About a month ago, I wrote about the good kind of stress — the neuroscience of why hard things stick, why IKEA furniture you assemble yourself feels more valuable than identical pre-built pieces, and why Trader Joe’s legendary parking lot chaos is a feature, not a bug.
The response was wonderful, and I want to build on it this week — starting with a story that has nothing to do with consumer behavior. At least not at first.
Too Busy to Imagine a Different Life
There’s an image of the French peasantry that has stayed with me for years. Even in times of upheaval, most people’s days were consumed by survival — fieldwork, hauling water, tending livestock. Whatever their grievances, they had very little time or energy left to imagine a different life. Revolution — or any fundamental change in how you spend your days — requires a resource that’s easy to overlook: time. It’s hard to rethink your life when every hour is already spoken for.
I kept thinking about that line while writing last week’s newsletter on productive friction. Because the question I keep getting is: if humans have always craved meaningful experiences, why is the experience economy exploding now?
And I think the answer might be as simple as the one about those peasants.
People finally have the time.
Fifty-Eight Hours
In 1900, the average American household spent 58 hours a week on housework — just the core tasks of cooking, cleaning, and laundry. Not childcare. Not errands. Just keeping a home running. Economists Greenwood, Seshadri, and Yorukoglu reconstructed this in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (2005).
Fifty-eight hours. More than a full-time job.
In 1890, only 24% of houses had running water. Households hauled seven tons of coal and 9,000 gallons of water each year. A single load of laundry — one load — took four hours: heating water, scrubbing on a washboard, wringing by hand, hanging to dry, pressing with a flatiron that had to be reheated continuously on the stove.
Then, over the course of a century, technology did what technology does. The washing machine. The refrigerator. The vacuum cleaner. Central heating. Running water.
By 1975, those 58 hours had dropped to 18. By 2024, the American Time Use Survey shows the average American spending just two hours a day on all household activities combined — cooking, cleaning, laundry, yard work, and maintenance.
Two hours. Down from fifty-eight.
We talk a lot about what technology does. We don’t talk nearly enough about what it gives back. Technology didn’t just make chores easier. It returned an enormous amount of time to people’s lives — time that, for the first time in human history, could be filled by choice rather than necessity.
What People Did With the Time
They didn’t rest. That’s the interesting part.
When your jar is full of sand — 58 hours of mandatory chores, survival-level maintenance, no shortcuts — there’s no room for the rocks. The big, meaningful things. You can’t browse a bookstore on Saturday afternoon when laundry takes four hours. You can’t choose a slow pour-over coffee ritual when dinner requires an hour of preparation from scratch. You can’t drive to a concert, sign up for a pottery class, or take your dogs on a long morning walk.
As technology cleared the sand, space opened up. And people filled it. Not with more rest, not with more efficiency — with experiences.
The share of US consumer spending on live experiences has increased 70% since 1987. Mastercard Economics Institute data shows European experience spending rose from 19% to 22% of total spending between 2019 and 2023. Bain–Altagamma’s 2024 monitor identifies experiential luxury as one of the strongest growth categories. Vinyl records outsold CDs for the first time since the 1980s. Independent bookstores hit their highest count in decades. Half of vinyl buyers don’t even own a record player — they’re buying the experienceof a physical relationship with music.
Analog Escapism was named a top cultural trend in VML’s Future 100 Report.
But nobody is choosing to hand-wash clothes again. Nobody wants to haul water from a well. Nobody is nostalgic for scrubbing floors on their hands and knees.
People aren’t rejecting convenience. They’re using the time convenience gave them to be selective about where friction creates joy. To reach for the rocks.
The Piece We’ve Been Overlooking
There are excellent explanations for why the experience economy is growing. Pine and Gilmore showed how commoditization pushes businesses from goods to services to experiences. Gilovich and Kumar at Cornell demonstrated that experiences create more lasting happiness than material purchases. Social media turned experiences into social currency. The World Economic Forum points out that when products are ubiquitous, rare experiences become the new status signal.
Last month, I added another layer: the neuroscience. Productive friction triggers dopamine and oxytocin. Effortful engagement creates memories in ways that frictionless convenience never can. That’s the psychological why.
But underneath all of it is something we keep stepping over: people need the time to have experiences. And for most of human history, they didn’t have it. They were too busy surviving.
This isn’t a competing explanation. It’s the precondition that makes all the others possible. The psychology was always there. The human desire for meaning was always there. What wasn’t there was the space in the jar.
Why This Matters Now
Here’s why I’m writing about this and not just filing it under “interesting historical observation.”
Every previous automation wave was physical. Appliances replaced manual labor. Logistics replaced errands. Each one freed up time, and each one was followed by a surge in experience spending. That pattern has repeated consistently for over a century.
AI is the next wave — but it’s automating cognitive work. Drafting, summarizing, deciding, comparing, filtering. The mental equivalents of hauling water and scrubbing washboards.
And it’s doing something else. The WEF’s analysis of the experience economy observes that as AI makes digital content infinitely abundant and frictionless, people crave what technology can’t replicate — scarce, sensory, unpredictable, in-person moments. AI doesn’t just free up time. It makes everything around experiences feel more commoditized, which makes the experiences themselves feel more valuable.
Here’s my synthesis: if every previous automation wave freed time and was followed by a surge in experience spending, and AI is about to be the largest automation wave in history — then we’re looking at the largest expansion of discretionary time since household appliances. The demand for meaningful experiences — the rocks — is about to surge.
And most companies are still focused on clearing sand.
The Shift
The dominant product strategy of the last two decades has been making things faster, easier, more frictionless. Clearing sand. That was the right question for its era. It built trillion-dollar companies.
But Foresight Factory’s 2025 report named “Positive Friction” a defining consumer trend. UX designers are beginning to experiment with intentional micro-delays— deliberate pauses and moments of slowness built into digital products — an emerging pattern that signals a shift in how the industry thinks about speed and ease. Luxury brands are introducing ritualized purchase flows. The SAP Emarsys data I cited last month showed “silent loyalty” — passive retention driven by convenience — declining, while emotional loyalty rises.
The next decade belongs to the brands that help people choose the right rocks. That design friction worth having. That understand the difference between sand their customers want cleared — and rocks their customers are hungry for.
My friction piece gave you the neuroscience of why productive friction works. This one gives you the simplest explanation I can offer for why now: people finally have the time. And they’re about to have a lot more of it.
Convenience won the war. It cleared the sand. It created the space.
Experience is letting consumers choose their big rocks.
Hamutal Tula Schieber is the author of The Joy Dividend: How Brands Win by Reducing Stress and Sparking Delight (#1 new launch in Strategic Management and Consumer Behavior on Amazon), keynote speaker, and founder of Schieber Research.