Were They Only Feeling Themselves?

Whether in front of a crowd at sports events or in intimate one-on-ones. Everyone felt it. Ok, not everyone. There were some who tried with all their willpower to demonstrate that they wouldn’t fall for the trick. But most couldn’t resist anymore once they put the wristband on.

But that’s not meant dismissively at all. On the contrary. What they felt was real, because whoever ran the test felt it too. The test subject was definitely more stable with the band than without. The feeling of standing stronger was real. For the one doing the pushing and of course for the one who had to keep their balance. The conviction that something had changed was real. But did it come from the product? Or from them?

The human body is an incredibly sensitive organism. It reacts to expectation, to what it’s told, and when someone stands in an excited group, chances are the excitement spreads to them too. They see what’s happening and no one needs to tell them they’ll be stronger with the wristband, the body is already reacting. Muscle tension changes. Posture shifts. You actually stand more stable. Whether that’s because something external is acting on you, nobody can say.

That’s documented and reproducible. It’s one of the oldest mechanisms in medicine. The placebo effect. Doctors know it, science thinks it knows it. I really had every opinion and every school of thought explained to me in a plausible way. Everyone’s heard of it, and whoever works in marketing knows how to cash in on placebo.

I did the test at all kinds of events and trade shows, hundreds of times. I know the astonished faces as well as the uncertainty that gets smiled away with a disbelieving head shake. Most were so stoked they immediately fetched their partners or colleagues. The thing went viral at a time when viral hadn’t even arrived in marketing yet. Come here, look, you have to try this too.

None of them willfully lied or pretended. They really felt something. I felt it, and we tried it in every, really every conceivable variation. I was in university labs discussing double-blind with serious scientists and testing it exhaustively. And that’s exactly what made the whole thing so complex.

When someone tells you: I can feel it, you can’t say: no you can’t. Because they can feel it. The sensation is there. It’s subjective for sure, but it’s there. What couldn’t be proven was the claimed cause. The frequency and the energy on the hologram. Maybe the cause lies elsewhere. Maybe in the head of the person feeling it. Nobody could really tell me for sure, even though most were very sure of their position. Just sure in every direction.

I remember a moment at an event. An older man, tradesman type, skeptical by default, both arms tensely crossed. He said with a scientifically serious expression: What a load of nonsense. I replied: Just try it yourself. He tried it demonstratively unwilling but he just stood there solid, impossible to knock over. Without the wristband he tipped to the side immediately. With the band he stood stable again like a tree. He looked at me, said nothing and bought two. His wife has those balance issues sometimes, she could definitely use this.

What happened in those moments? This tree of a man experienced his own body. Not a product, but his body reacting to a situation. Was it the attention, or the expectation that was there despite the skepticism? Was it the fact that someone had told him: now pay attention?

And I stood beside him smiling proudly and took his money. Another one.

That’s the part I thought about for a long time afterward. Not whether people felt something. But what it means that I didn’t have a clear answer where it came from, and sold it anyway.

I didn’t promise any healing. I didn’t make any medical claims. I ran the test and let people feel. What they concluded from it was their business. That’s how I explained it to myself. For a long time.

But the explanation gets thinner the more honestly you look. Because of course I created the context. I told the story of the frequencies, which the product developer had shown me really convincingly. Every tape cassette is a magnetic band on which frequencies are stored that a playback device makes audible. Here the playback device is the human, who has their own magnetic field and resonates with this hologram. I’ll leave it at this slightly simplified explanation for now. Another essay on this topic will surely follow soon. But that’ll get more complicated.

In any case, I built the expectation. Built a kind of stage on which their own body performed. Without that stage, they wouldn’t have felt anything, because nobody would have asked them whether they feel something. An effective production with a very simple set.

So what’s left apart from the big question? The answer anyway can’t be limited to a wristband. It goes beyond that, of course. How much of what we feel actually comes from outside? And how much of it do we produce ourselves, because we want to produce it?

The people at the sports events connected this moment only to the wristband. They experienced a moment in which they can perceive themselves differently. One in which they’re more stable and stronger. Over time the wristband was always the occasion but not the cause. That sounds paradoxical, but that was my personal safe space. Protection from feeling bad. From explaining something I didn’t understand myself.

So I sold moments. That’s less dramatic than fraud but a bit more complex than honesty. It’s some kind of space in between, where a big part of consumption happens and in this case can’t be countered by science. Another product that doesn’t do what it promises, but triggers something, because we want it to trigger something. I don’t know. I need a few more essays to understand it myself. But what I do know for sure is that what the people felt was real. Because I felt it too. Maybe it was their own strength or their own attention. What’s certain is their body reacted. And they all thought it came from outside.