A curious new development has emerged among affluent Western consumers, who have long since exhausted the traditional avenues of self-reinvention. Having cycled through veganism, stoicism, cold-water immersion, dopamine fasting, and various forms of curated ethnic identity adoption, they have begun moving toward a deeper and more immersive form of experiential authenticity. What began innocently enough as "Chinamaxxing" — drinking hot water, wearing house slippers, and speaking vaguely of "balance" and "harmony" — now appears to be evolving into something more weird and revealing.
The initial appeal of Chinamaxxing was obvious. It offered all the emotional satisfactions of cultural belonging without any of the historical burdens or political complications. Participants could enjoy the aesthetic surface of an ancient civilisation while remaining safely insulated from its realities. The rituals were comforting, inexpensive, and easily documented on social media. Most importantly, they allowed the practitioner to feel transformed without requiring any actual transformation.
But aesthetic immersion, like any form of consumption, obeys the law of diminishing returns. Drinking hot water eventually becomes merely drinking water. Slippers become just footwear. The thrill of borrowed identity fades with familiarity. The modern consumer, conditioned by endless novelty, cannot remain satisfied with surface rituals indefinitely. Inevitably, the search begins for deeper authenticity.
It is here that the practice takes a darker and more revealing turn.
A small but growing number of lifestyle influencers have begun exploring what might be called "oppression simulation" as the next frontier of experiential identity. Having adopted the visible rituals of another civilisation, they now seek to approximate its invisible psychological conditions. The logic is presented as a form of empathy. To truly understand a culture, they argue, one must experience not only its comforts but its constraints.
In practice, this has led to the creation of carefully curated environments designed to simulate conditions of surveillance, restriction, and uncertainty. Spare rooms are converted into minimalist concrete spaces. Lighting is deliberately harsh and uninviting. Communication is restricted for predetermined periods. Participants describe the experience as "grounding" and "clarifying." They speak of gaining insight into resilience, discipline, and the fragility of personal freedom. It prepares them for Left wing politics.
What is most striking is not the simulation itself, but the safety net surrounding it. At any moment, the participant may end the experience. The door is never truly locked. The deprivation is elective. The suffering is reversible. The simulation is framed not as punishment, but as wellness.
This reveals the fundamental paradox at the heart of the phenomenon. The practitioner seeks to experience constraint while retaining absolute control. They wish to feel vulnerable without being vulnerable. They pursue authenticity while ensuring their immunity from its consequences.
The result is not an encounter with reality, but its aesthetic approximation.
This tendency reflects a deeper structural condition of affluent societies. Material security has become so complete, and personal autonomy so extensive, that individuals increasingly struggle to experience the sense of necessity that shaped earlier human lives. For most of history, identity was not chosen. It was inherited, imposed, and enforced by circumstance. One's culture, social role, and political environment were facts, not lifestyle options.
Today, these constraints have largely dissolved for the privileged classes of the developed world. Identity has become fluid, negotiable, and reversible. While this freedom is often celebrated, it also produces a peculiar form of existential weightlessness. Without external constraint, the individual becomes responsible for constructing their own meaning. This is both liberating and destabilising.
The simulation of constraint becomes, paradoxically, a way of restoring psychological structure. It provides the sensation of necessity within a framework of absolute safety.
Yet the practice also reveals a profound asymmetry. Those who engage in oppression simulation do so precisely because they are free from oppression. Their ability to enter and exit the experience at will is itself the privilege they seek to temporarily suspend. The simulation therefore depends upon the very freedom it attempts to negate.
What emerges is a form of experiential tourism, not across geography, but across conditions of existence. Just as earlier generations travelled to foreign countries to experience exotic landscapes, today's identity tourists travel into simulated psychological environments. The destination is no longer a place, but a state of being.
This phenomenon would be impossible without the immense surplus of security, stability, and comfort that characterises late modern societies. Only a civilisation that has largely solved the problem of survival can afford to aestheticise its absence. Only individuals whose lives are defined by choice can find novelty in its temporary removal.
None of this is undertaken with malicious intent. Participants sincerely believe they are expanding their empathy and deepening their understanding of the human condition. They document their experiences with earnest reflection. They speak of gratitude, perspective, and growth.
Yet the practice inadvertently exposes the distance between simulation and reality. Real constraint does not arrive as a wellness exercise. It does not announce itself as an opportunity for personal growth. It does not offer an exit clause.
The simulation therefore reveals less about the conditions being simulated than about the conditions of those doing the simulating. It exposes a civilisation so insulated from necessity that it must manufacture artificial forms of it in order to feel psychologically grounded.
In this sense, oppression simulation is not a sign of cruelty, but of distance. It reflects a widening gap between those who experience constraint as an unavoidable fact of life, and those for whom it has become a voluntary aesthetic experience.
The modern Western consumer has mastered the art of acquiring the external symbols of any identity while remaining internally unchanged. Culture becomes costume. Constraint becomes exercise. Reality becomes elective.
What remains, at the end of this process, is not transformation, but performance.
The individual has not become someone else. They have simply added another experience to their collection.
And when the simulation ends, they return to the same condition that made it possible in the first place: a life defined, above all, by freedom.
For almost all of human history, necessity was external, objective, and unavoidable. It was imposed by hunger, climate, disease, physical danger, and political authority. These forces did not ask for consent. They defined the boundaries of existence. Identity was therefore not something one assembled, but something one endured. A medieval peasant did not "explore peasantness." He was a peasant because the alternative was starvation. A factory worker in 1890 did not simulate constraint to build character. Constraint was the condition of survival.
Necessity gave structure to reality.
It provided resistance. It imposed consequences. It made certain actions impossible and others unavoidable. Most importantly, it created a stable relationship between action and outcome. The individual learned, often brutally, that the world was not negotiable.
Modern affluent societies have progressively dissolved these constraints, at least for a significant portion of their populations. Food is abundant. Physical danger is rare. Political authority, while still present, is diffused and bureaucratised rather than immediate and personal. Even discomfort itself has been minimised through climate control, pharmaceuticals, and digital mediation.
This is an extraordinary civilisational achievement. It represents the partial liberation of humanity from conditions that defined existence for millennia.
But liberation from necessity produces an unexpected secondary effect. When external constraints recede, the individual is no longer shaped primarily by reality, but by choice. Identity becomes elective rather than imposed. One no longer discovers oneself within necessity, but constructs oneself within possibility.
This produces a paradox. Freedom expands, but structure weakens.
Without external resistance, the individual begins to experience a form of ontological lightness. Choices proliferate, but none feels anchored. Identity becomes fluid, revisable, and provisional. The self begins to resemble a narrative under continuous revision rather than a fixed condition grounded in necessity.
This is psychologically destabilising, even when materially comfortable.
Human beings evolved in environments defined by constraint. Our cognitive and emotional architecture expects resistance. It expects consequences that cannot be undone. It expects reality to push back. When this resistance disappears, the individual experiences a subtle form of unreality. Life begins to feel less like participation in a fixed world and more like navigation through a menu of options.
Simulation emerges as a compensatory response.
If necessity cannot be found, it can be imitated. If constraint is absent, it can be performed. The individual constructs artificial limits in order to recreate the psychological structure that external necessity once provided. Cold showers, fasting, extreme exercise, digital detox retreats, and now simulated political or cultural constraint all belong to this category. They are voluntary reconstructions of involuntary conditions.
Their appeal lies precisely in their artificiality. They allow the individual to experience the sensation of necessity while retaining ultimate control. This preserves the emotional benefits of constraint without its risks.
But this also reveals their limitation. Artificial necessity cannot fully replicate real necessity, because it remains reversible. Its authority is conditional. The participant knows, at every moment, that the constraint exists by choice.
This knowledge prevents the simulation from becoming reality.
The deeper significance of these practices, therefore, is not that they successfully recreate necessity, but that they testify to its absence. They are civilisational artefacts of a world in which survival has become sufficiently secure that its psychological conditions must be deliberately reconstructed.
This represents a historically unprecedented situation. Previous civilisations sought to escape necessity. Modern affluent civilisation increasingly seeks to simulate it.
The irony is profound. The greatest success of civilisation — the reduction of involuntary suffering — produces a secondary desire to reintroduce its structural features in controlled form.
This does not mean that affluent societies are collapsing or decadent in any simplistic sense. Rather, they have entered a new phase in which the primary challenges are no longer material, but existential and psychological. The problem is no longer survival, but meaning.
Necessity once provided meaning automatically. To survive was meaningful because survival was uncertain.
When survival becomes routine, meaning must be constructed by other means.
Identity tourism, oppression simulation, and similar practices are attempts — often unconscious — to restore the feeling of reality that necessity once guaranteed. They are efforts to recover weight in a world that has become, materially speaking, almost frictionless.
They do not signal moral failure so much as structural transition. Humanity has moved from a condition defined by external necessity to one defined increasingly by internal self-construction.
We are, in effect, the first civilisation forced to confront the psychological consequences of widespread freedom.
And we are still learning how to live in its absence of limits.
https://michaeltsnyder.substack.com/p/in-2026-it-has-become-trendy-for