You Didn't Want That. You Wanted to Want That.

Be honest with yourself for one moment.

Do you own a Stanley cup? Have you deep cleaned something with a pink Scrub Daddy? Have you dry scooped a protein powder, taken a cold plunge, gone through a "quiet luxury" phase, an "that girl" phase, a sourdough phase, a mushroom coffee phase? Did you buy something because TikTok made you feel an urgent, almost physical need for it that evaporated completely three weeks later?

No judgment. Truly. Because the person writing this has been guilty of at least four items on that list, and the philosophical concept we're about to discuss applies equally to everyone involved.

Here is the real question, the one worth sitting with: when you bought the thing, followed the trend, adopted the aesthetic, was that *you* choosing it? Or were you, in some quiet way, choosing it precisely so that you wouldn't have to choose?

There was a French philosopher who would like a word with you about this.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Briefly

Jean-Paul Sartre was a 20th century French philosopher who dressed poorly, chain-smoked aggressively, and had extremely complicated opinions about everything. He is one of the main figures of existentialism, which is the philosophical tradition that takes human freedom very seriously, arguably too seriously, in a way that becomes its own kind of anxiety.

His central idea was that humans are "condemned to be free." By this he didn't mean freedom in the fun, vacation sense. He meant that unlike a rock (which just sits there doing rock things) or a chair (which exists to be sat on, purpose pre assigned), humans have no built in essence or instruction manual. You exist first, and then you figure out what you are. There's no default setting.

This sounds liberating. It is also, according to Sartre, absolutely terrifying.

Because if you are radically free, if there is no predetermined nature, no cosmic role you're supposed to fill, then every choice you make is genuinely yours. You can't blame your upbringing, your culture, your personality, your star sign. Those things influence you, sure. But at the moment of choice, the choice is yours, and you know it, and you are responsible for it.

Most people, Sartre argued, find this unbearable. So they find ways to escape it.

He called this escape "bad faith" (in French: *mauvaise foi*). Bad faith is when you pretend, to yourself, that you have less freedom than you actually do. When you act as though you are simply following a script, as though some external force is making the decision for you, as though there was never really a choice to begin with.

And now look at fad culture.

The Fad as a Freedom Escape Route

Here is how a fad works, psychologically.

First, something appears. A product, a habit, an aesthetic, a diet, a way of arranging your living room. It starts with a small group of people who genuinely, organically like it for their own reasons.

Then the algorithm notices. The content spreads. Suddenly the thing is everywhere on your feed. People you follow and admire are using it, endorsing it, making it part of their identity. The thing starts to feel not just appealing but necessary, like there is a version of yourself that owns it, and that version is somehow doing better than the version that doesn't.

You buy it. You adopt the habit. You post about it.

Now here's Sartre's question: at what point in that sequence did you actually make a decision?

Because if you examine it honestly, what often happens is that the desire arrived prepackaged. You didn't sit down and think, "I value hydration, I've assessed several water vessels, and I've concluded this particular one suits my life." You saw the thing, you saw other people wanting the thing, and the wanting transferred. The trend made the choice, and you ratified it.

This is bad faith in action. Not malicious, not stupid, just the normal human tendency to outsource the discomfort of choosing to the crowd. The crowd already decided. The crowd seems happy. You can just follow along, and if it turns out to be a bad call, well, everyone was doing it, so how can it really be your fault?

Sartre would say: it absolutely can be your fault, and you knew that the whole time, and the fact that you tried to hide from it is exactly what makes it bad faith.

The Waiter and the Stanley Cup

Sartre had a famous example of bad faith that is worth knowing, because it's kind of mean in a very French way.

He described a waiter who is performing being a waiter a little too hard. The posture is too stiff, the gestures too precise, the helpfulness too automatic. The waiter has essentially become "a waiter" as though it were a fixed identity, a role with no person inside it. He has convinced himself that he is not a free human being who happens to be serving tables today, but rather a natural, inevitable, essential waiter. The freedom of choosing to do something else doesn't feel real to him because he's buried it under the performance.

Now replace "waiter" with "person who is really into the current wellness trend."

You know the type, because you have probably been the type. The person who doesn't just drink the mushroom coffee but becomes, for a period of time, an entity whose identity is organized around mushroom coffee. Who sends articles about adaptogens. Who experiences mild judgment toward people who are still doing regular coffee. Who feels a small but real sense of community with other mushroom coffee people.

And then, six months later, the trend shifts. And the mushroom coffee phase is gone as cleanly as it arrived, replaced with something else, and there is rarely much reflection about where the previous self went.

Sartre would say: you were never really the mushroom coffee person. You were a free human being who borrowed a ready made identity because it was available and socially legible and saved you the trouble of figuring out who you actually are. Which is hard. So you wore the trend instead.

The Other People Problem

There is a second piece of Sartre's thought that is relevant here, and it comes from his most famous line, which is almost always misunderstood.

"Hell is other people."

Everyone uses this as a quote for introverts who need a day off. That is not what it means. What Sartre actually meant is that other people are a problem because they see you, and being seen means being defined, and being defined means your freedom is partially stolen from you by someone else's perception.

When other people look at you, they form an image of you. That image is outside your control. And worse, you start to see yourself through it. You begin to perform for their gaze, to manage their perception, to be the version of yourself that their expectations are expecting.

Fad culture is basically an entire industrial complex built on this dynamic.

The fad provides a visible identity signal. Owning the correct water bottle, following the correct morning routine, having the correctly curated apartment aesthetic, tells other people something about who you are before you've said a word. It's a costume that prenegotiates your social position. And because humans are deeply social creatures who have always needed to signal group membership to survive, this feels satisfying in a way that goes well below conscious decision making.

The problem, as Sartre saw it, is that when you organize your choices around the gaze of others, you are not really living your own life. You are performing a life for an audience. And performances are exhausting, and they end, which is why fad cycles are so relentless. You need a new signal every few months because the old one has been adopted by too many people, diluted, made unspecial. The performance requires fresh material.

But Isn't It Just Fun?

This is a fair objection, and it deserves a real answer.

Yes, obviously, sometimes a trend is just a trend. Sometimes a product is good, and it went viral because it's good, and you bought it because it's good, and you enjoy it without any existential crisis attached. Not every purchase is a philosophical event.

Sartre would not argue with this. His point was never that all social participation is corrupt or that you should refuse to enjoy things other people also enjoy. That would be its own kind of bad faith, performing a contrarianism to avoid confronting freedom from the other direction.

The question he'd push you to ask is not "did other people like this first?" but rather: "do I actually like this, and would I still like it if no one could see that I have it?"

That second part is the test. The silent version of the choice.

Because if the answer changes significantly when you remove the audience, that's useful information. It doesn't mean you have to stop buying the thing. It means you know something true about why you're buying it, and knowing true things about yourself is, according to basically every philosophical tradition that has ever existed, better than not knowing them.

The Anxiety Underneath

Here is what is genuinely sympathetic about all of this, and why Sartre's framework shouldn't make you feel judged so much as understood.

The reason bad faith is so common is that radical freedom is genuinely uncomfortable. If you accept that you are fully responsible for who you are and what you do, the weight of that is heavy. It means your life is not happening to you, it's being constructed by you, choice by choice, and you could always have done otherwise, and the you that exists is the accumulated result of those choices.

That's a lot to carry around while also trying to get through a Tuesday.

Fads offer relief from this. They say: here, just be this for a while. The community is right here. The identity is preassembled. You don't have to figure out who you are from scratch; you just have to buy into this particular version of being a person, and it will carry you for a season.

Sartre's response to this is not "stop it, you coward." His response is closer to: the relief is real, but it doesn't last, and it can't, because you are not actually a thing that can be permanently solved by the right product or the right aesthetic. You are a process. A continuous act of becoming. And the only way to live in a way that feels genuinely yours is to stay in some honest relationship with the fact that you're the one making it up as you go.

What This Actually Looks Like in Practice

You don't need to become a philosopher. You just need to practice one small habit, which is inserting a pause between the desire and the action.

Not a long dramatic pause in the woods where you "find yourself" by smoking something and wearing a knit scarf. Just a pause at the end of the day when you are alone scrolling for your next purchase, long enough to ask a few quick questions:

1. Where did this desire come from, and is it mine or did I absorb it from the feed?

2. Would I want this if no one would ever know I had it?

3. Am I buying the thing, or am I buying the feeling of belonging to the people who have the thing?

4. Have I wanted things like this before, and how did that go?

None of this is an argument against buying things, following trends, or enjoying the social pleasure of sharing an enthusiasm with other people. All of that is fine and human and nice. It's an argument against sleepwalking through your own choices, which is the one consistent position Sartre held across his entire career, even when everything else got complicated.

The goal is not to be the person who smugly refuses every trend while drinking plain water from a glass vessel they made themselves. That person is also in bad faith, just in the opposite direction, performing nonconformity for an audience of one.

The goal is to be the person who occasionally buys the thing, knows why they're buying it, and doesn't build their identity on its continued relevance.

That's harder than it sounds, especially when the algorithm is very good at its job.

But you are, as Sartre would insist with the full weight of French intellectual tradition behind him, free. Terrifyingly, inconveniently, inescapably free.

Even on the checkout screen (with the 10% additional discount).