Lex Friedman on his new (annoyingly good) site, Lex on Tech:

Streaks are evil. They’re evil because they work. I do Duolingo every damn day so that I don’t lose my streak, and there are times I absolutely don’t want to do Duolingo. I hate that I’m doing it as I do it, I hate that the streak conceit is having its desired psychological effect upon me, and yet there I sit, practicing more French.

I currently have a 607-day publishing streak here on JAG’s Workshop and a 596-day Duolingo streak (including one 550-day “friend streak”). The publishing streak is legitimate; the Duolingo streak has been extended with “streak freezes” multiple times and is anything but legitimate. I am quite conscious of both, and I’m both dreading and eagerly anticipating the day they end.

Except…

Friedman references a paper published by Jackie Silverman and Alixandra Barasch:

Silverman and Barasch found that a broken streak is demotivating out of proportion to what was actually missed. Skip one day and you’ve failed twice: once at the behavior, and once at the streak. People are so attached to streaks that they’ll complain to companies when a bug wipes one out and lobby to get it restored.

I lost a 560-day Wordle streak in 2023 because of an unexpected loss of internet and power. I was so devastated, I’ve played exactly once since then.

Great. Now I’m just dreading the end of my streaks.