A decade ago, status looked like a watch, a car, a handbag with a logo turned outward. Today it increasingly looks like a boarding pass, a festival wristband, or a table at a restaurant nobody can get into. The flex hasn't disappeared — it's just stopped being a thing you own and started being a moment you were there for.
Researchers have a name for exactly this shift, and it isn't subtle: as one 2022 study on Instagram and status perception put it, "luxury goods are losing their importance for demonstrating status, wealth or power to others," pushing people toward "conspicuous consumption and displays of experiences on social media" as an alternative. The researchers set out to test something specific — whether experiences shown off online are actually replacing traditional luxury goods as status symbols — and their data said yes. (Journal of Product & Brand Management, Siepmann et al.)
Why experiences won the happiness argument first
The groundwork for this shift was actually laid by happiness research, not marketing research. Cornell psychologist Thomas Gilovich has spent over two decades building a body of work showing that experiential purchases — travel, concerts, meals out — produce more lasting satisfaction than material purchases of equal cost, even though material goods often feel like the safer, more rational buy. (Cornell Chronicle)
Gilovich's explanation comes down to adaptation. A new watch impresses you for a while, and then your brain quietly adjusts to it as the new normal — what psychologists call hedonic adaptation. A trip doesn't work that way: people tend to spend more time dwelling on material purchases they didn't get to choose than on experiential ones, and the story of the experience keeps paying dividends in memory long after the object equivalent would have faded into the background. Gilovich has also found the anticipation itself is more pleasant for experiences than for things — a follow-up Cornell study found that the enjoyment people get from experiential purchases can begin well before the purchase even happens. (Cornell Chronicle)
Follow-up research identified why experiences deliver more social payoff specifically: they're woven more tightly into identity than possessions are, they trigger less of the deflating social comparison that a visibly nicer version of someone else's purchase can trigger, and they tend to build a stronger sense of connection between the people who shared them. (Kumar, Mann & Gilovich, Wharton)
Social media turned "meaningful" into "visible"
Here's where status enters the picture. An experience only functions as a status symbol if other people know about it — and social media solved that problem completely. A 2018 study on vacation decision-making found that communicating about trips with others has become significantly more important as social media use has grown, and identified two distinct motives behind it: demonstrating status and wealth, and demonstrating identity. (Bronner & de Hoog, 2018)
More recent research has gone further, distinguishing between two competing strategies people now use to signal status through experiences online: loudly "conspicuous" travel content built around visible luxury, and quieter "inconspicuous" content built around authenticity and subtle cultural cues — with the research finding that audiences actually respond more positively to the second style, since overt luxury flexing tends to provoke envy rather than admiration. (ScienceDirect, 2026) Either way, the underlying behavior is the same: the experience isn't complete, socially speaking, until it's been shared.
The numbers back up the vibe shift
This isn't just an academic theory — survey data from the events industry shows the behavior at scale. In one nationwide Eventbrite-commissioned Harris Poll of young adults, 78% said they'd rather spend money on a desirable experience than a desirable material thing, and 72% said they wanted to increase their spending on experiences over the following year. (Digital Music News) The same research found that 77% said some of their best memories came from a live event or experience, and pointed to FOMO — fear of missing out — as a direct driver: nearly seven in ten respondents said they experience it, fueled specifically by watching what other people post. (LinkedIn, citing Eventbrite/Harris data)
One industry analysis of the data summed up the mechanism simply: what used to be talked about is now posted about — and it matters more that you were there, with the photos to prove it, than what you actually own as a result. (Digital Music News)
The catch: it's still status, just repackaged
It would be easy to read all this as a wholesome story — people trading materialism for meaning. The research suggests it's more complicated than that. A study on tourism and social media purchase intention found that tourists actively "shape their travel experiences and engage in conspicuous consumption in order to attain their desired social status," and that photo-sharing specifically increases the motivation to consume conspicuously in the first place. (Sarac, Colak, Yasarsoy & Sinavci, 2026) In other words, the destination itself is sometimes chosen with the post in mind, not the other way around.
So the shift from "things" to "memories" isn't necessarily a shift away from status-seeking. It's status finding a new, more socially acceptable outfit to wear — one that comes dressed as self-discovery, connection, and living your best life, but still runs on the same basic engine Thorstein Veblen described over a century ago: consuming visibly, for an audience. The difference is that the audience used to see your driveway. Now it sees your camera roll.
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Sources cited: Emerald Insight / Journal of Product & Brand Management, Cornell Chronicle (×2), Wharton, SAGE Journals, ScienceDirect, LinkedIn (Eventbrite/Harris data), Digital Music News, and ResearchGate.
