CONCEPT
Emotional Commodification
The process by which feelings — once experienced as the interior, irreducible dimension of private life — have been progressively incorporated into the circuits of economic exchange as packaged products, services, and experiences.
Emotional commodification names the historical expansion of consumer capitalism into domains of intimate life that had previously been at least partially shielded from market logic. Grief becomes a therapy package. Friendship becomes a networking opportunity. Romantic connection becomes a dating subscription. Care becomes a platform service. Self-understanding becomes a meditation app. The process does not necessarily produce worse experiences—the therapy may help, the dating app may produce a marriage, the meditation app may reduce anxiety. What the process does produce is the reorganization of emotional life around commodity forms, so that feelings increasingly arrive pre-packaged with expectations, price points, and productive functions.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Illouz traced the process in Consuming the Romantic Utopia (1997), demonstrating how romantic love became mutually constitutive with consumer capitalism through the twentieth century—the candlelit dinner, the diamond ring, the vacation destination as sites where love was experienced and where commerce harvested the experience. She extended the analysis to therapy in Saving the