Guilt by Notification January 21, 2025

I’m being bullied by marketing departments.
I know that’s what it is. I know it’s not actually the critters they send with over-large eyes and disapproving expressions, but I’m unusually susceptible to such things. Guilt is one of the languages I’m fluent in.
I want to go to Italy. I want to start at one end and eat my way to the other, stopping to look at artistic masterpieces along the way. As long as I’m doing this, I thought it might be a good idea to at least be able to ask directions and read a menu in Italian. So I began learning Italian on Duolingo. I’ll never be fluent, and that’s okay, but I don’t want to be one of those arrogant American tourists who didn’t bother learning any of the language before I showed up.
Now granted, I need reminders to do my Italian lessons. I know that consistent practice is the key to learning. So at first I thought that Duo the owl and his stable of socially awkward friends popping up on my reminders was cute. But now? I feel bullied. Duo does not care if I’ve had a really hard day at work. Duo doesn’t care if my brain is stuffed full of other things and the last thing I need to do is talk with Junior and Eddy about whether Junior can have any more videogames.
Duo realized that I knew in the back of my brain that he was nothing more than pixels and zeros and ones, but his programmers were clever. They came up with Friends Quests, in which you team up with a buddy to earn points and prizes. So if you let Duo down, you’re also letting your in-real-life friend down.
Dirty pool, Duo. Dirty pool.
Duo’s not the only one doing it.
Long day? Can’t wait to get in bed? Oh no! Don’t lose your Wordle streak! Or else…or else…or else nothing at all, if we’re being honest, but we’re conditioned to think that losing that streak just might have something to do with the melting of the polar ice caps. If you don’t log in to Farm-merge-crush-whatever, you won’t be on a roll anymore, and the next prize you get will suck. And it matters, I mean really matters if you get a purple jewel or an orange one.
I mean, seriously. I think these companies must have a ‘department of making customers bad.’ As a pure-bred Jewish mother going all the way back to Eve, I consider myself an expert in guilt trips(traps). Perhaps I have missed my calling. When I was choosing careers I thought that marketing was all about coming up with clever tag lines and hooks. Apparently the industry has evolved so that all I would need to do is come up with guilt-inducing ways to make people feel like they’ve failed at life if they don’t use our product.
I think I could be good at this. [Picture of grieving older woman covering her face with a lace hanky.] “Have you taken your Life-Extend Vitamin today? No? I guess you want your mother to sit at your funeral wondering how she could have raised you to have more sense.”
[Picture of anatomically impossible dog with giant eyes and prominent ribs.]] “Your Virtu-Pet is currently dying because you haven’t given them any water pellets today. Don’t be a murderer! Log in before it’s too late!”
[Picture of bored looking people in different colored space suits, phasers at the ready.] “Your team is waiting for you to take your turn on Space Adventures! If you don’t take it soon, we’ll eject one of your friends into the cold void of space and lock them out of the game for two weeks. Don’t be that guy.”
It sounds like I’m being silly, but this is exactly how these notifications feel when I see them in my inbox. The people pleaser in me, who’s been active since I was capable of conscious thought, wants to please these animated characters in the same way that I wanted to please parents and teachers and other authority figures. It’s pathological, yes, but it also must be common and effective because of how often it shows up in my notifications and inboxes.
I’d go on, I’d give you an armchair psychoanalysis of the whole phenomenon, but I can’t. There’s only an hour and a half left in the day, and I have a few hundred more pixelated bullies to satisfy before the day ends.
Buy my book, Devil’s Defense and/or find me on Substack.
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Lori B. Duff is an award-winning author who practices law on the side. Her latest book, “If You Did What I Asked in the First Place” was awarded the Gold Medal for humor in the Foreword INDIES awards in 2019. You can follow her on Twitter at @LoriBDuff and on Facebook. For more blogs written by Lori, click here. For more information about Lori in general, click here. If you want Lori to do your writing for you, click here. If you want Lori to help you market your book, click here.
Guilt by Notification
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