Nice thread, life hacks - I like the model/image of the "self improvement/self flagellation see-saw". Not sure whether to continue here or there, but I do have points about gamification.
So we can neurochemically gamify/steer the lives of others-as-consumers, but how does that steering change when we attempt to do it to ourselves? As a consumer, we can experience being manipulated by, in effect, an outside influence. How would that experience change when we are being manipulated by an inside influence? At once the puppet and the puppetmaster - reclaiming the cockpit of our drives by expelling the silicon valley pirates.
As the effectiveness of the above "see-saw" can be attested to by some of you, what are the limits? Do you think one can get to the point where their self-manipulation is so fine and subtle that it doesn't even feel like they are tricking themselves - but rather it feels as if genuine meaning is being stumbled upon?
I'm inclined to believe it is possible, and it can be expressed in terms of gamification, seeing as we would be engineering, around ourselves, a system of meaning and achievement, however teleological.