Ask who it is good for

A young woman in Riyadh opens a shopping site every evening before bed. There is a daily reward for checking in, a deal that expires at midnight, a little badge for buying three weeks in a row. Most nights she buys something small. Most of it she did not want in the morning.

Three different forces are at work on that screen, and they tend to arrive together.

The first is an imbalance of knowledge. The people who built the page know exactly which colour, which timer and which phrase will tip a tired person into one more purchase. She does not. Using what you know for someone else's good is teaching. Using it for your own good, at their expense, is something else, and the test is simple: if the buyer knew what the seller knows, would she still buy?

The second is repetition. Videos of people unpacking their weekly orders, friends comparing what arrived, a feed that treats buying as a hobby. After a while the belief stops feeling like a belief. A small parcel every few days becomes simply what people her age do, and nobody wants to be the one who has opted out. Pressure from peers turns a pitch into a custom.

The third is the habit itself, which was the goal all along. A customer who comes back from reflex is a far easier business than one who chooses freely each time. The stickiness is built in, and it is good for the seller long before it is good for anyone else.

The easiest moment to step away from all three is before the first evening. Once the habit forms, every reason to stop meets a reason to check one more time.

So the useful questions are plain ones. Who gains from this? What do they know that I do not? And is there any harm in waiting a day? A good idea survives a night's sleep. Most of the ones that do not were never good ideas.