The Sabbaticalist #071: Why We Work and Live in a Trance of Addiction
Part 2 of 2: An anthropologist studying Vegas casinos for 15 years and her book about addiction design
Part 1, an essay about the “ultra-processed fun” of cruises
Part 2, continued in this week’s Sabbaticalist:
Antidote: Natasha Dow Schüll and the Machine Zone, a trance-like state casino designers deliberately try to induce in us (but is it only casinos?)
Practice: Unoptimizing ourselves (aka getting the f out of asymmetric collusions), starting with leisure
Antidote: Addiction research by Natasha Dow Schull (NDS)
NDS is a cultural anthropologist who spent over 15 years in Las Vegas to study the behaviors of heavy slot machine users and what makes its design so addictive for them. She studied users who sat for 24, even 48 hours without leaving, some even wearing adult diapers to do so. She published her findings in Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas in 2012.
As part of her research, she went to industry trade shows like the Global Gaming Expo year after year and talked to the engineers and designers of these machines. Schüll found that the machines are designed to induce a trance state players call “the zone,” in which time, money, and even your own body fade into the background and the only thing left is the next pull.
She calls this mechanism “asymmetric collusion,” because a new gambler may walk in thinking the goal is to win the jackpot and take it home, but the goal of the house is actually to maximize your continuation, down to the ergonomics of the chair, the lighting, the seatback cash-out screen that lets you win without getting out of your chair. Over 90% of casino revenue now comes from this “collusion,” not the smoke-filled card tables of high rollers and their glammed up hangers-on one might imagine. Less Ocean’s Eleven, more Wall-E.
Despite being almost 15 years since its publication, the paperback of Addiction by Design was issued in 2025. Schüll has been interviewed at length by multiple platforms in the couple of years, including the Center for Humane Technology. In a recent interview with the NPR, she summarizes the four pillars of addictive design that you likely find deeply familiar, in both person and professional settings:
Solitude: you engage alone, just you and the screen (or machine). removing the social cues that would normally tell you to stop.
Bottomlessness: the content never runs out and loads automatically (slot machine, email, Instagram). You’re never “finished,” only endlessly interrupted.
Speed: new content arrives so fast that the line between you and the machine blurs; Schüll describes it as losing the sense of “where you begin and the machine ends.”
Teasing: increasingly, apps know what you want but deliberately serves you something close to it rather than the thing itself, so you keep chasing the next click.
You see where I am going with this. The trance-like “zone” of slot machines is now abundantly accessible in each of our hands, pockets, and purses. The addiction design deployed by the top Vegas casinos is now deployed by Big Tech for the apps that billions of us use every day. It’s the 275 pings a day that induce our workday trance, and the doomscrolling in a fit of “revenge bedtime procrastination” that gets us deeper into this asymmetric collusion even when we are “relaxing.” And, most alarming of all, is the blatant and incessant rise of the sports gambling and prediction market via our smartphones. I’m so appalled by this that I’ll devote a full essay to this in a future post rather than tacking it onto this as an afterthought.
Related Reading, about those 275 pings:
This isn’t to say that we all must forever swear off cruise vacations or Slack or our step goals. But the principles of addiction design is a framework through which we can contemplate whether we are playing or are being played.
I posit Schüll’s framework as a Sabbaticalist antidote because it offers us clarity in a system that would prefer us be oblivious and docile for the sake of infinite growth. You can’t opt out of a system you can’t see, and you certainly cannot be part of the change you want to see if you don’t see it in the first place.
Practice: Unoptimizing our leisure
This week, do not participate in “fun” or “relaxing” activities that has been designed with addiction and asymmetric collusion in mind. How to think about it:
Am I doing this completely alone, now because I am seeking quiet and peace, but because it’s been designed that way?
Does this activity have a natural finish line or does it just keep refilling if I let it?
Am I chasing something that always feels one step away, the next tier, the next level, the next notification, the next hand (every video game, I know, but you can take a break for one week)?
Who built this, and do they profit more the longer I stay in it?