Dragon

Dragon is a popular life management system (LMS) inspired by old MMORPGS. I use it. I think it’s better than its main competitor, Jaynes, though both have their upsides. Some people use them in concert, but I guess I don’t need quite that much hand-holding. Dragon uses an approach called gamification; everything you see gets annotated with progress bars and stats and achievements and quests. From the simplicity of brushing your teeth to the complexity of raising a child, the audacity of Dragon is to imagine all of life as a game, and to render you as the player, to visualize and incentivize personal growth and responsibility by outsourcing the burden of that responsibility to an app.

If Jaynes, in contrast, has the same goal, it takes a much more literal approach, wherein the software manifests a virtual companion, an assistant who, far from being a servant, presents itself as the master. Jaynes the man hypothesized that the phenomenal experience of premodern man perceived the interior voice, not as a facet of the self, but as a literal other, as the voice of a god or gods, as if a real and personal and agentic being spoke at all moments to all people. This is offered as a parsimonious explanation for premodern religious experience, for the casual ease with which our ancestors referred to the voice of god, an ease they felt because they literally heard it.

Jaynes the app draws an avatar to walk beside you, exhorting you to take moral and sustainable actions at all times. You can skin it to look like a burning bush, or a beautiful woman (but I repeat myself), or like the great sages of past ages; Buddha, Jesus, Socrates, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, or Oprah. I find it all a bit tiresome, Zeus and Poseidon commanding me to floss. Regardless of the skin you choose, you get the same moral prescriptions, according to the Jaynes app team’s philosophy of “Universal Virtual Morality,” which claims to identify common themes in all moral teachings, and to refine them into something that is “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.”

The userbase of Jaynes skews female, and the userbase of Dragon skews male.