You Are the Loops You Run

At 2:17 a.m., the founder is staring at a green line.

Not code. Not text. A dashboard graph on his phone: revenue, last 24 hours.

The line is slightly up and to the right—about 9% higher than yesterday. He knows this because he’s refreshed the Stripe app six times in the past hour. He tells himself he’s “monitoring the business,” as if his gaze exerts some quantum influence on the numbers.

In reality, the business can’t hear him, and the graph does not care. But his nervous system has quietly been wired into a loop:

Open app → see number → micro-jolt of hope or dread → vow to stop checking so often → tap icon again twenty minutes later.

This is a smart person. He can talk about “systems thinking” and “compounding” and “feedback loops.” He’s read the right books. He’s drawn the little diagrams with arrows and stocks and flows. He can explain how an economy grows or how a virus spreads or why TikTok’s engagement curve looks like a ski jump.

But at 2:17 a.m., he is not running a system.

A system is running him.

Once you start looking for it, this is one of the strangest features of modern life: people who can explain feedback loops in the abstract, but live every day at the mercy of loops they don’t even realize they’re in.

You, too. Me, too.

You open Twitter “just for a second,” and a half hour disappears into a scroll that leaves no residue but a faint film of irritation. You glance at Slack to “see if anything’s urgent” and somehow end up reorganizing a Notion board for work you still haven’t actually done. You finish an intense block of writing, reflexively tab to Gmail, and hand your attention to whoever felt like typing your address into a “To:” field.

None of this is a moral failure. It’s a systems problem.

And systems problems don’t yield to willpower; they yield to design.

You are mostly loops

Donella Meadows, one of the clearest thinkers on systems, liked to say that if you see a behavior that persists over time, there is a feedback loop producing it. (kislayverma.com)

A feedback loop is simple: something produces an effect, that effect feeds back into the thing, and over time the pattern either stabilizes (balancing loop) or accelerates (reinforcing loop).

• Your body temperature is held around 37°C by a balancing loop: too hot, you sweat; too cold, you shiver.
• Your savings account, if you leave it alone, grows via a reinforcing loop: more principal → more interest → more principal.
• Your Twitter addiction does too: more scrolling → more micro-rewards and social comparisons → stronger craving to scroll.

We like to imagine our lives as a series of big, cinematic decisions: the moment you quit your job, the day you moved cities, the phone call when you said yes to the cofounder.

But if someone followed you around with a camera for a week and then sped up the footage, the heroic narrative would dissolve and something more humbling would appear: a creature made of loops.

Wake → check phone → bathroom → coffee → inbox → one more scroll → maybe start the hard task → notification → context-switch → guilt → coffee again.

When researchers track how habits form in the wild, they don’t see single, triumphant moments of resolve. They see repetition in context. In a study that followed people as they tried to adopt simple daily behaviors (like drinking a glass of water after breakfast), automaticity—the feeling of doing it without thinking—rose gradually and then flattened out over time. On average, it took about 66 days to plateau, with a wild range from 18 to 254 days depending on the person and the behavior. (en.wikipedia.org)

That is: you become what you repeatedly do, but the curve is slow and curved, not a straight line.

Every repeated loop is voting, quietly, for who you are.

We tend to experience “who we are” as something mysterious and internal—identity, values, personality. But a more pragmatic view is that identity is mostly the story your brain tells itself about the loops you run.

“Apparently I’m the kind of person who is always checking Slack” is an identity, just not a very inspiring one.

The question that matters is not “Do I have enough willpower?” It’s: “What loops am I in, and who put them there?”

The loops other people build for you

Walk into a casino and you can feel the geometry of addiction. There are no clocks. Machines are placed so there’s always another one in your peripheral vision. Sounds are tuned so a small win sounds like a big one. The entire building is a 3D sculpture of feedback loops.

Now look at your phone.

Push notifications, infinite scroll, “pull to refresh” gestures that work like slot machines—designers didn’t invent these patterns by accident. They came directly out of research on persuasive technology and variable reward schedules: when rewards are given on an unpredictable pattern, people (and pigeons) will press the lever compulsively. (behaviormodel.org)

One team of researchers simulated Instagram inside an fMRI machine. They showed teenagers photos (some theirs, some other people’s) with either many likes or few. When a teen saw their own photo with lots of likes, the nucleus accumbens—a core piece of the brain’s reward circuitry—lit up, the same region you see active when people win money or taste chocolate. (psychologicalscience.org) The effect was social and imitative: they were also more likely to like photos that already appeared popular.

That’s one loop:

Post → get likes → reward circuit fires → brain updates “this is worth doing again” → more posting (often of whatever got likes last time).

Notice how little of that loop is under conscious control. Status-sensitive brain regions that evolved millennia ago for tribal cohesion are now wired into a global slot machine that never closes.

The persuasive-design crowd talks in clinical language—“engagement,” “time on site”—but what they’re really doing is tuning the gain on your loops. Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, has compared modern tech companies to control rooms where a handful of people schedule the thoughts and feelings of billions by adjusting the design of feeds and notifications. (english-video.net)

None of this is conspiratorial. It’s just the natural outcome of a certain business model. When your revenue depends on attention, you design loops that harvest attention. Our brains become the contested terrain where those loops compete.

If you don’t deliberately design your own counter-loops, you will spend a nontrivial fraction of your life acting out other people’s A/B tests.

The spotlight that isn’t there

Now zoom from your phone to your sense of self.

Another famous set of experiments asks college students to do something mildly humiliating: wear a Barry Manilow t‑shirt to a room of strangers. Before entering, students are asked to estimate how many people will notice and remember the shirt.

They overestimate—by a lot. The number in their heads is about twice the actual number of observers who later recall it. (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

The researchers called this the spotlight effect: we walk through the world feeling like a mental spotlight is following us, when in fact most people are busy worrying about their own shirt.

Follow that misperception through a week and a pattern emerges:

You walk into a party, feel awkward, assume everyone notices. You send a message in a group chat that lands flat, then replay it all day. You ship a feature and assume every user spotted the one awkward edge case.

In reality, most people didn’t see it, didn’t care, or forgot in thirty seconds.

The spotlight effect is a feedback loop in your head. You imagine eyes on you, which ramps up self-consciousness, which makes you more likely to monitor yourself instead of attending outwardly, which feeds the feeling of being “on stage.” (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

Social media supercharges this. It takes a bias that already made us overestimate how much others are watching, then wraps it in literal counts: views, likes, followers. The metrics become an externalized spotlight.

Status anxiety is just the spotlight effect with better UI.

What’s tragic is how much real life gets sacrificed to impression management in a spotlight that mostly isn’t there. People contort their dating profiles into what they think will “play.” Founders spend more time crafting investor updates than talking to paying customers. Writers build elaborate personal brands while publishing very little work that requires skin in the game.

The loop is: imagine audience → pre‑emptively manage their reaction → never test what would happen if you just acted from your own values in the first place.

In other words: showmanship without substance.

Showmanship vs. substance (and the cost of signals)

There’s a reason this dynamic feels so primal: paying costs to display status is an old game. In evolutionary biology it’s called costly signaling. Think of the peacock’s tail: an enormous, energy-intensive decoration that screams, “I am so fit I can afford this ridiculous handicap.” Only a genuinely healthy peacock can pay for it; that makes the signal honest. (en.wikipedia.org)

Humans do the same thing in fancier outfits. Men, especially, will burn money on flashy but functionally redundant goods—luxury cars, conspicuous watches—when they’re in a short-term mating mindset. In lab experiments, when men are primed to think about casual sex, they’re more likely to prefer high-status products (like an expensive sports car) and to imagine themselves using them in public, where others can see. Women, in turn, read those displays fairly accurately as signals of short-term intent. (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

On social media, every post is a tiny signal in a vast mating-and-status market. The result is predictable: we end up overpaying for signals—hours spent curating, editing, polishing—while underinvesting in the underlying asset the signal is supposed to represent.

You can spend ten hours polishing a launch thread about your startup, or ten hours talking to users. Both will produce some status. But only one will produce a better product.

The temptation is always to optimize for the feedback loop that pays you sooner.

Tweets pay in minutes. Real product insight pays in months.

Which loop do you think your nervous system prefers if you let it choose unassisted?

Fast loops, slow loops

Here’s a helpful way to look at your life that I’ve stolen from systems thinking: every meaningful activity sits inside at least two feedback loops—one fast, one slow.

Fast loops give you quick, unambiguous feedback.

Slow loops pay off glacially, but compound enormously.

Consider three examples.

A founder’s fast loop:

• Post a screenshot of a new feature → likes and praise within an hour.

Their slow loop:

• Ship features, watch retention inches upward over quarters.

A writer’s fast loop:

• Post a clever thread → immediate engagement metrics.

Their slow loop:

• Write, revise, publish longform pieces → reputation builds over years.

A person’s social loop:

• Reply wittily in a group chat → instant little laughing emojis.

Their slow loop:

• Show up reliably, listen, help friends move apartments → a decade later you have people at your hospital bed.

Our brains are tuned by evolution to care a lot about what happens in the next few seconds and minutes—that’s how you avoid predators, find food, and not get ostracized from the tribe. Fast loops are thrilling because they speak the ancient language of immediate reward.

But almost everything you say you care about—mastery, deep relationships, a meaningful company, financial independence—emerges only from slow loops.

Donella Meadows pointed out that reinforcing loops (the ones that compound) almost always run into balancing loops (constraints) in the real world. (tosummarise.com) There’s always some limit: market saturation, physical exhaustion, death.

What she didn’t have to contend with is what happens when a culture full of reinforcing loops (compounding skills, compounding relationships, compounding capital) is flooded with an always-on layer of fake reinforcing loops that pay quickly but don’t actually lead anywhere.

It’s like having a stock market where one set of assets compounds quietly at 7% per year, and another set flashes “+50% TODAY” in red and green every five minutes, but actually nets to zero.

If you don’t have a philosophy for preferring slow loops over fast ones, the fast ones will win by default.

Life as UX: Hick’s Law, Fitts’s Law, and your habits

Designers of good interfaces obsess over two simple but powerful empirical regularities.

Hick’s Law says the time it takes to make a decision grows with the number of options—logarithmically, not linearly, which means going from 2 to 4 options hurts more than going from 12 to 14. (en.wikipedia.org) Add too many buttons to a screen and people stall or bounce.

Fitts’s Law says the time it takes to move a pointer to a target depends on the distance to the target and its size. Small, far-away buttons are harder to hit; big, close ones are easier. (thedecisionlab.com)

Steve Krug boiled a lot of usability wisdom into one sentence: don’t make me think. Websites, he argues, should be self-evident—obvious to use without reading instructions. (en.wikipedia.org) That doesn’t mean users are dumb; it means life is busy, and cognition is expensive.

Those same laws apply, almost embarrassingly directly, to your own behavior.

If doing the thing you say you want to do requires too many micro-decisions (What time should I go? Which program should I follow? Should I go hard today or rest? Do I have the right socks?), Hick’s Law guarantees that many days you’ll just… not. Too many options. Decision paralysis.

If the action is physically or logistically far away—a gym 25 minutes across town, a writing app that takes five nested menus to reach, the books you mean to read buried on a shelf—Fitts’s Law says you’ll hit those targets less often than the ones right in front of you: YouTube, fridge, couch. (thedecisionlab.com)

BJ Fogg’s behavior model captures this in a compact equation: behavior happens when motivation, ability, and a prompt converge in the same moment. (behaviormodel.org) If something isn’t happening, one of those three is too low.

• If motivation is low, shrink the behavior until it fits (do one push-up, write one sentence).
• If ability is low, redesign the environment to reduce friction (put the weights in your living room, keep a notebook open on your desk).
• If prompt is missing, hook it onto an existing loop (after I make coffee, I write for ten minutes).

The important thing is: this is design, not character. You’re allowed to treat your own life the way a good product designer treats a screen—by reducing cognitive load and shrinking the distances to the actions you actually want.

There’s a deep mercy in that perspective. Instead of “I’m lazy,” you can say, “I’ve accidentally made the wrong things easy and the right things hard.”

Identity as a feedback loop

James Clear popularized the idea of identity-based habits: instead of focusing on goals (“run a marathon”), focus on becoming the kind of person who does the behaviors (“I’m a runner”). In his formulation, true behavior change is identity change: once you see yourself as a certain type of person, sticking with the associated habits stops feeling like effort and starts feeling like integrity. (charlottegrysolle.com)

Identity, in this view, is a loop between beliefs and behavior:

“I’m the kind of person who…” → do behaviors that match → evidence accumulates → belief strengthens → more matching behavior.

The mistake a lot of high-agency people make is trying to change identity top-down, by assertion: “From now on, I’m a disciplined founder / deep worker / emotionally available partner.”

But any belief about yourself that isn’t backed by repeated loops feels hollow, and your brain knows it. It has the receipts. If your calendar is a museum of broken promises to yourself, your subconscious is not going to buy the new slogan.

The nice part is that this cuts both ways. In that 66‑day habit-formation study, missing a single day didn’t significantly derail the curve. (studylib.net) What mattered was returning to the loop.

So you don’t need to become a different person in some heroic overnight act. You need to design loops that are small enough to survive your worst days, then keep closing them.

Identity change begins at the granularity of “after I close my laptop at work, I text one friend” more than at the level of “I will be more social this year.”

Humility as a long feedback loop with reality

Ego is, in a sense, a refusal to listen to feedback.

It’s the voice that insists your first model of the world is correct; that you can skip the “measure” and “learn” parts of the loop and go straight from idea to entitlement.

In startups, this shows up as founders who fall in love with their solution before they’ve really understood the problem. Eric Ries built the Lean Startup movement on the observation that most startups don’t die because nobody could build the thing; they die because they built the wrong thing really efficiently. Hence his mantra: build → measure → learn. (en.wikipedia.org)

Humility, properly understood, isn’t self-abasement. It’s an agreement with reality: I am finite, and the world is opaque, and my first guesses are probably missing something important.

In psychology, “intellectual humility” refers to recognizing the limits of your knowledge and being willing to revise your views. People high in this trait tend to show less partisan myside bias and more openness to engaging with those who disagree. (templeton.org)

As a personal practice, humility means you deliberately widen the feedback loops that can reach you. You expose your work to critique earlier. You talk to customers when it’s still slightly embarrassing. You run small experiments that can falsify your favorite ideas.

You say things like, “Here’s what I think; what am I missing?” and actually mean it.

There is a slow architecture to that stance. The rewards—better models of reality, fewer catastrophic errors—arrive on a time scale slower than the little dopamine hits of being right in a meeting.

But over a career, the compounding is brutal. People who run tight loops with reality—test, adjust, test again—quietly outpace those who spend their energy defending an identity as “a visionary.”

Showmanship on a date, substance in a life

Let’s come down from the whiteboard to something more human: a first date.

You’re sitting across from someone you actually like. You can feel your brain booting up the Perform For Approval protocol. You mentally sift for anecdotes that land well, opinions that sound smart but non-threatening, little status markers to slip in casually.

It’s a natural move: you’re trying to optimize for the fast loop of immediate impression.

But imagine, for a moment, that this goes “well.” You impress them by being a carefully curated avatar. They like the performance. You get a second date, maybe a third.

At some point, the loop hits reality. You can’t maintain a persona indefinitely. The “real” you leaks out, or you burn out and resent them for liking the character more than the actor.

A more uncomfortable but more useful question is: what would I say or do on this date if I assumed the spotlight effect was wrong—if they’re not scrutinizing me nearly as much as I think—and my goal were to find out whether our actual lives would be good together?

The loop changes:

Instead of “say the clever thing → get a laugh → feel safe → escalate performance,” you might try, “share something real → see how they respond → either relax into more honesty or gracefully exit.”

This is slower feedback. Vulnerability doesn’t always get you an immediate positive reaction. But over time, it tends to filter for people who like your substance, not your showmanship.

The same dynamic plays out in professional life.

Performing being a “founder” (pitch decks, conferences, thought-leadership threads) is one loop. Doing founder work (talking to users, writing code, fixing onboarding) is another.

One is legible to large audiences and full of fast feedback; the other is mostly quiet and full of slow, ambiguous feedback.

If you confuse the first for the second for long enough, your startup becomes what one investor friend of mine calls a “TED talk in LLC form.”

Designing a week like a product

Let’s return to our founder at 2:17 a.m.

Imagine he closes Stripe, puts the phone down, and decides on a small act of rebellion: next week will not be designed by whoever wants his attention the most. It will be designed like a product.

How would he do it?

He wouldn’t start with goals. Goals are abstract and easy to lie about. Instead, he’d start with loops: what are the recurring cycles of behavior that, if they existed, would almost guarantee progress?

He might decide there are three that matter this quarter:

• A craft loop: building and improving the product.
• A customer loop: talking to people who use (or might use) it.
• A health / sanity loop: sleep, movement, one human conversation per day not about work.

Then, for each loop, he’d design:

• The prompt: what existing event will trigger it? (After daily standup; after lunch; when I close my laptop.)
• The action: the smallest version that still counts. (Email one customer; fix one papercut bug; walk around the block.)
• The feedback: how he’ll see and feel the result. (A visible kanban; a tally in a notebook; a “done” list at the end of the day.)

Notice what he’s not doing: he’s not trying to brute-force a whole new personality. He’s editing friction and prompts.

Maybe he and his cofounder declare “analytics windows”: two fifteen-minute blocks per day when they’re allowed to look at dashboards, and the rest of the time the apps are literally behind friction (logged out, on a separate device, behind a distracting password). They’re redesigning their own Fitts’s Law: making the temptation farther away and smaller, the meaningful work nearer and bigger.

He might decide that no feature is allowed to be tweeted about until a certain number of users have used it twice in a week. That’s a tiny nudge away from optimizing for applause and toward optimizing for retention. That’s Lean Startup’s build–measure–learn loop enforced at the level of social signaling. (en.wikipedia.org)

He might realize that the thing killing his health loop isn’t ignorance but Hick’s Law: too many options for “working out.” So he kills all but one: every weekday at 5pm, he walks to the same nearby park, does the same simple set of bodyweight exercises, then walks home. No decision. No creativity. Just a loop.

From the outside, none of this looks impressive. There is no single cinematic turning point. But over months, the compounding is ferocious.

• The craft loop accumulates as a smoother product.
• The customer loop accumulates as intuition about what matters.
• The sanity loop accumulates as a founder who still has a personality in two years.

We underestimate how much slack there is in a week. A few redesigned loops can fundamentally change the trajectory without ever feeling like a “life overhaul.”

Designing loops for others (without being evil)

If you’re a founder, designer, or engineer, you’re not just a node in systems; you’re a systems builder. You are literally designing loops for other humans.

Steve Jobs’s line—“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works” (daringfireball.net)—is often quoted for its aesthetic bite, but it’s also an ethical statement. How a product works is, in large part, how it shapes users’ loops: what it makes easy, what it makes hard, what it nudges by default.

Steve Krug’s “don’t make me think” principle is not an invitation to bypass users’ judgment; it’s a reminder that you’re spending their cognitive budget on whatever you put in front of them. (en.wikipedia.org)

You can use that power in at least two ways:

• To trap people in fast loops that extract value (endless scroll, addictive recommendations, dark patterns around unsubscribing).
• To support slow loops that create value (clear goals, honest metrics, obvious next steps toward what they came to you for).

Nir Eyal’s Hooked model—trigger → action → variable reward → investment—can be used to make people mindlessly open an app whenever they’re bored, or it can be used to help them build a language-learning streak or a meditation habit. (en.wikipedia.org) The underlying psychology is neutral. The ethics are in the choice of loop.

There is no clean way to opt out of this game. If you build a product with zero regard for habit loops, someone else will build a slightly more habitual version and eat your lunch. Attention is adversarial by default.

But there is a difference between designing to help someone get what they already value and designing to hijack their valuation system.

One rough test I like is: If my user woke up tomorrow completely clear-headed, well-rested, and thinking long term, would they still want to run this loop I’m building for them?

If the honest answer is “probably not,” you are in the extraction business, no matter how pretty your mission statement.

The quiet courage of choosing your loops

In Barry Schwartz’s work on the paradox of choice, he distinguishes between maximizers—people who try to find the absolute best option in every decision—and satisficers—people who decide what “good enough” looks like and stop there. Maximizers often get slightly better outcomes, but feel worse: more regret, more second-guessing, more depression. (en.wikipedia.org) The cost of constantly evaluating is higher than the benefit of occasionally optimizing.

At the meta level, this is what choosing loops is about.

You cannot optimize every decision. You cannot evaluate every possible habit, market, relationship, career path. If you try, you’ll get lost in a forest of half-built loops, each abandoned during the awkward middle before compounding kicks in.

At some point, you have to do the deeply unsexy thing of saying:

• This is the craft I will put ten years into.
• These are the two friends I will keep calling even when life gets busy.
• This is the fitness protocol I’ll stick with instead of chasing novelty.
• This is the product we will ship, flawed, and learn from, instead of endlessly pivoting in Figma.

Not because these loops are objectively the best in some cosmic sense, but because they are good enough and you are willing to live inside them.

From the outside, this can look like settling. From the inside, it feels like relief—a release from the anxious fantasy that your life is an optimization problem with a hidden global maximum that you will reach if you just keep scrolling.

Choosing your loops is a kind of spiritual satisficing.

You are the loops you tolerate

Somewhere in an office park, a designer is nudging a button three pixels to the left to improve sign-up rates. Somewhere in a dorm room, a 19‑year‑old is refreshing TikTok, long past the point of enjoyment. Somewhere in a coffee shop, a founder is peeking at a dashboard for the tenth time today.

All of them are dealing, in their own way, with the same raw materials: attention, feedback, compounding.

If you zoom out far enough, a life is just the integral of all the loops you were in—the sum of the cycles that ran often enough to leave a dent.

A year from now, you will have run roughly 365 × however many daily loops you keep. Tiny changes at the loop level—what you check first in the morning, what you do right after lunch, where your thumb goes when you’re anxious—will have compounded into a different shape of life.

None of this requires self-loathing. Quite the opposite. It requires approaching yourself the way a good designer approaches a user: with curiosity, with respect for limits, with a willingness to iterate.

You’re not failing because you haven’t tried hard enough to be a different person.

You’re just running loops that someone—or something—else designed.

You can start changing that this afternoon, not by resolving to be heroic, but by picking one corner of your day and making the right thing slightly easier and the wrong thing slightly harder.

Move one button. Remove one choice. Add one prompt to something you already do.

Then run the loop once.

Then again.

Then again.

Over time, reality will respond. The feedback will change. Identity will quietly update. The spotlight will dim. The slow loops will begin to hum.

And you’ll wake up one morning to find that you are, in fact, a different person—not because you thought your way into a new self, but because you designed better loops and let them do what loops do best: compound.