What most excites me about GLP-1 receptor agonists isn’t the weight loss. It’s the emerging picture of their effects on reward circuitry, habit formation, and compulsive behaviours.

Reduced interest in alcohol. Attenuated “food noise.” Dampened compulsive patterns across domains. Lilly is running trials in smoking cessation and alcohol use disorder. People report diminished interest in doomscrolling, gambling, impulse shopping.

Something deeper is happening here.

You’re Outgunned

Before GLP-1s, we asked people to white-knuckle their way past Skinner boxes that ten thousand PhDs have been optimising against them for years. (I’m borrowing this framing from Performative Bafflement, who put it better than I could.)

Every big company has armies of researchers coordinating to create vastly imbalanced world-models and deploy them against average people. They’re building fine-grained models of consumer behaviour and motivation, reaching deep into our collective biology and neurology to identify, grasp, and yank on whatever hooks exist for altering behaviour at scale. They’re discovering and creating biologically-grounded addictive superstimuli.

The results are everywhere. Junk food engineered to bypass satiety signals. The “attention economy” growing phone time from 2-3 hours per day in 2014 to 7-9 hours in Gen Z today. Online gambling. Infinite scroll. Ragebait.

To a first approximation, everyone is outgunned. Even if you do the smart thing and opt out — don’t eat junk, don’t do social media, don’t click clickbait — you’re still affected by everyone else living in this regime.

Revealed Priorities

This is where the “revealed priorities” framing becomes useful.

The way you spend your time reveals what you’re actually prioritising. Not what you say you value, not what you wish you valued — what you actually prioritise, as revealed by your actions.

GLP-1s don’t change your values. They change your capacity to act on them.

When the pull of short-term dopamine pellets is attenuated — whether that’s food, alcohol, or doomscrolling — you suddenly have room to choose the things you actually want to prioritise. The ragebait and the endless scroll start to look like what they are: sad, dark little reward dispensers that were never going to lead anywhere.

We’re lucky to have drugs that can help us bootstrap into the positive path, which actually reflects our deeper values when we don’t have spirals in our eyes.

The Positive Feedback Loop

There’s something motivating and self-reinforcing about positive change.

When you’re stuck, you’re vulnerable to parasitic meaning-systems and engineered outrage loops. When people see their weight improving, their health markers resolving, unhelpful habits diminishing, they develop a sense of optimistic agency.

The opportunity cost of wasting hours — or many short minutes of distraction scattered across the day — on things that don’t serve you becomes obvious. You start to see time differently. You start to protect it.

This is the opposite of the doom spiral. It’s what happens when the Skinner boxes lose their grip.

The Seatbelt Analogy

Seatbelts don’t make you a better driver. They don’t change your values about safety. They just… reduce the cost of the hostile environment you’re navigating.

GLP-1s are similar. They don’t make you a better person. They don’t give you discipline or willpower or virtue. They just reduce the cost of navigating an environment that’s been deliberately engineered to exploit your neurological vulnerabilities.

We don’t moralize about seatbelts. We shouldn’t moralize about this either.

The Uncomfortable Implication

If GLP-1s reveal what people actually want to prioritise when the noise is turned down, what does that say about all the time we’ve spent judging people for their “choices”?

Maybe a lot of what we call weakness of will is just… losing a fight you were never equipped to win. Maybe the person doomscrolling at 2am isn’t failing at self-control — they’re losing to a system specifically designed to make them lose.

The moralising framework says: try harder. The revealed priorities framework says: maybe the problem isn’t effort. Maybe the problem is that you’re fighting a war with asymmetric weapons, and now we finally have something that levels the field.