Economic Commentary | Why Can Sentiment Become a Commodity

In recent years, a clear consumer trend in the Spring Festival market is the growth of sales in spiritual and emotional products, far surpassing material goods.

For example, this year’s Spring Festival saw appointments at handmade DIY experience centers in Chongqing’s main city booked into the end of the holiday, queues at museum entrances stretching from morning to noon, and young people packed into late-night self-service KTVs, unwilling to go home.

This is not accidental. Data shows that by 2025, service consumption orders related to “happy living” will increase by 36% year over year, healing services will see demand double, and the emotional consumption market is expected to exceed two trillion yuan.

Clearly, emotions are becoming commodities that can be priced and traded.

This is not simply a consumption upgrade. If it were just about income increases, people could easily spend more on higher-quality goods. But much of the expenditure is not aimed at durability; instead, it is used to purchase experiences—atmosphere, ritual, healing, and security.

Emotions are becoming commodities, and consumption is booming. The underlying reason is a fundamental change in how emotions are obtained. In the past, emotions depended on relationships and scenarios. Festive cheer came from family size, neighborhood interactions, and stable social structures. Emotions were byproducts of life, not something that needed to be purchased.

But now, many structural supports have become fragile. Families are smaller, mobility is higher, and community ties are looser. Systems that once provided free emotional support are no longer as stable as before.

According to basic economic principles, when natural supply decreases, the market will fill the gap. As a result, happiness is packaged into experiences, loneliness is transformed into content consumption, and anxiety is channeled into courses, travel, and short escapes. Even festivals themselves increasingly rely on consumption behaviors to fulfill emotional needs. The essence of emotional products is a substitution mechanism—replacing the density of relationships, the depth of shared life, and the security that comes from long-term stability.

Another more tangible background is the expansion of uncertainty. When career prospects and income expectations become harder to predict, people’s desire for controllable outcomes intensifies. Buying a decorative item can instantly change the atmosphere of a space; signing up for an experience class can immediately provide emotional feedback. Small, immediate, and certain—these are the core attractions of emotional consumption. It offers a short-term sense of control; in other words, when major life events are uncertain, people use small choices to stabilize themselves.

Emotional consumption indeed meets genuine needs, which is undeniable. But it also raises a question: when emotions are long-term dependent on commodities for activation, does genuine emotional connection become lazier and more fragile as a result?

This is not to deny the value of emotional consumption but to remind the market and policymakers to clearly see its boundaries.

While the market can fill immediate emotional gaps, it cannot replace the warmth of relationships or the sense of social security. In this sense, the prosperity of emotional consumption is both a huge economic opportunity and a mirror reflecting unresolved issues in modern society—particularly in family support, community building, and public cultural life.

Paying off these debts is more fundamental than simply expanding the emotional consumption market. It’s about helping people find a sense of stability not just through consumption but through genuine social relationships. This, perhaps, is a more meaningful issue behind the two-trillion-yuan market that deserves serious attention.