Pleasure’s P&L: The Libido Budget Thesis

You run on a libido budget—finite psychic cash you spend to regulate state. Three ledgers keep score: drive principal (raw energy from the id), working capital (focus/composure the ego can deploy), and a compliance tax (the superego’s guilt/shame and social penalties). Cigarettes made that math ugly: big compliance tax (odor, ash, stigma), high ritual overhead (step outside, break flow), and uneven payoff (variance). You got relief, but you burned time, attention, and self-image to get it.

RRPs act like a clean valve. Same drive, far less leakage: no plume or spectacle, near-zero latency (pop–place–proceed), tighter onset curves (less prediction error). The superego stops sounding alarms, the ego stops spending willpower hiding and apologizing, and more working capital is left for the task you actually care about. In Freud-speak, repression was costly storage; the desire didn’t vanish, it accrued interest and leaked sideways. Give it a low-friction conduit and the spring uncoils—less symptom, more function.

Scale that up and you get a productivity dividend: minutes returned, cognitive drag removed, fewer displacement behaviors. The design rules follow: kill spectacle, standardize the curve, honor the mouth’s “sensory checksum,” map products to jobs (“Burst/Steady/Coast”), and frame the behavior as composure and reliability. Net-net: renicotinization isn’t “more desire,” it’s less waste—same signal, fewer taxes, better days.