The experience machine

You could have everything you ever wanted, but still not want it. And I think a lot of brands and companies forget this.

So I learned about this concept called the experience machine in my undergrad. It’s pretty interesting. It’s by this guy, Robert Nozick. He’s some Harvard philosopher. The thought experiment goes that you have some machine that you could plug any human being into, and it’ll generate any experience for them, like The Matrix, basically. So you could have all your desires fulfilled. But you wouldn’t want that, right?

The interesting thing here is that it goes against human nature. You’d think that we would want all of our desires, and it doesn’t matter how we get it as long as we get it. But brands, they kind of forget this part, which is that there’s one thing that’s more important than anything in life, which is authenticity.

#philosophy #psychology #marketing