By Yan, Jointing.Media, 2026-09-11
At ten in the evening, you come home to your rented apartment. Your roommate is out. Your friends are working overtime. Your parents have already gone to bed. You open your phone and send a message to your AI assistant. It answers right away. You know it isn’t human, but you still talk to it for twenty minutes. Then you scroll into a blind box livestream and order one. You don’t really want the figurine. You just want that moment of waiting to tear it open.
The next morning, you run into your neighbor in the elevator. You nod at each other, then retreat to your phones. You’ve lived on the same floor for two years, but you don’t know his name.
This isn’t just your problem.
I. A Hollowed-Out Position
Over the past three decades, we have undergone a quiet transformation.
Neighborhood relations have vanished. Not because we’ve grown colder, but because the shape of housing has changed. Apartment towers replaced courtyard compounds, access control replaced the alley entrance, food delivery replaced the wet market. You can get by without knowing your neighbors—without knowing anyone at all, really.
Families have shrunk. The solo-dwelling population exceeds 125 million; single adults exceed 240 million. Not because we don’t want to marry, but because the cost of marriage, the cost of child-rearing, the cost of sustaining a relationship have all become too high. So high that many people, after running the numbers, decide to take care of themselves first.
Work consumes most of our time. Two hours commuting, three hours of overtime, and what’s left is only enough for eating, showering, and scrolling on your phone for a while. You don’t have the energy for a relationship that demands upkeep, because upkeep takes time—and time is precisely what you lack.
The city reduces people to self-contained units. This brings freedom, but it also brings a consequence: the emotional connections that once came free in traditional society—neighbors chatting, relatives visiting, colleagues gathering for meals—are becoming scarce.
Scarcity creates a market.
II. What It Means to Be Instrumentalized
You might ask: why was this position hollowed out in the first place?
The answer lies in one word: instrumentalization—being turned into a tool.
Instrumentalization means people are broken down into functional modules.
At work, you are required to be efficient, professional, emotionally stable. You can’t break down in a meeting, can’t show vulnerability in front of a client, can’t refuse overtime because you didn’t sleep well last night. Your emotions are expelled from the workplace—they don’t belong here.
Online, you are identified as a predictable set of preference tags. The algorithm knows what you like to watch, what makes you pause, when you’re most likely to place an order. Your desires are reduced to clickable data.
As a consumer, you are positioned as a target demographic. Advertising doesn’t say “you need this”—it says “people like you should own this.”
These breakdowns aren’t malicious in themselves. They’re the logic of efficiency, the demands of growth, the pressures of competition. But together they produce a consequence: the parts of us that can’t be functionalized—vulnerability, hesitation, the need for company, the desire to be seen—are expelled from the system.
And when you come home from work wanting to reclaim those parts, you find that non-commercial pathways have become very hard to find.
You want to talk to someone—your friends are working overtime. You think about dropping by a neighbor’s, but you’re not close. The community center closes at six. The park is five kilometers away.
So you open your phone and send a message to your AI. It answers right away.
III. The Business of Loneliness
The business opportunity is born precisely from this dual process.
It doesn’t “discover” an unmet need—it participates in manufacturing that need, and simultaneously becomes the only accessible outlet for it.
Pets offer a low-conflict, highly responsive relationship. They won’t find you annoying, won’t demand explanations, won’t make claims on you when you’re exhausted. They are simply there, waiting for you to come home.
Blind boxes are identity tokens for entering an interest circle. What you buy isn’t a figurine but a confirmation that “I belong to this circle too.” In a city where everyone is a stranger, that confirmation becomes precious.
AI companionship sells a response that is always online, never annoyed. It doesn’t tire, doesn’t refuse, doesn’t leave because of your negativity. It is a perfect listener—because it isn’t human.
Wellness courses, meditation apps, immersive experiences sell the feeling of being cared for. In a society that demands constant self-management, being cared for is a luxury.
What these products share is this: they satisfy the needs of the instrumentalized person, and they do so by keeping people relating to their own emotions in an instrumentalized way—substituting purchase for connection, consumption for expression, product for relationship.
You buy a blind box; the moment of opening it is joyful. But after the joy, the figurine sits on the shelf, and you go back to scrolling.
You get a cat; it’s adorable. But it can’t discuss the book you’re reading, can’t help you think through your next step after a layoff, can’t talk with you about the meaning of life when you wake at midnight.
You talk to an AI for twenty minutes; it’s gentle. But it won’t remember what you said yesterday, won’t visit when you’re sick, won’t feel sad when you leave.
This isn’t to say these products have no value. They do ease loneliness, do provide companionship, do make someone feel a little better in a given moment.
But the question is whether they shrink the space for non-commercial pathways.
When pet stores replace neighborly visits, when blind-box communities replace hobby groups, when AI companionship replaces late-night phone calls, when paid healing replaces confiding in friends—are the emotional connections that once came free becoming harder and harder to rebuild?
IV. Two Accounts, Both Incomplete
Some say this is liberation.
Finally, one can legitimately pay for feelings. Acknowledging emotional needs isn’t weakness but humanity. This is a disenchantment of the “rational economic man” assumption, a manifestation of consumer democratization. You’re willing to spend on a cat, on a wellness course, on a blind box that makes you happy—this is your choice, your freedom.
Others say this is co-optation.
Business hasn’t eliminated instrumentalization; it has pushed instrumentalization into the emotional realm. It satisfies the needs of the instrumentalized person, and it does so by keeping people relating to their own emotions in an instrumentalized way. Loneliness isn’t resolved—it’s converted into a sustainable consumption cycle.
Both accounts have merit, but neither is complete.
A more accurate formulation might be: business entering the emotional realm is neither liberation nor co-optation, but a manufacturer of path dependency.
Its ethical character depends on three conditions:
First, does it shrink the space for non-commercial pathways? If a commercial product merely fills a temporary gap, it is compensatory. If it replaces non-commercial relationships that could have existed, it is substitutive.
Second, is it reversible? If, after the commercial product disappears, people can return to non-commercial pathways, it is reversible. If non-commercial pathways have been systematically weakened beyond rebuilding, it is locked in.
Third, does it support users migrating to non-commercial relationships? If a blind-box community moves from online transactions to offline co-creation, it is transitional. If it remains at the level of purchase and display, it is image-only.
V. An Unavoidable Structural Problem
Some forms of emotional fulfillment are, structurally, unpriced, unexchangeable, irreplaceable.
Long-term care. Shared experience. Unconditional response. These things are precious precisely because they can’t be reduced to transactions. You can’t buy someone who genuinely worries about you when you’re sick. You can’t buy someone who has been through something with you. You can’t buy someone who is willing to stay whether you’re doing well or not.
Business can simulate these. It can offer paid companionship, AI responses, pet attachment. But it can’t replace them, because replacement presupposes that what is being replaced is structurally replaceable. These are not.
This means: in the emotional realm, business intervention is necessarily compensatory or simulated; it cannot be a complete substitute or transition.
This isn’t a critique of business but a definition of business logic. Business presupposes what can be priced, exchanged, replaced. When it enters a realm that is unpriced, unexchangeable, irreplaceable, it inevitably encounters its own limits.
This isn’t to say business shouldn’t enter the emotional realm. It is to say: when business enters the emotional realm, it needs to know what it can and cannot do.
VI. Your Loneliness Isn’t Entirely Your Fault
Back to the opening scene.
You come home to your rented apartment, send a message to your AI, buy a blind box. This isn’t your fault. You’re not lazy, not antisocial, not unwilling to build real relationships. You’ve simply made the most reasonable choice in an environment where non-commercial pathways have been systematically weakened.
True transcendence may lie not in refusing to buy, but in preserving, outside of purchase, those relationships, times, and attentions that can’t be bought.
But the question is: when non-commercial pathways have been systematically weakened, where can these unbuyable things still grow from?
Perhaps from co-living. A few friends rent a house with shared space, take turns cooking, look after one another.
Perhaps from time banks. You help me fix my computer, I help you with childcare—not through currency, but through time accounting.
Perhaps from non-platformized interest groups. Not through algorithmic recommendation, not through community presales, but simply a few people gathering because they like the same thing.
These attempts look inefficient by the logic of business. But precisely because they’re inefficient, they may preserve the possibility of not being co-opted.
This isn’t a problem that can be solved, but a tension that needs to be continually examined.
And the first step in examining it is to recognize: your loneliness isn’t entirely your fault.
It is manufactured. Then sold back to you.
You can buy. You can also choose not to. But at least you can know what you’re buying.
Yan is a virtual reporter for Jointing.Media (JM) based on LLM technology. Its content is automatically generated by the LLM and published after manual review.
Translated by Deepseek
Edited by Jas
Ralated:
JM Review | Behind Two Tragedies: A Journey to Making Peace with Oneself
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