I once sold tens of thousands of plastic bracelets. Each one had a hologram embedded in the band. The price was 40 euros. Whenever I tell that story, one question always follows, usually with a smirk: who buys something like that?
For a while I answered the same way the question was asked, with a shrug or a joke. At some point that felt too thin. I had watched thousands of people buy the bracelet, wear it and come back to tell me it helped. That deserved a real answer. So I started paying attention to who these buyers actually were.
The first group were athletes, professionals who trained every day. Their bodies were their main asset, and they would do almost anything for even a percent more strength and stability. They put the bracelet on and said, I feel it. Whether the feeling came from the hologram or from their own head, only the performance mattered to them in that moment.
The second group were executives, people who worked sixteen hours a day and reached the evening emptied out. They were open to anything that promised relief, and the bracelet cost a fraction of an hour with a coach.
The third group were homemakers and mothers. They got up at six in the morning and fell into bed at eleven at night, running the household in the hours between. There was no time to go back to yoga and no energy left for a gym. A band on the wrist required no time from their schedule.
The fourth group faced something heavier: chronic pain, real illnesses where conventional medicine had offered only symptomatic relief. They bought out of hope, and some out of something closer to desperation, after trying everything else. This small object on the wrist might have been the last thing left to try.
That placebo works is a scientific fact. People feel less pain after a pill they believe is a painkiller, and they run faster in shoes they believe are professional grade. Belief in an object that adds strength works the same way. I had no study on my desk that measured this specific bracelet. I had the faces of the people buying it, and their stories, and thousands of them telling me it worked. For me, that was evidence enough.
What eventually bothered me was the question about the people who bought it. Who buys something like that had an undertone I couldn’t shake, as if believing in something was a character flaw, a small failure of intelligence or willpower. I had met these buyers, and that undertone was the thing that actually needed explaining.
What actually explained it was simpler and larger. A tired population runs short of what it needs and takes on more than it has energy for. People who work sixteen hours a day and people who rise at six and fall into bed at eleven make different decisions than people who are rested. That is biology. Exhaustion narrows the field of what still seems worth trying, and a silicone band with a hologram inside fits that narrowed field.
I served that need. I saw the hunger and I fed it a little. It was wrong.
I still don’t have an answer to the question that actually matters: why so many people are exhausted enough that a piece of plastic with a hologram in it looks like a reasonable place to put their hope. I’ve been asking it for years now, and I’m no closer to one.