7/30/22: Continuity (TM)
At first the Continuity Device was developed and used for Bipolar patients. “Wouldn’t it be great if you could take some of those highs and plug them into the lows? If you collapsed that sine wave of lived experience, couldn’t you live a more balanced life? One of equanimity?” At least that’s how the ads went.
The Device allowed you to experience the average mood and motivation of your present self, up to a maximum time horizon of 2 months. The mechanism was a black box. Competitors theorized that it must have some kind of probabilistic forecasting ability. The frenzied attempts to reverse engineer it mostly revolved around trying to replicate the trick of predicting the future.
The Company, of course, denied any kind of oracular ability, and kept mum on how it worked.
The Continuity Device did well in this initial market, especially for those bipolar patients who spent more time manic than depressive. In fact, many users actually had higher baseline function than the average person when their sine wave was collapsed.
After two years, it won FDA approval for mass market use.
In the beginning, Harry used his Device exclusively for fitness. He had always felt miserable when actually exercising, before feeling an endorphin rush once he was finished. The high had an absolute value greater than the absolute value of how much it sucked to exercise. He just could never get himself over that activation energy barrier.
By setting the Device’s time horizon to 6 hours out, he felt the high of the post-exercise rush simultaneously with the low of actually using his muscles. On net, it was a more positive experience. He found that he ran more, and took care of himself more.
“The best way to describe it is that you feel like your Present Self has continuity with your Future Self,” he said to his therapist. “You’re more generous towards your future self because you ARE your future self. I used to binge eat, because I had discontinuity of Self - it was the equivalent of my Present Self giving my Future Self the middle finger. But now, if I eat too much, I feel the shame from that experience at the moment I’m blowing through that bag of chips… so I just stop.”
After a few months, he started setting his time horizon further out.