The things we buy to prove we still exist | EPISODE 2: The Anxiety Economy

Dear Reader,

Economists have always preferred a neat, simple explanation of consumption.

People buy things because they need them: a coat keeps out the cold, a chair provides somewhere to sit, and a kettle, if one is lucky, produces tea.

It is an elegant theory, economical in both language and imagination, and for a time it described reality well enough.

It now describes modern consumer behaviour about as accurately as a Victorian map describes the internet.

The contemporary economy, meanwhile, is filled with purchases that address problems no one technically has.

Planners promise discipline, supplements promise optimisation, shoes promise self-control, and somewhere in the background, a small army of water bottles nudges that hydration may be the missing ingredient in personal fulfilment.

None of these products can reliably deliver the virtues they suggest, yet demand for them continues to expand with remarkable confidence.

The global wellness economy surpassed $5.6 trillion in 2023, according to the Global Wellness Institute, a figure that suggests the human body has become an unusually ambitious improvement project.

Markets devoted to self-optimisation continue to grow even during periods of economic uncertainty, which is not quite what one would expect if these purchases were driven purely by function.

The explanation is less practical than it appears.

These products are not just tools; they are symbols, and what they offer is far more than efficiency or health; it’s identity.

Consumer researchers refer to this as identity-based consumption, though the behaviour itself is easier to recognise than the terminology suggests.

People do not only buy objects for what they do; they buy them for what those objects signal.

A purchase becomes a statement about the kind of person one is, or maybe the kind of person one is trying, with some effort, to become.

This tendency becomes particularly visible when a sense of control begins to slip.

In experiments by Adam D. Galinsky and Adam Rucker, individuals placed in low-power conditions showed a greater preference for status-signalling goods. The appeal was not extravagance so much as reassurance. The object does not resolve the uncertainty; it translates it into something more manageable, something that can be purchased, owned, and quietly interpreted as evidence.

Economists George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton described it through the lens of Identity Economics, arguing that people derive value not only from outcomes but also from acting in ways that confirm their identity. The satisfaction lies not entirely in what the object does, but in what it allows one to believe about oneself. A purchase, in this sense, becomes a small act of verification.

The pattern becomes clearer in moments when identity is not merely abstract but unsettled. In studies of young adults leaving foster care, researchers observed that certain possessions carried disproportionate meaning: a desk, a carefully maintained room, a small collection of belongings preserved through multiple moves. These objects were not valuable because of their price or utility.

They mattered because of what they represented, namely independence, stability, and a sense of control over one’s own life. They functioned as anchors, holding in place an emerging identity at a moment when very little else felt stable.

If we look at it from this angle, modern consumer culture begins to appear less irrational and more revealing. The objects themselves are often ordinary, occasionally excessive, and sometimes utterly absurd, yet their symbolic function is precise. They provide visible cues about the kind of person someone is attempting to be, allowing identity to take on a material form.

This is not just cultural; it carries economic weight. Research in Labour Economics shows that appearance and lifestyle cues influence hiring decisions and wages. Research from the National Bureau of Economic Research found measurable wage penalties associated with higher body weight, particularly for women, even after controlling for education and occupation.

However uncomfortable the finding may be, it proves a broader point: bodies, habits, and lifestyles often function as signals of discipline, reliability, and self-control.

Long before economists formalised these ideas, philosophers had already circled them. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that taste operates as a social language through which people communicate status, education, and belonging.

The philosopher Jean Baudrillard suggested something more unsettling, namely that in modern consumer societies people increasingly purchase signs rather than objects, with symbolic meaning becoming the true commodity.

Which helps explain why certain purchases feel unexpectedly reassuring. The object itself may be ordinary, but its meaning is not; it signals discipline, organisation, competence, control, and in doing so reassures without resolving anything at all.

Because the objects people buy rarely alter the structure of the world around them. They do not reduce uncertainty or stabilise the future. What they stabilise instead is something smaller and more immediate: the story people tell themselves about who they are.

In uncertain conditions, that story becomes unusually valuable, sometimes more so than the product itself.

And what consumers often purchase, in the end, is not the object.

It is the evidence.

Evidence that the person they recognise in the mirror still exists.

Cheers!

Akanksha