Daily-Dose

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From New Yorker

From Vox

Created by Japanese toymaker Bandai, Tamagotchi became a smash hit when it was released in Japan in 1996, selling millions of units in less than a year. The international buzz about the toys made for an effective hook. In 1997, Tamagotchi arrived in US toy stores, and kids lined up outside FAO Schwarz to buy them — the store sold 30,000 units in the first three days. Bandai made more than $160 million from Tamagotchi in the US that year.

Fads have an element of mystery. Some, like the Pet Rock, become almost as famous for their absurdity as they do for their popularity. “It tends to be kind of lightning in a bottle,” says Nir Eyal, author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life. If it were possible to identify exactly what sparks trends, such products could be precisely engineered to succeed. Still, some commonalities do emerge.

Our brains are tuned to pick up newness. “That’s a cornerstone of what interest is all about,” Silvia says. “How people respond to things that are new, different, unfamiliar, and unexpected.” In long-ago times, this vigilance and attention to change in our environment kept us alive.

While Game Boys were popular for video games on the go, nothing else replicated the precise experience of a Tamagotchi. The toy was ever-present in a way others weren’t — it was created with a built-in keychain so it could be literally attached to the player, and keeping the digital pet alive required constant gameplay. It also marked the advent of digital pets, which would continue to be popular in later years with the introduction of the online Neopets game, the AIBO robotic dog, and others.

To go one step deeper, an object or product becomes increasingly fascinating if it’s constantly changing — basically, if it renews that sense of novelty.

In the 1950s, psychologist B.F. Skinner researched the power of variable schedules of rewards. In a lab experiment, an animal might be given a food reward randomly. Perhaps the animal presses a button and, the first time, it immediately dispenses a treat. The next time, it takes 10 taps before that reward is doled out. That kind of irregularity creates more interest than when the reward is delivered on a set, unchanging schedule.

Humans are similarly drawn to this erratic structure. Unexpected rewards result in a greater rush of dopamine. That’s because variability is involved with higher learning — if we’re able to correctly predict a reward, it’s not as interesting to our brains. But if it’s surprising? Now that’s something worth remembering. That’s part of the reason we’re drawn to fads at all. “Knowing what trends or styles are hip has an element of variability almost like a slot machine,” Eyal says.

A Tamagotchi changes and adapts depending on gameplay. The digital pet trills for attention. You learn how to interact with it. When you check in on your device, there may be any number of steaming little piles of turds for you to clean up. And then — miraculously, as all life is — you check your Tamagotchi one day to find that your pet has grown.

A person looks at a Tamagotchi game in their hand with an open-mouthed expression. They have a Tamagotchi character on his shoulder and an egg carton filled with Tamagotchi games in front of them.

Countless toys stare out from the shelves of stores across the country. But the Tamagotchi isn’t just a cool-looking object, nor is it merely an entertaining game. It’s a symbol of belonging, as were Tickle Me Elmo and Beanie Babies before it. “The thing itself is almost immaterial,” Lembke says. That’s why the GigaPet — a nearly identical toy, in theory — doesn’t cut it. The name- brand Tamagotchi transmits taste, indicating that you know what’s cool and interesting. “That becomes very powerful,” Eyal says.

Lembke describes trend-following as akin to the behavior of a flock of birds: No sooner has one bird startled and raised its wings than all the birds around it are in flight. “Humans are wired to know, see, and be aware of what our near neighbors are doing,” she says.

This is amplified in childhood. “Fads spread like wildfire through K-12 schools,” Silvia says. “Some people are into it, then everyone’s into it, and then you have to be into it or else you’ll be a loser.”

This kind of emotionally driven behavior may be because the lateral prefrontal cortex, the self-regulation part of the brain, matures slowly. Moreover, from an evolutionary perspective, adolescence is the time when people prepare to leave their families and create their own lives. Children are seeking their place. Consider the hierarchy of the playground, with its “in” groups and “out” groups. Kids play, bully, and suss out who falls where in the pack. Money and class come into play, with expensive, branded goods becoming a divisive force regarding who can afford to adopt fads at all. The popular kids tend to latch onto trends early, influencing the rest of their peers to hop on board — or else suffer being an outcast. “What drives all human behavior, all motivation, is not the pursuit of pleasure, but the avoidance of pain,” Eyal says. “One of the worst pains we can experience is social isolation.”

Schools are a pressure cooker for our drive for connectedness and belonging, where children can closely watch what their peers are doing. Philosophical anthropologist René Girard coined the term “mimetic desire” as part of his larger theory of human relations, positing that we do not desire things independently, but rather based on what other people want. Eyal summarizes it as: “Monkey see, monkey do.”

It makes a lot of sense when you consider evolution. In a world of risk, it’s safest to follow what others do. Caveman A ate a speckled mushroom, got sick, and died. Caveman B, on the other hand, ate a small brown mushroom, lived to tell the tale, and reported that it tasted delicious. So it’s only logical to eat the second type of mushroom, not the first. This is trendspotting as a tool for survival.

In a modern world of abundance, humans still possess basic desires to sate our hunger and thirst, to seek shelter and warmth. But when it comes down to what we eat, what we drink, how we style our homes, and what clothes we wear, it’s often not enough for something to satisfy our base needs. We’re influenced by peers and innovators.

There’s a problem with Tamagotchi. The stakes are too high. Ignore the pets for too long — even five to six hours — and they might die. In fact, it’s not enough to merely keep it alive. Fail to care for your Tamagotchi properly, and it evolves into a selfish duck-billed creature as opposed to a well-balanced teddy bear. In 1997, Education World interviewed one exasperated assistant principal in Connecticut. “First we were overrun with Beanie Babies, then all of a sudden teachers started commenting that the kids seemed to be taking a lot of long bathroom breaks,” he said. As it turns out, kids were stealing off to care for their virtual pets.

Schools begin to ban Tamagotchis; rebellious kids sneak them into class regardless. Others ask their parents to babysit their digital pets at home.

The shrill cry of the Tamagotchi interrupts family dinner, homework, time with friends. You’re tethered to it — literally, by a keychain, and emotionally, as it depends on you for survival. You bond with this cute digital creature because it has the same characteristics as living animals — seeking our attention, holding grudges, and seeming to act independently. As Harvard computer science researcher Judith Donath wrote about our connection to Tamagotchi, “It is obsessive to leave a meeting or dinner because a game requires attention, but it is reasonable to do so if a pet is in need.”

Humans grow attached to things when there’s an investment. While the Tamagotchi may not cost much money (unless you pay for it with your own allowance, a hefty toll), it costs a whole lot in time. Sweeping away tiny, digital poops with the press of a button. Feeding it a sandwich, a slice of cake, or a piece of wrapped candy. Scolding it when it won’t eat. Checking its weight and age. Administering medicine when it’s sick.

The Tamagotchi requires devotion. And the sheer time required to keep it alive only further binds us to it.

Eyal points to commitment and consistency bias here, also known as the sunk-cost fallacy. This is a sociological concept which essentially says that the more we invest in something, the more likely we are to keep doing it. “Only an idiot would keep putting effort, time, and money into something that’s not valuable, so it must be valuable,” Eyal summarizes. “This circular logic keeps us doing what we always have done. To break the chain is very uncomfortable.”

But putting on this obsession as a personality — not just playing with the Tamagotchi, but becoming a Tamagotchi player — is also about identity. Adolescence is the time of brain pruning, says Lembke. Neurons become selected for those we use most and deselected for neural circuits we’re not using. “The ones we tend to use a lot are then heavily myelinated, this sort of way of adding insulation to the wiring so it works more efficiently,” Lembke says. Mental architecture is still in formation. “It’s a time of enormous plasticity in the brain.” Synapses evolve and change depending on how we interact with our environment. It becomes a stage when humans try on different personas and go through phases.

Plus, taking your Tamagotchi to school, to restaurants, or to the park is about fitting in and demonstrating that you’re a part of a community. When we make human connections, our systems for dopamine and oxytocin (the so-called “love hormone”) are activated. “It’s not really a surprise to learn that we feel pleasure when we make human connections,” Lembke says. “And we feel connected by doing the same thing at the same time, experiencing the same emotion at the same time, wearing the same thing at the same time, watching the same show at the same time.”

Egg, baby, child, teenager, adult: The Tamagotchi evolves quickly. Each day marks the passing of months or even years in the Tamagotchi world. You’re responsible, caring for your Tamagotchi diligently. But, within two weeks, your adult Tamagotchi grows needy. Tamagotchis require the most attention as newborns and as they approach the end of their life. Some may beep as frequently as every 5 minutes, demanding help. Their needs are a bottomless hole for attention. Your Tamagotchi’s health and happiness diminish. Then, due to sickness or old age or neglect, it sprouts wings and returns to its home planet. Your Tamagotchi has died. Cue the tears and the heartbreak.

(That anguish, by the way, is real. Online cemeteries pop up for mourners and, in one English town, children even lay their Tamagotchis to rest in real pet cemeteries. In fact, the psychological phenomenon for how humans form attachments to machines and AI was named for this emotional connection: the Tamagotchi effect.)

You restart with a new pet, but it’s not the same. Your first has died and, with it, that initial joy. It’s happening on a broader scale: Because Tamagotchis are now so common, the popular kids abandon them in search of the next cool thing. Your friends discard their eggs. Some of them become frustrated by their pet’s demands, smashing their eggs against the wall or on the ground, accidentally restarting their game.

Remember the seeking aspect of the dopamine reward cycle? That comes back into play here. When we try new things, a rush of dopamine floods the reward pathway, which makes us feel good and reinforces that pleasure. But our brain adapts. This inundation is followed by a dopamine deficit state, which makes us crave and seek. “It’s a craving that drives motivation,” Lembke says. “To restore baseline levels of homeostasis, or to get even higher.”

Our ancestors couldn’t remain in a blissed-out state. “If we did, we wouldn’t look for the next reward,” Lembke says. The brain processes pleasure quickly, tells us that we should get more of it, and has us move on to the next thing.

“Dopamine rewards experiencing something new,” Silvia says. Hobbies that tend to be long-lasting have a sense of infinite learning or a community around them that provides a social benefit, such as crafting or sports. “You could always get better, you could always learn something new,” Silvia says. “There’s a gravity always pulling people in deeper.”

Fads tend to be static. Pet Rocks and Cabbage Patch Kids didn’t get any better — they were what they were. Sure, maybe your Tamagotchi became more entertaining as you progressed through the first round of gameplay, or perhaps even as you improved your caretaking skills with your next pets, but eventually the thrill dissipated.

The Tamagotchi fades from the schoolyard, fades from memory. You put yours in a drawer and are free of its beeps and demands.

Yet toymakers learned from all this — what worked to get you obsessed and what eventually chased you off. Digital pets? Still hot. Though, perhaps, the toys don’t need to be quite as needy. And what would happen if that faux pet weren’t made of hard plastic but, rather, were as soft as a stuffed animal? Toymakers iterate.

By autumn 1998, there’s something new in stores capturing the collective imagination.

Enter the Furby.

Lexi Pandell is a writer from Oakland, California. Her nonfiction work has been published in the Atlantic, the New York Times, Wired, and elsewhere.

Why experts are focusing on hospitalizations in the omicron wave

As Dean pointed out, the goal of the vaccination campaigns has been to break the link between cases and hospitalizations and deaths, to give people protection against severe illness so that fewer and fewer people who get infected end up so sick they are admitted to the hospital. Even if the denominator (case numbers) stayed the same, the numerator (hospitalizations) would shrink.

“Some places sort of succeeded in doing that,” Dean said. The United Kingdom’s delta wave this summer is instructive.

The UK actually matched or exceeded the US in the number of daily cases, adjusted for population, as delta became the pandemic’s dominant strain. The virus ebbed and flowed over the course of several months; the UK saw peaks of 690 new cases per million people in mid-July, 565 in early September, and 693 in late October. The US barely reached more than 500 cases per million across that time frame.

Our World In Data

(A reminder: Case numbers depend on sufficient testing, and the UK has consistently and significantly outpaced the US. That is another reason hospitalizations and deaths are seen as a more reliable metric, because they are easier outcomes to measure.)

Yet over the same period, the US consistently saw more deaths per capita than the UK, sometimes enduring three times the daily death rates during the worst of the delta wave.

Our World In Data

Dean’s best guess for why the UK saw more decoupling between cases and serious outcomes than the US during the delta wave is vaccinations. The UK surpassed the US in its overall vaccination rate in late June and continues to outperform America.

The UK has done a particularly good job of vaccinating its most vulnerable residents: seniors. As of today, the United States has gotten two doses to 88 percent of its over-65 population. England specifically has reached more than 95 percent of that population with two doses, and more than 85 percent of those people have received a third dose. The US, by comparison, has boosted a little more than 50 percent of its over-65 population.

The UK’s experience demonstrates that a country can make meaningful progress toward decoupling cases and severe outcomes when more people get vaccinated.

The US has continued to vaccinate more people since the summer, just not as many as experts would like to see. So while we could see more infections with omicron than ever before, the hope is that a smaller share of those cases will end in hospitalization or death because more people have some immunity.

But omicron, because it is so transmissible, still poses a serious threat to the US health system. The numerator of cases could still become so large that, even if a smaller share of them lead to severe illness, the raw number of hospitalizations could still exceed anything we have seen so far. Already, during the summer’s delta wave, some US hospitals were so overwhelmed that they didn’t have the beds or staff to care for all of their patients who were experiencing a medical emergency. Some of those patients died.

That could happen again if omicron spreads too quickly, even if the proportion of cases that turn serious becomes smaller. That is why experts say it is so important to keep track of hospitalizations: That metric will tell us when and where the health system is coming under strain.

“I haven’t seen evidence of a full decoupling for these metrics anywhere, though fewer cases are being hospitalized and fewer hospitalized patients are dying compared to earlier time periods in the pandemic,” Spencer Fox, associate director of the University of Texas Covid-19 Modeling Consortium, told me. “I still believe that hospitalizations are the metric to track. Until we can have a pandemic surge that doesn’t threaten health care capacity, we are going to be in a position where we cannot allow unchecked transmission.”

Why case numbers are still important to keep an eye on

The more immunity in the population, the more hospitalizations and deaths become the most reliable metrics of how serious the crisis is. But that doesn’t mean we can ignore case numbers entirely. As more infections occur, the coronavirus will have more opportunities to evolve.

“We are far from everyone being vaccinated,” Eleanor Murray, a Boston University assistant professor of epidemiology, told me. “Given that every infection is a potential opportunity for a new, worse variant to emerge, we really need to still be tracking infection rates as much as we can.”

Case numbers will also give us an idea of the toll the pandemic is taking on society beyond those worst outcomes of hospitalization or death. People who test positive for Covid-19 are still supposed to isolate for 10 days, according to the CDC. That means they can’t go to work or go to school. That is an inconvenience for their lives and, depending on who they are, it could also jeopardize essential services for everybody.

A person in scrubs, gloves, and mask squats on the floor of a hospital room containing an empty bed. Nathan Howard/Getty Images

A nurse waits for her next Covid-19 case to be brought from the emergency room shortly after a deceased patient was removed from the same Intensive Care Unit room at Asante Three Rivers Medical Center in Grants Pass, Oregon, in September.

Experts are already worried about a massive number of health care workers testing positive and needing to isolate at the same time hospitals are experiencing a surge of omicron patients. Staffing remains as big of a challenge for health systems as physical capacity, and people will not get the care they need if many doctors and nurses get infected at the same time.

“It matters who tests positive,” Osterholm said. “Many health care workers are not going to be able to work. … I think we are going to see a substantial challenge, above and beyond what we’ve seen so far.”

He also gave the example of police officers or firefighters, essential workers who test positive and then must isolate, as another example of how widespread infections could compromise essential services and put more people at risk beyond the direct effects of the coronavirus itself.

And there remains the unavoidable fact that, even in places with high vaccination rates, increasing case numbers will likely translate into increasing hospitalizations, especially with the omicron variant proving more elusive for vaccine-conferred immunity. The relationship might not be as strong as it has been in prior waves because more people are vaccinated, but it will still be there.

“Case rates are an early warning for where we are headed with hospitalizations, even in the setting of high vaccine coverage,” said Maya Peterson, associate professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at the University of California Berkeley. “If you have a huge number of cases, even with a low hospitalization rate, you can overwhelm hospitals.”

Whatever the metric, what matters is what we do with the data we have

It’s not as simple as focusing on just cases or just hospitalizations. Both of the metrics tell us something important about how Covid-19 is affecting our society and our health systems.

But any of this data is only useful if public health authorities act upon it, said Justin Feldman, a social epidemiologist at Harvard University. There is a widespread recognition among public health experts that, in many parts of the country, no new public health measures are likely to be put in place — certainly not preemptively — and, by the time cases and hospitalizations and deaths are rising, it’s already too late to prevent a crisis.

“I believe the argument goes: Case rates may no longer be closely linked with hospitalization rates because large proportions of people are vaccinated, at least in some areas. If we used case rates to trigger certain public health policies in the past, we should now use hospitalization rates instead,” Feldman told me. “My first question is, ‘What public health measures are we even talking about?’ Politicians at all levels have mostly given up on them, even when necessary.”

Some local governments have started putting more serious measures into place, reinstituting mask mandates and requiring people to be vaccinated to eat in restaurants or attend other indoor events. The Biden White House is announcing this week a plan to make more free tests available and deploy emergency personnel in places hit hard by omicron.

But even with omicron upon us, only nine states have mask mandates in place. Many governors are uninterested in closing businesses again or putting any more restrictive policies into place, including banning large crowded indoor events. Some of them are Republicans who have been skeptical of Covid-19 interventions; others are Democrats who say that they don’t want to punish their vaccinated constituents with new rules.

Individuals can still take precautions, and local data may give them an idea of how seriously they should be taking the Covid-19 threat at any given time. But the will of government leaders to act in the face of omicron appears to be selective.

So without new interventions, all these metrics — case numbers, hospitalizations, and deaths — could continue to pile up, with a limited effect on the government’s pandemic response.

As Feldman put it to me: “These metrics are mostly useless if we’re not going to implement additional public health measures.”

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