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, but as a companion. A hired friend of sorts, whose job is to listen, encourage, and make you feel psychologically safe on the way up.

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.

Try to criticise this purchase. Go ahead.

You can argue that a luxury watch is overpriced for what it does. You can argue that an experience was chosen for the Instagram-worthy moment. But if someone buys a service because it soothes their anxiety, protects their mental health, or provides emotional safety, what exactly do you say?

Any critique is immediately reframed as an attack on their psychological wellbeing. The purchase becomes culturally bulletproof.

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

The meme that can’t be criticised

Richard Dawkins introduced the concept that ideas are replicators, subject to the same selection pressure as genes. They spread from mind to mind, and the ones that survive are those best at getting themselves copied, regardless of whether they benefit the host.

David Deutsch then extended Dawkins' framework to distinguish two types. Rational memes earn their spread through genuine usefulness. They invite criticism, undergo error-correction, and the people who hold them do better as a result.

Anti-rational memes survive differently. They survive by disabling your ability to question them. They install a psychological tripwire that makes the idea immune to challenge, allowing it to spread even when it actively harms you.

"The more accurately the hobgoblin's attributes exploit genuine, widespread vulnerabilities of the human mind, the more faithfully the anti-rational meme will propagate." – David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity

The mutation of the consumerist meme

Consumerism has been quietly mutating for decades, each iteration more insulated from criticism than the last.

Objects gave way to experiences.

Experiences gave way to emotions.

And with each mutation, the meme found a more defensible position.

The emotion era is its most bulletproof form yet.

A transaction shielded by the sanctity of mental health itself.

When you question whether an AI companion toy or a sensory healing retreat actually resolves your anxiety, the meme reframes your critique as an attack on 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.

The band-aid

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

But 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.

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, an AI-driven sleep tracker, or a bubble tea.

These solutions don't fix the underlying problem. They merely act as band-aids, spiking your dopamine and blood sugar enough to endure one more afternoon of a poorly configured life, at increasing cost, for as long as you stay in the 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 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.

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.

In the ​full article​, I go deeper into why our cognitive defaults keep us in the loop, and what the actual exit looks like.

As always, question the defaults.

Here's to building the exit, not buying the relief.