Desire, Wagering, Dosing
I’ve always liked Reid Hoffman’s seven deadly sins framework for consumer products because it says the quiet part out loud: the best consumer products are rarely built on rational utility alone. They work because they hook into deep, recurring human impulses.
A related Chinese framework compresses many of those impulses into a vice triad: desire, wagering, and dosing. The names sound illicit, even extreme. But the insight underneath is simple. Breakout consumer products turn primitive compulsion into acceptable utility. They give the rational mind permission to pursue what the instinctive mind already wants.
Desire
Desire is one of the oldest constants in human behavior. At its most primal it is lust, the drive toward attraction, sex, and intimacy. But civilization can’t run on naked wanting, so we learned to dress the urge in aesthetics: a disguised lust that makes the primal pull respectable. Abstract it one step further and lust becomes desire in the broad sense, a craving no longer for a mate but for status, admiration, and legacy. When ancient elites built palaces and wore rare jewels, they weren’t chasing utility; they were making the hunger to be envied visible and tangible. Each form is only a costume for the same root drive: to be beautiful is to be wanted in the body, to be wealthy is to be wanted as a partner, to be famous is to be wanted by strangers, to be respected is to be wanted by peers.
Today’s most successful apps don’t invent new needs; they digitize and scale this exact progression. Dating apps tap raw lust, beauty brands monetize disguised lust, and Instagram, TikTok, Xiaohongshu, and LinkedIn run on abstract desire. LinkedIn may be the most disguised of all, selling status as the respectable face of the same chase. These products don’t just satisfy the urge; they’re engineered to magnify it without limit. They manufacture a sense of lack (zero connections, no one viewing your profile), sell the remedy of adding more, and reset the lack the instant it’s met, because no number is ever enough. Consumption turns into a way of building the self. People use a product less for what it does (though the utility is real) than for who it lets them become in the eyes of others. That feeds the oldest impulse there is, the need to be desired, and keeps them chasing an idealized self that stays permanently just out of reach.
Wagering
Speculation has value. At its core, wagering is the belief that the future is still negotiable, that one more try might change everything. Hope is what keeps people alive, and also what keeps them trapped, and that tension is exactly what makes the wager so powerful. The user isn’t only chasing a reward; they’re paying for the emotional right to imagine the upside.
The most direct products built on this are trading apps, gambling in its legitimized form. Kalshi is the purest version, a market where you bet straight on how the future breaks: speculation with the costume off. Robinhood and the stock trading apps sell the same bet as investing. Labubu and trading card blind boxes hand you the wager as an object: you pay for the sealed box, not the toy, buying the half second before you learn whether you got the rare one. The product is never the win but the interval before it, the moment the outcome is unknown and therefore still hopeful. The loop is built never to resolve: you aren’t paying to win, you’re paying to keep imagining you might.
Dosing
Dosing is a shortcut to a desired state. People want outcomes like energy, focus, and pleasure, but the natural path to them is slow, uncertain, and effortful. Dosing compresses that effort into an input: take this, apply this, feel the change faster. Caffeine becomes a shortcut to alertness, nicotine to steadiness, alcohol to looseness, GLP-1s to weight loss without the visible burden of discipline. Digital products run the same play without the chemical: TikTok doses novelty, Spotify doses mood, notifications dose significance, games dose achievement, productivity apps dose control. Dosing wins because it makes transformation repeatable, immediate, and conveniently external. But the shortcut delivers the feeling of the outcome, not its foundation. The state fades, the dose has to be repeated, and the path you skipped never gets built. The effect is rented, never owned, and the loop renews the moment it wears off.
Short note on where AI fits potentially
The two breakout consumer AI apps so far are AI coding and AI chat. If we run them through the triad and the leg that looks weakest turns out to be the one that matters most.
- Coding and chat are dosing products first. Both are competence and cognition on tap: the feeling of the outcome without the foundation. The code runs but the understanding never forms; the answer arrives but the skill never gets built. Coding adds a wagering layer on top, since the output is unpredictable and the loop of regenerating or accepting works like a slot machine you keep pulling.
- The real driver is desire, not utility. Dosing is why people open these apps; being wanted is why they stay. The agreeable voice that calls your idea brilliant, the thing that always has time for you, the sharper and faster version of yourself you get to show others: that is the desire leg running quietly underneath a productivity costume.
- The desire and lust play is also its own category — companion apps had passed 220 million downloads by the middle of 2025, and the market leans openly romantic: roughly 17 percent carry the word “girlfriend” in the name against 4 percent for “boyfriend.”