>>65343034Sorry if this is meandering and horribly edited, I'm have to phonepost to answer.For example, MOST gym memberships and Xbox Live subscriptions are completely unused, because most people theoretically want to do those things, but either can't or "can't" due to the effort or time involved. There's significant opportunity cost to playing video games, so many adults feel like they shouldn't. But want to feel like they have the option, even if they'll gaslight themselves into feeling like they're not allowed to every single time, and ultimately never actually use it. Similarly, the benefits of going to the gym are very abstract until you actually get some muscle growth months later, and you can never really make tangible the long term health benefits and the thousands of dollars MINIMUM saved on medical bills. If we could, everyone would brush and floss their teeth perfectly. People might not know the health benefits of cardio, but everyone knows that not brushing means losing your teeth. And yet.
In terms of how this works for companies, they get over double the subscription money than the actual number of patrons they have using their service, and it's in their interest to make it harder to unsubscribe, or to quit using at a minimum level. But it doesn't have to be extremely difficult, because the human brain just prefers not to handle that kind of low-reward, moderate-frustration task if it can avoid it. Preventing a small, hypothetical abstract loss in the future isn't very motivating. Your brain isn't even calculating the eventual $240 you're losing over the next two years of procrastinating on cancelling a $10/mo subscription, it's only calculating the $10 of each month you're in. So they can pretend like they're not doing anything wrong. You can sign up for a carwash service at the drive-through terminal, but you have to walk into their office and talk to a salesperson who will try to browbeat you out of cancelling it. Most people are fairly conflict averse, so they mentally avoid doing that and often even thinking about it. Unsubscribing from a website is ways buried deep in a menu, out of sight, and just frustrating enough to deter passive desire.
How this works for each kind of business is different, but large companies often have psychologists on staff to make their specific products functionally addictive, not due to chemical dependency, but through hacks of human psychology. This is why almost every software is now a service even when it doesn't need to be, and almost every video game includes gambling elements, and tries to force you to form a habit around doing "dailies," or getting login bonuses, or whatever, and try to get you to rope all of your friends in, so there are also social pressures to keeping the subscription. Social media is built on using that premise to harvest data, and since everyone is there, it becomes a group action problem that makes it near impossible to reach consensus and leave for a new platform.
To escape, you have to consciously (while away from the pattern) create an environment where breaking the pattern is likely to happen, in spite of yourself. But this is a greater amount of planning than most people are used to, or have the life circumstances to enforce. Most people are living paycheck to paycheck, and are always less than two weeks from financial catastrophe, so they don't want to set aside the time and mental effort to handle each specific thing, or even to PLAN doing so, which is exactly what you have to do.
This stuff is pretty well explained in the context of video games on YouTube. I recommend looking into it.
