Is It Ethical to Embarrass Yourself Awake?

Whether embarrassment is an ethically defensible way to build a habit doesn’t resolve into a clean yes or no: shame is, by most of the research, a poor long-term motivator, and yet mutual accountability between people who chose each other is a meaningfully different thing from public humiliation, even when the difference is hard to feel at 6 a.m. Both of those are true at once. That’s the whole problem.

What follows isn’t an interview with anyone else. It’s an argument I have with myself most times I think about this category of app, written out so you can watch both sides instead of getting my flattened conclusion afterward. Call the two voices Me and the Skeptic. The Skeptic isn’t a strawman I built so I could knock it down. Some of what it says, I think it’s right about.

Does shame actually work as a long-term motivator?

Skeptic: Start with the research you already know. June Tangney spent decades studying the difference between shame and guilt, and the finding that holds up across her work is that guilt (“I did a bad thing”) tends to produce repair and better behavior over time, while shame (“I am a bad person”) tends to produce withdrawal, defensiveness, and relapse. An app that sends your friends an unflattering photo isn’t whispering “you skipped a step.” It’s closer to “you failed, publicly, and here’s the evidence.” That’s shame’s shape, not guilt’s — why one tends to outlast the other as a motivator is a separate question from whether the exposure itself is fair, but it’s the reason I keep coming back to Tangney’s framing instead of just the fairness question.

Me: I don’t think that’s wrong, exactly. I think it’s imprecise about what the photo is actually doing. A candid picture of you mid-yawn isn’t a verdict on your character. It’s closer to a mild, specific, forgettable embarrassment, the kind you’d feel if a friend caught you in pajamas, not the kind that reorganizes your self-image. But I’ll grant the harder version of your point: I don’t have a study proving that distinction holds for every person who uses this. I’m inferring that from the mechanic’s shape, not from evidence about what it does to people over a year.

Skeptic: So the honest answer to “does this work long-term” is that nobody’s really measured it.

Me: Yes. That’s fair.

What about people who’d find this genuinely distressing?

Skeptic: Some people carry real rejection sensitivity, or social anxiety, or a history that makes any kind of public exposure land much harder than average. For those people, this isn’t a mild nudge. It’s a genuinely bad night.

Me: Agreed, without qualification. This is where I think the honest move is admitting the tool has a population it’s wrong for, not arguing that population doesn’t exist. Who ends up in your circle before anything ever fires is a decision you make while calm, not a fixed condition of the app, which is at least a partial answer, but it’s not a full one, because the people most likely to spiral over a bad photo are often the same people least likely to have set their circle up carefully in advance.

Can you really consent to this at 6 a.m. if you agreed to it at noon?

Skeptic: This is the objection I think you underrate. You turn this feature on while awake, rested, and reasonable. The person it actually fires on is groggy, irritated, and not making the same judgment calls. Consenting to a rule isn’t the same as consenting to enduring it in the exact compromised state the rule targets.

Me: This is the strongest thing you’ve said, and I want to sit with it instead of rebutting it. There’s an actual precedent for this exact tension in medicine: the Ulysses contract, named for the man tied to the mast, used in psychiatric care when someone in a lucid state pre-authorizes treatment they know their future, symptomatic self will refuse. Rebecca Dresser wrote about the legal and ethical shape of these arrangements back in 1982, and the reasoning that makes them defensible is narrow: the future self isn’t a stranger being overridden, it’s the same continuous person, in a predictable and temporary state they already anticipated. I think that logic partially rescues the alarm case. Grogginess isn’t a diagnosed impairment, though, and that’s a real disanalogy, not a footnote. I’m not fully comfortable resolving it either way.

Is public accountability just public humiliation with better branding?

Skeptic: Say the quiet part. You’re describing a punishment that happens in front of an audience. That’s the definition of humiliation whether or not you like the word.

Me: I’d push back here more than anywhere else. Humiliation, as I understand the word, involves an audience you didn’t choose, a scale you can’t predict, and no exit. This is closer to what actually separates a fair consequence from one that just stings: it’s automatic, it’s bounded, and the people receiving it are ones you selected while thinking clearly, not strangers. Part of that fairness rests on something you can never fully verify in the moment, either, which is the uncertainty about who’s actually going to be paying attention on any given morning — a mostly-silent circle isn’t the same thing as a hostile crowd. And there’s a claim I’ll defend on its own: removing every social stake to avoid any chance of discomfort isn’t free either. Avoidance has its own cost, roughly the premise behind exposure-based approaches in clinical psychology, going back to Mowrer’s 1940s work: the thing you never risk facing tends to keep its grip on you, not lose it.

Skeptic: That’s a defense of discomfort in general. It’s not a defense of this specific amount, for this specific person, on this specific morning.

Me: No. It isn’t.

Where I’ve landed, which isn’t very far

I don’t think this resolves into “actually it’s fine,” and I’d be suspicious of a piece that told you it did. The uncertainty about who’s actually paying attention on any given morning is part of what makes the whole arrangement work, and it’s also part of what makes it a little unsettling to defend cleanly. My position: this is ethically defensible for people who chose it while thinking straight, for a circle they picked on purpose, at a severity they’d call fair the next morning. It’s not defensible as something you talk a reluctant friend into, or something a company should design toward the widest possible audience regardless of fit.

Small disclosure, since it’s the reason this argument exists in my head at all: DontSnooze is the app whose camera-roll mechanic prompted this whole debate. I’m not going to pretend that’s incidental. I just don’t think naming it changes which parts of the Skeptic’s case I actually believe.