The Phantom Tollbooth, IRL

In Norton Juster’s “The Phantom Tollbooth,” we meet the Terrible Trivium: A demon with a long list of beguiling, trivial tasks meant to keep those doing them from accomplishing something better. He sets Milo to moving an enormous pile of sand using only a pair of tweezers. To the eager Humbug, he gives a needle with the direction to use it to dig a tunnel through a cliff. To the scoffing Tock, he gives an eye dropper, with the instructions to use it to empty a well.

Tock quickly sees the uselessness of their tasks and drags Milo and the Humbug away, with the Terrible Trivium chasing them, hoping to take them back to their useless tasks.



Now, I know useless. How many hours have I spent filing marginally unimportant papers or scrolling through social media when I could be working on Doleful Creatures? Far too many, meaning a social media fast* is in order. I’ve dragged this book out for far too long. Time to finish it.

And there are other people who know uselessness too. Like the folks at Pioneer.

Put simply, Pioneer appears to be a business incubator enveloped inside a game. Many of the tasks the budding entrepreneurs can do to gain points and statue and maybe the attention of those deciding who gets the investment funding to bring their idea into the light, appear useless, even to those striving for the monetary goal.

From the article:

For Anton Samoylov, a software engineer who’s been playing Pioneer since April, this was the most gripping aspect of the tournament. “I went crazy," Samoylov recalls, laughing. "When I see points that I can earn and increase my position on the leaderboard, I can't resist.

“I see I have, like, 1,300 points, and then I see a quest: Submit a one-minute video about yourself and your project and get another 50 points? Obviously, I’m going to do that,” he says. “Sign up for our Discord … channel and get another 25 points? Again, I will do that.”

The contest quickly consumed his life. Samoylov asserts that his obsession with points and standings made him more productive than he thought was possible. His desire to win motivated him to complete difficult tasks and set impressive goals, he says. Before Pioneer, his project—an app, which, like Pioneer, uses gamification tools to help users meet their goals—was little more than an idea. 

Pioneer helped him turn it into a reality. Now, the app is available on the Google Play store and has a few dozen users, he says.

But playing Pioneer has its costs, he says. Samoylov spends an hour or two each Monday ranking other players’ progress updates. He points out that the anticipation of feedback from other players and the pressure to maintain a high score stressed him out to the point where it affected his sleep. “It can be used as a motivation boost, but at the same time it has its costs in terms of stress, in terms of additional time spent … and also in terms of focus lost.”

What he’s experiencing epitomizes what I’m experiencing with my writing. I keep putting it off in favor of less-important tasks (and while some of them are important, like being with my family, keeping up with my teaching, etc., much of what I do is, in fact, trivial and useless. Downtime has its virtues, but they fade when all you have is downtime.

*I’m not going to cut myself off completely but limit myself to fifteen minutes or less a day.