Two hours on lockpicking. He knew nothing about lockpicking.

Chris covered a SaaS product for a mid-size Austin company, which meant demos, handoffs, and a lot of async communication with engineers who expected precision. It was not a stressful job by the standards of the industry, but it required a baseline of mental availability that Reddit had started to erode in a way he could describe precisely: he was spending roughly 90 minutes a day on the platform across maybe a dozen subreddits, none of which were directly relevant to his work, most of which he had joined years ago and never unsubscribed from. r/nba was the main one. r/Austin. r/homelab, which he had joined when he was considering building a home server and then never did. r/personalfinance. r/dataisbeautiful. r/AskEngineers. Each individually felt like a legitimate interest. Collectively they were a distributed attention tax he paid out in three-minute increments across the day, and more significantly, in longer sessions late at night when the day was technically over and there was no cost to reading one more thread. The phone app made this easy. The recommendation surface was good at its job — it surfaced content adjacent to what he had already read, kept the feed moving, and offered a frictionless path from one thread to the next that required nothing except the absence of a reason to stop. He had no particular reason to stop, most evenings, because there was nothing demanding his attention and the threads were almost always at least marginally interesting. That was the precise problem. Almost always marginally interesting is enough to keep a feed running for two hours if nothing interrupts it.

9:04pm. Chris opened Reddit to check the NBA scores. The Mavs game was in the third quarter. He read the score — down six — and opened the live game thread. The thread had 2,300 comments. He read maybe forty of them, the top-voted ones, which were sharp. The Mavs came back in the fourth. At 9:38pm he was still in the game thread, which was now 4,100 comments and moving fast. He was at 34 minutes of Screen Time. At 9:41pm, the Reddit recommendation surface showed a post from r/lockpicking. The title referenced a well-known padlock brand having a documented vulnerability. He had never been to r/lockpicking. He did not own any locks he wanted to pick. He tapped the post anyway, because the title was specific and specific titles tend to resolve. The post linked to a pinned beginner thread in r/lockpicking that had been up for several years and had accumulated a detailed FAQ. The FAQ referenced a video about the history of the pin-tumbler lock mechanism — who invented it, what problem it solved, how the tolerances worked. The video was eleven minutes. He watched six minutes of it, then scrolled to the comments, where someone had posted a follow-up about vulnerabilities in commercial-grade hardware. That comment thread had 87 replies. At 11:31pm, Chris looked at the time. Screen Time showed one hour and forty-eight minutes. He had crossed the 45-minute limit at approximately 9:45pm — forty-five minutes before he watched the first second of the pin-tumbler video — and he had been reading about locks for nearly two hours since. He had not thought about the contract once. He did not particularly care about locks. He had not learned anything about locks he expected to retain. The Mavs had won by four points, which he had known since 10:15pm, and which had not prompted him to stop.

The next morning, Chris renewed the Lockin contract at tighter terms: $10 per day, 30-minute limit. He also opened Reddit, signed in, and unsubscribed from r/lockpicking and a half-dozen other subreddits he had no real interest in — most of them legacy joins from years ago he had never pruned. That cut the recommendation surface down to a smaller set of subs he actually cared about. The limit was the real lever, but the unsubscribe pass meant the algorithm had less raw material to work with at 9pm. Verification stayed the same: Screen Time, automatic, no manual confirmation. In the second period, he did not forfeit. He came close twice — once during another late Mavs game, once on a Sunday afternoon when he fell into a thread about municipal water infrastructure that was also, objectively, not relevant to his life. Both times he caught it at 27 minutes and closed the app. The closure felt different than it had in the first contract. Five dollars had been the kind of money he could pay and not feel. Ten dollars at a tighter limit registered the moment he sensed himself approaching the line. The contract did not stop the next thread from being interesting. It made the cost of one more tap visible at the moment of the tap — which had been the missing piece all along.