Adjacent Complementarity

Adjacent complementarity is the technical heart of the rational addiction model. Goods exhibit adjacent complementarity when today's consumption increases the marginal utility of tomorrow's consumption of the same good. Each cigarette makes the next one more desirable. Each drink raises the baseline from which the next drink is evaluated. The complementarity is adjacent in time — today's consumption affects tomorrow's — and it creates a feedback loop that is self-reinforcing. The agent does not drift into escalating consumption. The agent optimizes into it, following a path the consumption itself has shaped. In AI-augmented work, adjacent complementarity operates through the productive feedback loop: each session of high-output building raises the expected return on the next session, which makes the next session's opportunity cost (the cost of doing anything else) feel higher, which makes the decision to continue feel like the only rational choice.