Basically, the Pavlok is a next-level-shit Fitbit. It supposedly helps you break bad habits like smoking, nail-biting, and eating sugar by giving you a real-as-fuck shock on the wrist!
I have exactly one word for this device: Wut.
The Pavlok website (which refuses to disclose the price of the Pavlok unless you provide your email address) promises that Pavlok will help you break bad habits in five days by "associating a mild zap with your bad habit, training your brain to stop liking the habit."
If you scroll down on the link, you will witness videotaped testimonials from several people who were shocked out of their bad habits, including a woman named "Nagina" who "quit biting her nails." (I think Pavlok might work better for Nagina if it could shock other people every time they called her Vagina).
It's taken until 2015 for human beings to fully resign themselves to rat-in-a-lab-experiment status, and celebrate that fact on the Steve Harvey Show (again, see link). But here we are, and I for one couldn't be happier about it.
The only problem is that my bad habits aren't as simple as nail-biting, sugar, and smoking. I have no intention of quitting the first two, and I don't suffer from the third. But I do have lots of other bad habits that Pavlok probably won't be able to solve unless and until it becomes an embedded brain chip that stops me from ruminating on a hamster wheel of self-defeating thoughts.
I'll buy a Pavlok when it can electrocute me every time I wonder why someone isn't responding to my texts; obsess over my fat rolls and wrinkles; worry that my colleagues think I'm a professional disaster; become convinced that I should start a trust fund for my children's future therapy; and fear that the sheer monotony of my existence will land me in hospice care at age 90 wondering WTF happened to my life.
Yep. That's when I'll buy a Pavlok. So here's hoping for the next generation of more technologically-advanced Pavloks. Christmas 2016, perhaps?
Until then, there's always Prozac.
