We All Live Tied to the Mast

Hi I’m Angela 🧸A product growth marketer who exists in the space between caffeine highs and retention lows.

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What makes commitment sacred?

The best products don’t win by outcompeting others.They win by aligning with the part of the user that’s trying to win back control - from distraction, from inconsistency, from themselves.

I. The Founder’s Quiet Panic: Your Users Know What They Want. They Just Can’t Make Themselves Do It.

You built a product to help people reach their goals. You did the research. The interviews showed strong intent. The surveys confirmed it. The user journeys were straightforward. The problem wasn’t ambiguity, users knew exactly what they wanted. They wanted to write more, spend less, stop scrolling late at night.

But even with clear goals, engagement stalled. Retention weakened. Nudges, reminders, and scheduled routines were implemented, but they didn’t move the needle. The issue wasn’t lack of motivation. It was fragmentation.

Your product isn’t dealing with a single, consistent user. It’s dealing with two competing versions of the same person. One sets the intention. The other overrides it. At 10pm, the self who planned ahead loses to the self who wants comfort, escape, or distraction.

Until your product architecture accounts for this internal conflict, until it gives the goal-setting self tools to constrain the impulsive one, it won’t solve the real problem. It will remain just another well-intentioned interface, quietly ignored when it matters most.

This is the real challenge:You're not building for a user. You're building for a conflict between two selves inside the same user.

Until your product can help one version of the user constrain the other, you’re just another suggestion box they’ll eventually ignore.

Ulysses and the Sirens

Artist Herbert James Draper Year1909

II. The Industrialization of the Ulysses Pact:

When Restraint Becomes a Market Category

The problem is ancient. So is the solution.

In Homer’s Odyssey, Ulysses knows he will be tempted by the Sirens, creatures whose song lures sailors to their deaths. He doesn’t try to resist in the moment. He doesn’t trust his future self to win that battle. Instead, he designs the situation. He orders his crew to tie him to the mast and plug their own ears with wax. That way, even if he begs to be freed, they won’t hear him. He will be powerless by design.

This is the original Ulysses Pact:

A commitment made in a moment of clarity to constrain future behavior in a moment of weakness.

Today, this same logic isn’t just a metaphor. It’s a product strategy. In fact, it’s rapidly becoming a full-blown market category.Great behavior-change products don’t just nudge. They bind. They let the motivated version of the user set constraints on their future, less disciplined self. Think of it as multi-self UX. You’re not optimizing for convenience. You’re creating intertemporal contracts, agreements between present intention and future impulse.And most products avoid this. They default to polite encouragement. Light-touch motivation. Just-in-time notifications that hope the user still cares.

But users don’t need gentle reminders. They need masts to tie themselves to.

We’re watching the commodification of self-restraint.

Consider what users are now willing to pay for:

* Calm sells temporary mental silence

* Opal sells a voluntary ban on apps your future self can’t resist

* Beeminder turns goal tracking into real financial penalties

* Centered gamifies attention, rewarding your prefrontal cortex over your limbic system

These tools don’t promise freedom. They promise containment. A safehouse from your own future impulses.

And the market loves it.Because once you admit that the biggest threat to your goals is you, products that help you constrain yourself become not just useful, but essential.

This isn’t about productivity anymore.It’s a shift in consumer psychology - from