Fleeting megalomania

For years, experiential consumption established itself as an alternative to material goods. Travelling, going to a concert or discovering a new destination were a way of investing in memories rather than possessions. However, this has turned into a new race for the exceptional, in which experience alone is no longer enough: it has to be bigger, more exclusive, more immersive and harder to top.

In an environment where attention is limited and novelty is consumed quickly, spectacle has become a competitive value. Entertainment, tourism, architecture and culture keep scaling up their offerings to preserve their ability to surprise. Experience is no longer valued only for what it makes us feel, but also for its magnitude, its uniqueness or its ability to become a one-off event.

This is the logic of experience inflation: when the extraordinary becomes normal, the next step is to make it even more extraordinary.

This trend taps into the deeply human drive to explore limits, push what is possible and pursue what has never been achieved before. A quest that, tied to consumption, raises new questions. When does living an experience stop being enough, so that it has to be the biggest, the most exclusive or the most spectacular? At what point is the search for meaning replaced by the search for a record?

Constant spectacle also has consequences. The most sought-after destinations face overcrowding, the investment needed to surprise grows exponentially, and the exceptional loses some of its power to move us once it becomes the standard.

The drift towards fleeting megalomania redefines what we consider a valuable experience, but also the increasingly blurred limits of responsible consumption. The exceptional, now an aspirational norm, legitimises levels of spending that just a few years ago would have been hard to justify. Paying disproportionate sums for certain experiences is no longer seen as excess but becomes part of a narrative of deservedness, urgency and once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

This normalisation has clear economic implications. On the one hand, it encourages over-indebtedness or a reallocation of resources towards items that crowd out more stable spending. On the other, it consolidates a segmented market in which access to these experiences is restricted to those who can afford the extra cost, widening social gaps under the guise of individual choice.

At the local level, the impact is even more tangible. The concentration of demand in “must-see” hotspots intensifies pressure on already strained destinations. Places are being reshaped to serve an economy of the extraordinary that prioritises a constant turnover of visitors over everyday liveability. As a result, the urban and cultural fabric is being transformed through rising prices, the displacement of residents and a loss of identity in favour of quick, spectacular consumption.

As the exceptional becomes the standard, the system enters a spiral of constant escalation that is hard to sustain. The question is no longer just how much we are willing to pay to experience something unique, but what we are sacrificing, economically, socially and culturally, to sustain that illusion of uniqueness.