The “anxiety economy” is thriving. But will companies benefit from our fears?

When recently the newly appointed CEO of App Life360 recently describes the company As part of the “anxiety economy”, it sounded like a phrase. But it was also amazingly honest.

The application, which allows families to monitor their children (or parents) found in real -time, one in one in ten phones in the US, according to some reports. What started as a specialized product has become part of everyday life for many households.

Life360, along with Snapchat’s Snap Map and Apple Find My Friends (or Stalk My Friends as called in my family) is advanced As a tool for the safety and peace of the mind.

But the fact that its chief executive was comfortable to expressly linking the application to stress and its commercial exploitation underlines a much greater cultural phenomenon: we have more and more in a world where concern, vigilance and even guilt are used for profit.

Technology can breastfeed the stress

From an evolutionary point of view, stress is mostly good. He examined to prepare us for possible threats – things like a rusty on the grass that keeps us awake at night. This prejudice means that negative or threatening information are more easily and faster.

The difficulty is that the world we are now living in is very different from the savannah. The same vigilance that once protects us from predators, now keeps us refreshing applications, news scrolling and controlling digital maps for reassurance.

But technology is not neutral. Indeed, it can serve to enhance this instinct. A follow -up app like Life360 sells you the peace of mind, but can also raise new concerns. If your child’s location ceases for ten minutes, you may feel obliged to check, call or worry. The assurance is real, but also concern.

The illusion of control that offers these products gives us the feeling that monitoring reduces the risk when it can actually serve to increase our technology dependence. In fact, some research suggests that the harder we try to suppress stress, the The worst becomes.

Stress is often presented as an indefinite concern. The genius of marketing lies in giving this alarming home. For example, your home may not be safeYour child may not be quite learningor your skin may not be radiant enough. Once the concern is called, a product can be offered as a solution. In the modern and commercial world, consumer products become the “corrects“That we use to defend ourselves from this constant instability.

Marketing “guilty mom”

Parental responsibility is an area of ​​life that traders have managed to exploit with products both to relieve and enhance these fears. The “guilty mom“Trope records the way in which marketing exploits the gap between the real self (” I can’t always be there for my child “) and must/ideal Self (“a good mom must always know and protect”).

This divide produces guilt, which ultimately creates demand for products such as baby screens, organic snacks and monitoring applications. And while the relief is genuine, it is temporary because the subject confidence remains.

This helps to explain why facts They rarely calm us down. Statistically, most children are safer today than almost any time in history with lower mortality Prices, less violence and better health care. However, we are attracted to extreme and remarkable events, a prejudice that makes the threats stand out more intense than the quietest, more common indications of security. And because parents Don’t feel saferTraders can benefit from this gap between events and emotions.

That is why we call it “anxiety economy” is not excessive. Economies occur when a resource can be cultivated, exported, exchanged and escalating. Companies identify new stress activations, create tools for their management and maintain the concern they claim to solve.

The algorithms then utilize this fear by tasting millions of tiny interventions to determine what notifications, prompts and stories push our emotional buttons more effectively. By agreeing with the terms and conditions, we become part of a larger corporate consumer behavior experiment.

The concern for these applications is not that they are inherently bad. In fact, they can and do provide a degree of comfort. However, the deeper question is when the exploitation of stress is smoothed. Once we believe in the need to follow, it becomes difficult to resist. These beliefs are initially framed through the commercial lens built around personal choiceBut it bleeds in daily routines and eventually become part of the economy.

So, while LIFE360’s CEO may have been unusually unacceptable, her statement raises a deeper question: Do we want a society that commercially fear? Stress is a universal human feeling, but the choice of exploitation for profit is entirely cultural.

Markets are not interested in as people do. When even the economic type comfortably describes investment in a company such as Life360 as “roller“, It’s worth stopping if we want investment markets and economies that reward the revenue of stress.