows. But otherwise, nothing moves the needle.

In the past, the vast majority of attention accrued to a small group of people. This was when media was centralized and distribution was gated. Now, with the internet ubiquitous and media and distribution decentralized, more people can get a smaller piece of this attention. But if you get in the game, you have to compete.

The past decade or so has been about getting on to whichever platform is on the rise — YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Vine, TikTok — and building a following. Pick a niche, make content, be consistent, optimize for the native algorithm, cross-promote with other creators, get sponsors, create products and services to sell. The content creation playbook became a proxy for the “attention” playbook.

But I think we’re at a state of maturity with these platforms and playbooks. People want the next playbook to rise above the noise. Yet I don’t think there are any truly new plays left. The new attention playbooks will be full of old plays.

Old like MadMen and all the gambits from the golden age of brand marketing:

For the past few decades companies have jockeyed to create new brands, raise awareness, embed them in popular culture, and make them last. They’ve done this through creating novel names, designing simple yet memorable logos, choosing brand colors, fonts, icons, etc. And the winners have permeated everyday life.

This approach of creating new brand names has been incredibly successful, but it takes a lot of public and user education and a long time, and very few are successful.

But brands don’t just focus on company and product names. They get hyper specific about word association too. These words feed into all “copy” — taglines, slogans, ad campaigns, blogs, how they talk about the brand. There are good words, bad words, words that you can own, and words that you can’t own. And all of this amidst a lot of competition.

Word association is one of the old plays, and it’s interesting to see how it’s evolved. I’m particularly fascinated by short-form brand language: taglines, slogans, “brand words” that are used in abundance in social posts and the like.

The fewer words a slogan has, the bolder it is. If I started a personal computing business tomorrow and wanted to own the word “think,” it’d be hard to compete against a giant like IBM. But perhaps if I chose a slightly more obscure word or I knew how to run the UGC platform playbook already, I could try to make a dent.

Which brings me back to word association fame.

What’s the play for someone in today’s attention game trying to capture some of it?

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Greetings fellow theorists — this is a patron-only edition of Working Theorys where I share my rough drafts — more casual and candid mini-essays about top of mind themes.

#1 Time-to-Lameness

Anyone who creates things for others is looking for that first “magic moment.”

I’d describe it as the first instance that a user viscerally delights in what your product offers. This isn’t necessarily the first time they ever engage with your product, but ideally it would be. The “magic moment” is closely related to “time to value” — a clinical term for describing how long it takes a new user to derive value from your product. The shorter this time period, the better.

In startup lore, the canonical example of the magic moment is from Facebook’s early days. They figured out that a new user who gets 10 friends (mutuals) within ~ 2 weeks of joining the app would be a retained user. So, in reverse fashion, that was determined to be the minimum necessary state to produce the magic moment.

At the time Facebook launched though, the expected longevity of a successful consumer product was much greater than it is today. Now the concept of software longevity itself is in existential crisis. Things can become cool incredibly fast and they can become uncool nearly as fast. I’ve talked about my belief that trying to make every product or company “generational” now is a kind of trap.

So who decides how long you last? Some of it’s in your control, and for consumer in particular, much of it’s in the hands of the consumer. Builders are wondering — if perceived value depreciates so fast, should they even make products that are meant to last or just make quick hits and capture value as soon as possible?

The accelerating depreciation of cool means we need to minimize time to value and time to value capture, but also that we must try to maximize time to lameness. I’ve been thinking a bit about the latter and I see a few ways to approach it (which I might opine on in greater depth in a future Working Theory):

• Accept a slower ascent to “cool.” I have a theory that the slower your ramp up to being “cool,” the longer you’ll probably stay there. Early hype and viral growth can give false signals of product-market fit and long-term retention. Avoiding these hype subsidies by default makes you operate more objectively and with greater attention to true metrics and long-term value.

• Time-proof yourself. The more utilitarian a product is, the less I think it’s vulnerable to cultural shifts that render a brand or brand-aligned feature archaic. Timeless design and utility can make it harder to get the initial viral spike but pay off in the end. Riding trends is the opposite of time-proofing.

• Create a new category and claim it. If you can be first in a new category, and maybe even name the product concept, you have more power to remain a user’s choice. Kleenex is a classic example; by virtue of owning the cultural product reference, Kleenex helps maintain its own market position.

• Experiment with seasonality. If you can’t beat the coolness cycle, join it. If you expect your category’s product longevity to be 1-2 years, build a product that you intend to last just that long. And importantly, plan your value capture strategy so that you can get growth and profit in that time. Even if one product gets lame fast, you have another to take its place.

In the end, if you can’t find a way to extend time-to-lameness, your best bet is being ready and willing to compete against yourself. (I’m talking about products, but I think you could just as well apply this to people too.) Get ahead of your own descent from cool and into lameness. Get comfortable cannibalizing yourself.

#2 The netizen self vs. the citizen self

The Prestige is one of Christoper Nolan’s greatest films. It’s set in London circa 1900. The main characters, Angier and Borden (played by Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale) are magicians turned bitter personal and professional rivals.

(If you’ve seen the film, you can skip the multimedia plot summaries below …)

Borden invents a trick called The Transported Man in which he appears to travel instantly between two [wooden boxes] on opposite ends of the stage. Angier becomes obsessed with figuring out Borden’s method and even develops an imitation act.1

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Greetings fellow theorists — this is a patron-only edition of Working Theorys where I share my rough drafts — more casual and candid mini-essays about top of mind themes.

#1 Books are the new athleisure

Athleisure became ever more prominent during COVID, and I’d argue much of “business casual” attire has now been replaced by business athleisure attire.1 (Afterall, Lululemon even has designated work pants.) The critique or satire of traditional athleisure of course is that most people who wear it aren’t actually doing something athletic, whether in that moment or as a broader lifestyle.

But this is one of my favorite rationalizations about athleisure:

Athleisure broadcasts your commitment to controlling your body through working out. And to even get into a pair of Lululemons, you have to have a disciplined-looking body. (The founder of the company once said that “certain women” aren’t meant to wear his brand.) “Self-exposure and self-policing meet in a feedback loop,” Weigel wrote. “Because these pants only ‘work’ on a certain kind of body, wearing them reminds you to go out and get that body.”2

So why do I say that books are the new athleisure?

Everyone wants to be seen holding one but only a few are actually reading them.

And regardless of whether people are even reading them (it’s obviously hard to prove), I think the desire to read has increasingly come from the desire to seem like someone who reads, like someone who is well-read. Maybe this isn’t new, but it’s definitely having a revival — a kind of post-digital-media-saturation hobby, self-help trend, and virtue signal all in one.

While many people still discover books by word of mouth, there are more and more ways books are being marketed directly and indirectly. There’s the Goodreads push for book goals per year, the rise of booktok and booktube for younger generations, and every celebrity or influencer writing their own book too. Books are a high brow, aspirationally-intellectual product to sell and to buy and to broadcast.

Is this necessarily a bad thing if the net result is that more people do read? I guess that depends on how noble you think it is. Most people, many smart people, say reading a lot is an invaluable endeavor. But of course it depends what you are reading — the “healthy food” or “junk food” of books as it were. But much like athleisure, if looking the part helps you be the part, then maybe it’s net good.

One of my favorite recent finds that speaks so unbelievably well to this idea:

#2 Twitter goes Substack with “articles”

A painful thing with writing of late has been my inability to just share links on Twitter. Ever since Substack launched its “Notes” feature — the native short-form posting feature that’s an awful lot like Tweets — it’s become product-non-grata to Twitter.3 Just mentioning the word “Substack” or sharing a Substack link will get your Twitter / X post aggressively shadow banned.4

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Greetings fellow theorists — this is a patron-only edition of Working Theorys where I share my rough drafts — more casual and candid mini-essays about top of mind themes.

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Greetings fellow theorists — this is a patron-only edition of Working Theorys where I share more casual and candid mini-theorys about top of mind ideas.

#1 “Healthy” social apps are usefulness-first

There was a question1 asked on Twitter about the nature of “healthy” social apps and whether and how they can work:

“Is building a "healthier" social app always dead on arrival? BeReal, Path, probably others.... Like if tiktok is mcdonalds, is there a market for a sweetgreen? Or do apps need to be indulgent.”

Over a long horizon, I don’t believe “healthy” apps can sustain momentum as public, open-network based products. For example, a healthy Twitter, healthy Instagram, healthy Tiktok wouldn’t get to massive scale and wouldn’t win at scale. The more mass public the network, the more the value prop needs to (and perhaps devolves to) appeal to base human desires — for entertainment, status, etc.

BeReal started as a healthy option focused on “real” friends participation instead of just mass consumption, and on random, “live” posting to minimize processed photos. But to keep people from getting bored, it seems to be trying to expand content type and open up the network to more discovery. Most recently it also announced a move into creator and brand presence, a monetization-hopeful direction. So BeReal did work as a kind of healthier option, but it’s hard to keep scaling and stay “healthy” in the truest sense of the phrase.

The more you have “healthiness” as a core feature, the more I believe you need to lean into utility, especially to start. I wrote a lot more on social utility here. It’s also worth drawing a distinction between true “social” apps and “media” apps.

You can also target a more niche group of people who have an identity around something “healthy.” The market size for vices always looks bigger than the market sizes for virtues. But that shouldn’t dissuade you from building something, it should make you more thoughtful about how you do it.

Strava is a good example that fits both the “utility” and “niche” attributes. It started out as a utility to track your own runs, eventually built in more community features, and now is trying to become a social app too. It recently launched DMs! And the utility focus with premium features has allowed it to monetize strongly along the way.

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