The Market's Most Bulletproof Product

I came across this video on YouTube recently and it stopped me cold.

Somewhere on Mount Tai, one of China’s most sacred mountains, you can now pay someone to climb alongside you. Not as a guide or porter, but as a companion. Their job is to listen attentively, offer encouragement, and provide a psychologically safe environment while you climb. They can hold your hand or carry you part of the way if you ask. A hired friend of sorts.

This is one example of 情绪价值, or Qíngxù Jiàzhí, which translates directly as “Emotional Value.” It sounds like a quirky local trend. But I found myself thinking it might be a canary in the coal mine.

The Mutation of the Consumerist Meme

To understand why this matters, you have to trace how consumerism has quietly evolved over the past several decades, each iteration more insulated from criticism than the last.

The Object Era

Consumerism began with things. A car. A watch. A house.

The value was anchored in the physical product itself. The ability to purchase luxury goods signalled wealth and status, which drove consumers to desire and acquire such goods.

But over time, the democratisation of luxury allowed anyone to create the illusion of wealth. Materialism started being looked down upon as shallow.

The cultural script began to shift, buffered by scientific backing on hedonic adaptation and how accumulating things doesn’t move the needle on happiness.

So the market shifted with it.

The Experience Era

The new wisdom was simple: don’t buy things, collect experiences.

Travel. Eat out. Attend concerts and festivals.

Accumulate memories, not possessions.

The logic felt more defensible than the object era. How can you tell someone an experience isn’t worthwhile?

But something strange happened in the process. Accumulating experiences became its own status game. The experiences people sought weren’t idiosyncratic to their own genuine interests. They converged on the Instagram-worthy. Recognisable enough to signal taste and sophistication to an invisible audience.

I call this Experiential Consumerism.

Because status requires legibility, other people need to readily recognise the value of what you’re doing. Experiential consumerism herds people toward the same overhyped aesthetics and locations. An experience is undertaken to broadcast being “cultured” or up-to-date, chosen based on its aesthetic value for a feed rather than its actual value to your wellbeing.

A genuinely restorative weekend might just be a slow morning at home with a good book and a cup of coffee, but that doesn’t photograph well. The performative drive pulls us away from what actually restores us and toward what looks impressive.

Experiential consumerism, at its worst, outsources your attention to the performance of living rather than the living itself. This is largely where we still are.

There’s a simple test you can do for yourself. If you were strictly forbidden from taking a single photo, logging the location, or mentioning the experience to another human being for the rest of your life, would you still spend the time and money doing it? If the answer is no, you’re not buying an experience. You’re buying a broadcast.

None of this means experiences are worthless. But there’s a meaningful difference between an intentionally chosen experience and an inherited one. In a world of constant comparison and algorithmically curated feeds, distinguishing between the two has become harder than it sounds.

Experiential consumerism is harder to critique because it’s subjective. But criticism is still viable. The pursuit of the experience can be superficial or performative, driven by the underlying mechanism of status signalling.

Which leads us into the emotion era.

The Emotion Era

This is where China is now, and where the rest of us could be heading.

People aren’t shopping for a product or an event. They’re purchasing psychological safety. The purchase is framed as self-care, emotional regulation, or mental preservation. And in this era, consumerism becomes much harder to critique.

If you purchase a luxury watch for its functional value, a critic can objectively argue you overpaid for a basic time-keeping mechanism. If you purchase it for experiential value, they might critique the superficiality of status signalling. But if you purchase an object or service because it satisfies a profound psychological need, the transaction is suddenly shielded. To critique the purchase is framed as invalidating the person’s emotional pain or mental wellbeing. It becomes culturally bulletproof.

You cannot tell someone that a toy companion pet or a sensory “healing” service didn’t genuinely soothe their anxiety.

The Anti-Rational Meme

What we are seeing is not just clever marketing. It is the propagation of what philosopher David Deutsch calls an anti-rational meme.

In memetic theory, ideas are replicators, subject to the same selection pressure as genes. The ones that survive are those best at getting themselves copied, regardless of whether they benefit the host. Rational memes tend to earn their copying through genuine usefulness. They invite criticism, undergo error-correction, and the people who adopt them do better as a result.

Anti-rational memes survive by a different mechanism entirely. They survive by disabling the critical faculties of the host, installing a psychological tripwire that makes the idea immune to challenge and allowing it to spread even when it harms the person holding it.

Consumerism’s evolution into emotional value is a masterclass in this kind of mutation. In its utilitarian phase, the consumerist meme was vulnerable. By shifting from objects to experiences, it became shielded by subjectivity. And now, as it mutates into emotional value, it becomes shielded further by the sanctity of mental health. The meme built a progressively more impenetrable defence against error-correction.

When you question whether an AI toy actually solves someone’s anxiety, the meme reframes your critique as an attack on their psychological distress. Challenging the solution is made to feel like invalidating the need. The meme protects itself by making rational scrutiny socially and emotionally costly.

And it found fertile ground because the underlying need is real. Rising unemployment, relentless competition, major economic shifts, the constant overhead of a hyper-connected world, these all create genuine psychological stress.

The market didn’t invent the anxiety. It simply identified the gap and moved with remarkable efficiency to monetise it.

The Addition Fallacy

When humans face a problem, whether it’s anxiety, burnout, or a lack of meaning, our default cognitive bias is to add a solution. We buy a product, download an app, or hire a service.

But adding a solution doesn’t always solve the underlying problem. It merely acts as a band-aid to make the pain of a poorly configured life temporarily bearable. Buying a blind box or drinking a bubble tea doesn’t fix the root cause. It just spikes your blood sugar and dopamine enough to endure one more afternoon of it. It requires no fundamental change to your worldview or actions.

The flaw isn’t that people are seeking emotional value. The flaw is that they are outsourcing it to low-fidelity commodities instead of engineering their lives to create the conditions for calm and contentment.

When you are burned out by endless notifications and performative corporate culture, the market doesn’t tell you to quit. It sells you a $300 mindfulness retreat, a sensory deprivation tank session, or an AI-driven sleep tracker.

This creates a dangerous loop. You buy coping mechanisms, which requires earning more, which means enduring more stress, which requires more expensive coping mechanisms. You end up spending time to earn money, to spend money to buy back the peace lost while earning it.

The question was never whether the market is to blame. It’s whether the solution actually solves the problem it was hired to fix.

It doesn’t.

So what does?

Subtraction

If the problem is a poorly configured life generating more friction than you can sustainably manage, the answer isn’t more sophisticated coping mechanisms. The answer is less friction.

This is harder than it sounds, because subtraction requires an upfront pain.

It means the social friction of declining invitations and disappointing people as you step off the socially sanctioned version of what a good life should look like. The discomfort of sitting quietly with your own messy mind when you stop consuming short-term fixes. The ego cost of stepping away from the performative existence, the busy schedule, the curated experiences, and the visible signals of a productive life.

None of that is comfortable. But it is available right now, at no cost, to anyone willing to do the harder work of choosing differently.

The Highest Utility of Capital

Subtraction is one lever. The other is an exit strategy.

You can reach the point where your capital buys back your time, allowing you to walk away from friction rather than paying to endure it.

Time freedom is the exit strategy.

It takes time to build. But every dollar invested towards it gets you closer to the point where you step off the loop entirely, and wake up to dictate exactly what you do, when you do it, and who you do it with.

The goal isn’t to figure out which emotional value product provides the best return. The goal is to design a life that doesn’t require you to purchase emotional value in the first place.

What China’s Mount Tai companion climbers are really showing us isn’t a niche consumer trend. It’s a preview of what happens when the gap between the life people are living and the life they actually want grows wide enough that they will pay for a stranger to hold their hand on a mountain.

The market will always be there to sell the relief. The harder question is whether you’re building toward a life where you don’t need it, or just making the current situation more bearable.