Where Did the Money Go?

A Five-Year Audit of Addiction, Relief, and the Cost of Escape

Earlier this week, I sat down at my dining room table, opened up my app purchase history, and forced myself to look at where my money has actually gone over the last five years. It was sickening. Seeing thousands of dollars drained into digital porn made my stomach drop.

A heavy wave of shame hit me so hard I could barely breathe. I looked around my room and felt like an absolute fake. I thought about my dad and the legacy he left me. I thought about Pastor Watts and the deep, spiritual conversations we have, and the guys in POSSE who think I’m doing well.

I felt like I was living a total lie, putting on this good, respectable face for the people who love me, while secretly letting these companies bleed me dry in the dark. I started spinning out, telling myself I was just uniquely broken, weak-willed, and a moral failure.

But as I sat there staring at the numbers, trying to make sense of how I got here, I realized something else: I didn’t design these products. I just fell into a trap that was built to catch me.

Everything we buy and consume today is engineered by corporate data scientists whose only job is to hook our biology for profit.

Whether it’s an app feed designed to keep your eyes glued to the screen, a corporate fast-food menu, or a nicotine vape, they all use the exact same layout as a casino slot machine. It’s a loop:

Cue → Craving → Routine → Random Reward.

A psychologist named B.F. Skinner proved how this works decades ago with an experiment called the Skinner Box. He put a rat in a cage with a lever. When the lever gave a food pellet every single time, the rat only pressed it when it was hungry, ate, and went back to normal life.

But when Skinner made the food delivery completely random—meaning the rat never knew if it would take 3 presses or 50 presses to get a hit—the rat’s brain went totally haywire. The uncertainty turned into an obsession. The rat just stood there frantically pumping the lever over and over until it was physically exhausted, even when it was completely full.

That randomness is exactly what’s built into our phones and our vices. Every pull-down to refresh a timeline, every notification, every puff of a vape is just us pumping a random lever. It completely bypasses our logical brain.

The biggest realization for me, though, was something called the Relief Hypothesis. It’s a basic rule of human biology:

We don’t turn to these habits to feel good. We turn to them to stop feeling bad.

When you are carrying heavy stress, anxiety, or the quiet weight of feeling isolated, your nervous system is on fire. Your brain desperately wants an escape hatch to numb the pain.

The corporations know this. They don’t build these platforms for happy, fulfilled people; they design them to make money off our emotional pain. The vape doesn’t bring genuine joy; it just temporarily quiets the anxiety that the last hit created. Scrolling through a screen doesn’t cure loneliness; it just distracts you for thirty seconds so you don’t have to sit alone with your own heavy thoughts.

Looking back at my 5-year app purchase audit through that lens is when I finally started seeing the truth. I realized I wasn’t failing some moral test. I was a human being experiencing real-world pain, reaching for the only escape hatches around me. These companies made the stress, they built the vices, they sold me the relief, and they pocketed all my money.

I can’t just think my way out of this situation while I’m sitting right in the middle of it. I have to change my physical surroundings.

This week, for me, that meant facing the raw numbers to finally wake up. It meant turning off the constant notifications on my phone so the screen would stop pulling at me. It meant putting a nicotine patch on my arm and chewing a lozenge. Honestly, it’s frustrating as hell because I’m still dependent on a chemical right now, and it feels like a crutch, but the flat, steady dose stops the crazy highs and lows that keep my brain obsessed with the lever.

And finally, it meant getting completely offline today. I left the house, went out to a farm, and just stood in the dirt with my family to get my feet back under me. I texted a brother about plant science instead of staring at a timeline. I bought a hardback book on casino design to study the exact tricks they used to get inside my head.

I’m still on nicotine today, and I’m still dealing with the damage and the bills from the last five years. It’s a long road, and the temptation is still right there waiting for me.

But today, I’m not hitting the lever. I’m just standing in the dirt, looking at the trap clearly, and walking away.