Wednesday morning, December 11th. Scrolling past another "collecting experiences, not things" post from someone who spent $8,000 on a two-week trip they barely remember because they were too busy photographing it for social proof. The experience they collected was the appearance of having an experience.

The Experience Gospel

Here's what everyone agrees on:

Material possessions don't make you happy. Experiences do. Spending money on travel, concerts, restaurants, and adventures delivers lasting satisfaction. Things lose their shine. Memories compound. Experiential purchases are scientifically proven to increase well-being. Anyone still buying stuff is trapped in outdated consumerism. The enlightened ones collect experiences.

The promise: Shifting from material goods to experiences will make you happier, more fulfilled, and more authentic. You'll have stories instead of clutter. Meaning instead of maintenance.

The reality: Experience consumption has become just as mindless, status-driven, and empty as material consumption—sometimes worse, because it comes wrapped in moral superiority.

Thesis: The shift from material consumption to experience consumption isn't an escape from consumerism—it's a rebranding. We've traded one form of acquisition for another, but kept the same underlying patterns: collecting for status, optimizing for appearances, consuming to fill voids, chasing novelty instead of depth. Experience culture promises liberation from materialism but delivers many of the same problems in a form that's harder to critique because it feels more virtuous. The result is people who've spent fortunes on experiences they barely remember, traveled constantly but learned nothing, and accumulated a different kind of clutter—curated memories that exist primarily to be displayed. The problem was never possessions versus experiences. It was mindless consumption versus intentional living. You can consume experiences as mindlessly as you consume objects—and when you do, you get all the downsides of consumerism plus the self-righteousness of thinking you're above it.

How Experience Consumption Works

Let's examine what actually happens when "experiences over things" becomes your operating principle:

The Collection Mindset Transfers

What happens:

  • You stop collecting objects
  • You start collecting experiences
  • The collection impulse remains unchanged

What this looks like:

  • "I've been to 47 countries"
  • "I've tried every Michelin-starred restaurant in the city"
  • "I've seen 200 concerts this year"
  • "I've done skydiving, scuba diving, bungee jumping..."

The pattern: You're still accumulating. Still counting. Still treating life as a list to complete. You've just swapped the items being collected.

The satisfaction still comes from having more than others. From completing the set. From being able to say "I've done that." The experience itself is secondary to the accumulation.

Status Competition Intensifies

Material possessions have visible price ceilings. A luxury car costs $100k. A watch costs $50k. Status competition has limits.

Experiences have no ceiling. Someone can always go more exotic, more extreme, more exclusive, more expensive. There's always a rarer destination, a more expensive restaurant, a more exclusive event.

The result: Experience competition is actually more expensive and exhausting than material competition. At least material status had endgame purchases. Experience status is infinite.

Real example:

  • Material status: "I bought a nice car" ($60k, done)
  • Experience status: "I've done multiple African safaris, climbed Kilimanjaro, stayed in an overwater bungalow in Bora Bora, taken a private cooking class in Tuscany..." ($200k+, never complete)

The Instagram Optimization

Question: Are you having the experience, or collecting evidence that you had the experience?

The test:

  • If no one would ever know you did this, would you still do it?
  • If you couldn't photograph it, would it still appeal to you?
  • If you couldn't tell anyone about it, would it still feel worthwhile?

What happens in experience culture:

  • You choose experiences based on how they'll look to others
  • You optimize the experience for capture, not for living
  • You miss the experience while documenting it
  • The point becomes proving you were there, not being there

Example: You go to an exclusive restaurant. You spend the evening photographing food, checking angles, capturing the atmosphere. You barely taste the food. You don't have a real conversation. You leave with great photos and no memory of the meal itself. You consumed the appearance of an experience.

The Meaning Deficit

The promise: Experiences provide meaning that possessions can't.

The reality: Experience-chasing often skips the parts where meaning actually develops.

Where meaning comes from:

  • Sustained engagement with difficulty
  • Deep relationships built over time
  • Mastery developed through repetition
  • Contribution to something beyond yourself
  • Integration and reflection on experiences

What experience culture prioritizes:

  • Novelty and intensity
  • Breadth over depth
  • Moving to the next experience quickly
  • Collecting rather than integrating
  • Stimulation over significance

The result: You have many experiences but no wisdom. Lots of stories but no growth. Constant motion but no direction.

The Economics of Experience Consumption

Experience consumption has specific economic properties that make it worse than material consumption in some ways:

Experiences Are Less Satisfying Than We Predict

The research everyone cites shows experiences make people happier than possessions.

What the research actually shows:

  • Experiences make people happier than possessions in retrospect
  • We're better at remembering experiences positively than possessions
  • This is partly because memory is selective—we forget the bad parts

What this means:

  • You might have a mediocre trip full of stress, expense, and frustration
  • Six months later you remember it fondly
  • This makes you think experiences are always worth it
  • So you keep buying experiences that don't deliver in the moment

The trap: You're optimizing for future memory rather than present experience. You're spending money and time on things that aren't actually good while they're happening, but that you'll enjoy remembering.

This is arguably worse than buying a physical object you enjoy in the moment.

Experiences Can't Be Resold

Material goods retain some value. You can sell the car, the watch, the furniture. Bad purchases can be partially corrected.

Experiences are sunk costs. If you spend $5,000 on a trip that turns out to be disappointing, that money is gone completely. You can't resell your vacation.

This makes experience consumption higher risk: Every purchase is final. There's no secondary market to recover value.

Experience Inflation Is Real

What happens when everyone shifts to experience consumption:

  • Popular experiences get crowded
  • Prices increase due to demand
  • Quality decreases due to commercialization
  • Authentic experiences become tourist experiences
  • You need to go more exotic/expensive to find "authentic" experiences
  • Those become commercialized too
  • The cycle continues

Example: Twenty years ago, hiking Machu Picchu was a genuine experience. Now it's a crowded tourist attraction with advance booking, time limits, and thousands of people. The experience got worse as experience-consumption culture discovered it.

The Hedonic Treadmill Runs Faster

Material possessions: You buy a nice chair. You enjoy it for years. The hedonic adaptation is slow.

Experiences: You go somewhere exotic. You enjoy it for a week. Immediately after, you're looking for the next experience. The adaptation is rapid.

The result: Experience consumption drives faster consumption cycles. You need more frequent purchases to maintain the same level of satisfaction.

When Experiences Work (And When They Don't)

Let me be clear: Experiences aren't bad. Mindless experience consumption is bad.

Experiences work when:

1. They're Chosen For Intrinsic Reasons

You want to do something because:

  • You're genuinely curious about it
  • It aligns with your values
  • It develops a skill or capacity you care about
  • It strengthens a relationship that matters
  • It brings you present-moment joy

Not because:

  • It will make a good story
  • Other people will be impressed
  • It's on some list of things you "should" do
  • It will photograph well
  • It signals the right values

2. They Involve Depth, Not Just Breadth

Depth experiences:

  • Learning to cook well over years
  • Developing a meditation practice
  • Building deep friendships in your city
  • Mastering a musical instrument
  • Regular hiking in the same local mountains

Breadth experiences:

  • Trying every restaurant once
  • Visiting countries briefly
  • Sampling many hobbies superficially
  • Constant travel to new places
  • Collecting credentials

The difference: Depth experiences compound. Each instance builds on previous ones. You get better, understand more, go deeper. Breadth experiences are one-and-done consumption.

3. They're Integrated, Not Just Accumulated

After the experience, do you:

  • Reflect on what you learned?
  • Change your behavior based on it?
  • Let it transform your perspective?
  • Use it as a foundation for future growth?

Or do you:

  • Check it off a list?
  • Post photos and move on?
  • Start planning the next thing?
  • Let it fade into the background?

Integration is what turns an experience into wisdom. Without integration, you just have a collection of disconnected memories.

4. They Fit Your Actual Life

Questions to ask:

  • Does this experience serve the life I want to build?
  • Or am I consuming it because experience culture says I should?
  • Am I collecting experiences instead of living?

Example: If you want deep local relationships and a meaningful career, but you spend all your time and money on travel, your experiences are actively undermining your goals. You're consuming experiences that work against your life.

The Alternative: Intentional Experience

What actually works:

Choose Fewer Experiences, More Intentionally

Instead of: "Try everything, go everywhere, maximize experiences"

Try: "What specific experiences will serve my actual goals and values?"

Practical:

  • Say no to most experience opportunities
  • Choose a few that genuinely matter
  • Go deep instead of broad
  • Repeat experiences instead of always seeking novelty

Example: Go to the same cabin in the woods every year for a week. Same place, same activities, same people. This feels boring in experience-consumption culture. It's actually where depth, meaning, and genuine restoration happen.

Optimize For Living, Not For Capture

Before any experience, ask:

  • Am I doing this to have it, or to show I had it?
  • Would I choose this if I couldn't tell anyone?
  • Am I present, or performing presence?

During experiences:

  • Put the camera away (mostly)
  • Don't optimize for social media
  • Be bored sometimes
  • Miss the "perfect" shot
  • Choose presence over evidence

Allow Boring Experiences

The best experiences often look boring:

  • Regular dinners with the same friends
  • Daily walks in the same park
  • Weekly practice of a skill
  • Quiet mornings with coffee and a book
  • Routine that creates space for depth

These don't photograph well. They don't make good stories. They're not impressive to list. They also build the actual good life.

Develop Experience Taste

Just like you can have taste in art, music, or food, you can have taste in experiences.

Bad taste: "I want to do impressive things that other people value"

Good taste: "I know what kinds of experiences work for me specifically, based on self-knowledge and reflection"

Developing taste requires:

  • Trying different things
  • Paying attention to what actually satisfies you (not what should satisfy you)
  • Noticing patterns
  • Trusting your own preferences over cultural scripts
  • Being willing to have unpopular taste

Count Time Well Spent, Not Experiences Collected

Wrong metric: How many experiences did I have?

Right metric: How much time did I spend doing things I genuinely valued while I was doing them?

The difference:

  • Thirty mediocre experiences you collected for status: Low value
  • Three experiences you were genuinely present for: High value
  • One hundred hours doing the same meaningful thing: Extremely high value

The Real Problem (And Solution)

The problem was never possessions versus experiences.

The problem is mindless consumption versus intentional living.

You can mindlessly consume objects. You can also mindlessly consume experiences. The vehicle doesn't matter—the mindlessness does.

Mindless consumption:

  • Driven by external validation
  • Seeking novelty as an end
  • Accumulating to fill inner voids
  • Optimizing for appearance
  • Constantly seeking the next thing
  • Never satisfied with what is

Intentional living:

  • Chosen based on values
  • Depth over novelty
  • Cultivating inner richness
  • Optimizing for actual experience
  • Content with enough
  • Present with what is

You can do either with possessions or experiences.

A small collection of beautiful objects you use daily and appreciate deeply is intentional living.

Frantically collecting countries, restaurants, and adventure experiences you barely remember is mindless consumption.

Takeaways

What to actually do:

  1. Audit your experience consumption. Are you collecting experiences or living them? Are you present or performing?

  2. Choose fewer experiences. Deep is better than broad. Repetition is underrated. Boring can be meaningful.

  3. Develop taste. Know what actually works for you. Trust your preferences. Ignore cultural scripts about what experiences you should value.

  4. Optimize for living, not capture. Put the phone down. Be present. Let some experiences have no evidence.

  5. Allow boring experiences. The regular dinner with friends. The daily walk. The same vacation spot. This is where life actually happens.

  6. Integrate your experiences. Reflect. Learn. Change. Let experiences transform you instead of just accumulating them.

  7. Check your motivation. If you're doing something primarily for the story, the photo, or the status—reconsider.

The controversial bottom line:

Experience culture is consumerism in a yoga mat. Same accumulation, same status games, same emptiness, but with moral superiority baked in. The person spending $10k on an Ayahuasca retreat in Peru isn't more enlightened than the person who bought a nice couch—they just have better branding for their consumption.

The actual alternative isn't "experiences over things." It's intentionality over mindlessness. Presence over performance. Depth over novelty. Enough over more.

You don't need to travel constantly, try everything, or collect experiences. You need to live the one life you have with attention and intention. That's rarely photogenic. It's also where all the meaning is.

Stop consuming experiences. Start living.

Today's Sketch

December 11, 2025