The Experience Economy

 I am an instinctive sceptic of what we have been taught to call "the experience economy". The 21st-century, business analysts inform us, has witnessed an important shift in middle-class spending, from the material to the intangible. Instead of watches and sofas, we prefer to spend our money on concerts, festivals, immersive theatre and - here I struggle to suppress a shudder - novelty dining experiences...

"Experience" - heady, hedonistic, living on eternally in memory - is the precious, effervescent, quicksilver stuff of which a well lived life is made...

In London, the Evening Standard reports there has been  "a huge surge in ultra-expensive restaurants" charging £150 or more per head for a meal. The demand comes not only from the wealthy but from the aspirational middle class, from whom a dinner is no longer merely a meal but another opportunity for memorable experience. Hence 12-course tasting menus and viral social media chefs ostentatiously garnishing your food while you film them...

Obliging the Company
George Smith (1829-1901)
Photo Credit: Rochdale Arts &Heritage Service [CC BY-NC]

The connection between the advent of the experience economy and the modern pressure to display an impressive life online has been noted before. An overlooked factor is that many modern lives lack what you might call moments of ordinary transcendence. Our ancestors found in annual patterns of religious ritual and folk celebrations a way of bestowing significance on the course of normal lives and affirming a person's membership of a wider community. Twenty-first century existence is more individualistic and less variegated...

I suspect many people are willing to spend huge sums of money on experiences because they are not merely buying a fun night out but a part of what they hope will eventually add up to something like the meaning of their whole lives...

If I am sceptical it is because I tend to believe the more reliable path to meaning is not spending more money but cultivating long-term human connection... A life structured around community is one that offers a higher chance that an ordinary evening will turn out, as so often happens in the company of friends, to be a transcendentally memorable one...

None of this is to deny the fun of expensive restaurants and concerts (which after all, provide their own temporary communities), only to suggest that the huge quantities of money people are ready to expend on these experiences are a sign we are loading them with more significance than they can properly bear. Life's greatest moments cannot be purchased.

(James Marriott, The Times, 2024)

Hence 12-course tasting menus and viral social media chefs ostentatiously garnishing your food while you film them. Enjoy your meal and talk and laugh with friends. Film it. Really?

 The connection between the advent of the experience economy and the modern pressure to display an impressive life online has been noted before. Why is there not more resistance to this idea?

Life's greatest moments cannot be purchased. Indeed. Love, friendship, an appreciation of nature - cannot be bought.