When Capitalism Became Performance: Why We Stopped Building and Started Worshipping

I drove by a Trader Joe's this week and saw a line wrapped around the building.

My reaction was immediate and visceral: disgust. Not at the people themselves, but at what the scene represented. Here were dozens of people, willingly queuing for hours, not for food, or even precious alcohol, but for limited-edition Halloween tote bags.

And suddenly I was cataloging other moments that have triggered the same response lately. Embarrassingly, I'm an Ariana Grande fan, and when her Eternal Sunshine tour tickets went on sale, I watched bots snatch them up in seconds only to resell them at 4-5x face value. Tickets I would have paid $400, even $600 for, were suddenly $2,000+ on resale platforms. The Labubu toy phenomenon transforming ugly demon-faced toys into speculative assets, complete with resale markets and artificial scarcity. Costco gas lines doubling as consumer pilgrimages. Katy Perry taking a girl's trip to space as the ultimate consumption flex.

These aren't isolated incidents. They're symptoms of a deeper transformation in how we relate to markets, consumption, and identity itself.

I've spent my career in the trenches of entrepreneurship—building, selling, and advising businesses. I believe in the fundamental promise of market economies: that risk-taking, innovation, and value creation can generate both wealth and meaningful work. But lately, I've been troubled by a question that won't let go: at what point did we stop building capitalism and start performing it?

From Production to Performance

Classical capitalism, at its best, was about organizing resources into something more valuable. Entrepreneurs assumed risk, deployed capital, and created value whether through innovation, efficiency, or solving real problems. The system rewarded those who built something real: jobs, products, services that people actually needed.

What we're witnessing now is something different. We've entered a world where the symbols of consumption have replaced the substance of production. We're not buying things because they're useful or valuable anymore. We're buying them for what they signal about us: our identity, our tribe, our place in the social order.

The Trader Joe's bag isn't primarily a bag. It's proof of cultural literacy, of being "in the know." The Labubu toy isn't a toy; it's a portfolio position, a conversation starter, a marker of taste. Even the Costco gas line represents something beyond fuel: it's a ritual demonstration of rational consumer behavior, a performance of economic virtue.

How many tote bags does a middle-aged mom actually need? This isn't consumption anymore. It's worship.

The Illusion of Participation

Here's what makes this so insidious: this system still feels like capitalism. There are still winners and losers. There's still competition, scarcity, and market dynamics. But increasingly, what's being competed for isn't the creation of value—it's access to symbols of value. We're not building wealth; we're engaging in elaborate status games dressed up in market language.

The tech industry bears particular responsibility here. We've built incredible tools for connection and commerce, but we've also engineered scarcity where none needs to exist. We've gamified consumption. We've turned FOMO into a business model and transformed every product launch into a performative event.

This isn't entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship requires creation: taking resources and reorganizing them into something more valuable. What we're doing now is different—we're creating elaborate systems whose primary purpose is to manufacture desire, engineer scarcity, and extract value from increasingly elaborate performances of consumer identity.

It's exhausting. And it's not what I signed up for when I fell in love with business.

The Builders vs. The Brand Worshippers

I still encounter genuine entrepreneurs: people taking real risks to solve real problems. They're building software that actually increases productivity. They're creating hardware that extends human capability. They're organizing labor and capital in ways that generate actual value. These people still exist, and their work still matters.

But they're swimming against a cultural current moving in the opposite direction. We've created an economy where, increasingly, the surest path to wealth isn't building something new. It's capturing rent from existing systems. It's not creating value; it's extracting it. It's not solving problems; it's monetizing anxieties.

The distinction matters because it determines what kind of society we're building. Are we a civilization of creators or consumers? Of builders or brand worshippers? Of people who make things or people who queue for things other people made?

I know which side I'm on.

What Comes Next: Toward Meaningful Capitalism

I'm not advocating for the overthrow of market systems or some nostalgic return to a simpler time. Markets are extraordinarily effective at coordinating human activity. Private property and profit incentives have lifted billions out of poverty. I'm not romantic about the past, and I'm certainly not nostalgic for failed alternatives.

But I am arguing that we need to distinguish between capitalism as a system for organizing production and capitalism as a way of life that takes over everything. The former is a tool—imperfect but powerful. The latter is a problem.

What might it look like to reclaim the productive core of capitalism while resisting its consumptive excesses? A few principles come to mind:

Creation over acquisition. We should celebrate and reward those who build, make, and genuinely innovate—not those who simply master the game of manufactured scarcity and status signaling.

Utility over symbolism. Not every purchase needs to be purely practical, but we should be honest about when we're buying something because it's useful versus because it signals something about who we are.

Abundance over artificial scarcity. The digital age has made abundance possible in ways previous generations couldn't imagine. We should be suspicious of business models predicated on making artificially scarce that which could be abundant.

Meaning over metrics. Not everything worth doing can be monetized. Not every form of value can be captured in a balance sheet. We need spaces—both literal and metaphorical—that exist outside market logic.

The Space Between

There's something darkly comedic about Katy Perry floating in zero gravity on what amounts to a very expensive girl's trip. It's simultaneously a marvel of human achievement and an absurd symbol of what we've turned spaceflight into just another luxury experience to flex on Instagram.

We built the rockets. We solved the physics. We organized the labor and capital required to make spaceflight routine enough for entertainers to participate as tourists. That's real. That's genuine creation.

But when spaceflight becomes primarily a consumption experience, when it's more about the post than the achievement, we've crossed a line. We've moved from building the future to performing it.

The question isn't whether capitalism can survive this shift. It obviously can—consumption-driven capitalism is incredibly resilient, maybe more so than its production-driven ancestor.

The question is whether we can. Whether we as individuals, as communities, can maintain a sense of purpose and meaning in a world where increasingly, the only identity available to us is consumer.

I don't want that to be my legacy. And I don't think you do either.

Why I Stay in My Lane

I still believe in markets. I still believe in entrepreneurship. I still believe that voluntary exchange and creative destruction can generate prosperity and innovation.

But I also believe we've lost the plot. We've confused being busy with having purpose, consumption with creation, brand loyalty with genuine community.

This is why I stay in my lane—service businesses, Main Street operations, blue-collar industries. It's a lot easier to sell the virtue of cleaning someone's clothes or fixing their car than adding another cloud-based function that helps optimize data streams.

These businesses solve real problems for real people:

• Your car is broken, I fix it

• Your clothes are dirty, I clean them

• Your pipes are leaking, I stop the leak

No manufactured scarcity. No bots. No performance required.

These aren't the businesses that make headlines or attract venture capital. They're not "disruptive" or "scalable" in the ways that get people excited. But they're real. They're the backbone of actual communities. And they represent a version of capitalism I can still believe in.

The next evolution of capitalism—if there is one—shouldn't be about doing more of what we're doing now, faster and at greater scale. It should be about recovering a sense of what economies are actually for: not to generate transactions for their own sake, but to help people live better lives.

We're supposed to build wealth, not kneel to it. We're supposed to use markets as tools, not fashion identities from brands. We're supposed to create value, not merely perform consumption.

That's the capitalism I still believe in. That's the capitalism worth building. That's why I work with the businesses I do.

Everything else is just theater; it’sbexpensive, exhausting, and ultimately empty.

I think it's time to simplify.