The Marshmallow Economy
The Marshmallow Economy
People are fulfilling their social connection needs by watching others cry on TikTok.
Read that again. Let it land. Someone somewhere right now is lying in bed, alone, watching a stranger have a genuine emotional moment — a reunion, a loss, a confession — and their brain is releasing the exact neurochemicals it would release if they were in that moment. Oxytocin. That warm sense of connection. That feeling that says: you are not alone.
But they are alone. They’re holding a phone in a dark room and they’re consuming a compressed representation of human connection while being profoundly, materially disconnected from any actual human.
Their stomach is full. Their body is wasting.
Welcome to the marshmallow economy.
Social Corn Syrup
I think about food science a lot when I think about social media, because the playbook is identical.
In the 1970s, food scientists figured out something dangerous: you can engineer food to be more compelling than anything found in nature. You take the sugar, fat, and salt — the signals your brain evolved to seek out because they were rare and calorically valuable — and you concentrate them. You strip out the fiber, the micronutrients, the things that make your body feel satisfied. You add artificial flavoring that hits the same receptors harder than any real food could.
The result: people eat more and more while becoming less and less nourished. Obesity and malnutrition existing in the same body. The signals that say “you’ve eaten” firing constantly while the signals that say “you’ve been fed” never fire at all.
Social media did the exact same thing to human connection.
Instagram, TikTok, Twitter — they took the signals your brain evolved to seek out in social bonding (recognition, validation, emotional resonance, belonging) and concentrated them. They stripped out everything that makes real connection nutritious: the time, the vulnerability, the boring Tuesday afternoons, the uncomfortable silences, the showing up when it’s inconvenient.
What’s left is social corn syrup. Technically it activates the same receptors. It registers as connection. But it has no nutritional value whatsoever.
The Metric Trap
Here’s the structural problem: every centralized platform measures engagement — likes, comments, shares, time spent. They treat engagement as a proxy for value. More engagement equals better product.
This is the socialist calculation problem applied to human relationships. A like is a scalar — a single number — trying to represent the full structure of what a piece of content meant to you. Did it make you think? Did it change how you see your neighbor? Did it make you want to call your mother? The metric can’t capture any of that. It captures reaction. And then the entire system optimizes for reaction.
People don’t optimize their relationships. They optimize the metric. They post what gets likes, not what’s true. They share what drives engagement, not what they actually feel. The measurement becomes the target, and once it’s the target, it ceases to be a good measurement. It’s fullness masquerading as nourishment. Every metric goes up and every person feels emptier.
The algorithm that makes TikTok compelling is the same algorithm that makes it socially corrosive. It learns what emotional content you respond to and serves you more of it. Emotional resonance on demand. Crying babies. Surprise reunions. Righteous anger. Vulnerable confessions. All the social signals, stripped of all social context, delivered at the pace your dopamine system requests.
Two Thousand Friends and Nobody to Call
Here’s the paradox that should keep tech founders up at night: we have more tools for connection than any civilization in history, and we are experiencing a loneliness epidemic of genuinely unprecedented scale.
The U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory on loneliness. Not on opioids — on loneliness. Calling it a public health crisis on par with smoking. Young people report having fewer close friends than any generation on record. In Japan they literally had to invent a word — hikikomori — for people who withdraw from social life entirely.
How is this possible? How can you have 2,000 Facebook friends and no one to call when your car breaks down at midnight?
Because those aren’t friendships. They’re compressed representations of friendships.
A friendship is a process. It’s built through shared time, shared difficulty, shared boredom. It’s Tuesday evening and neither of you has anything interesting to say but you’re sitting on the porch anyway. It’s helping someone move and it sucks and you both know it sucks and somehow that’s the thing that bonds you. It’s the slow accumulation of trust that comes from showing up repeatedly, consistently, especially when it’s not convenient or entertaining.
Social media took that entire process and compressed it into the equivalent of highlights. You see someone’s vacation. You like their kid’s photo. You react to their political take. And your brain — which evolved in tribes of 150 people where any social signal meant real, embodied proximity — registers these micro-interactions as relationship maintenance.
But they’re not. They’re marshmallows. Little sugar hits that say “connection” without delivering any.
The cruelest part is that they suppress the appetite. When you’ve spent two hours scrolling through social content, your brain’s sociality meter says “full.” You don’t feel the urge to call someone, to go to that party, to sit with a friend and talk about nothing. You’ve already “socialized.” You’re not hungry.
But you’re wasting.
The Reciprocal Narrowing
And it gets worse, because the pattern feeds itself.
Each cycle of consuming compressed social signals trains your brain to expect that level of compression. Your prediction engine recalibrates. It starts treating the hyper-edited, algorithmically curated version as the baseline for what “social” means. Real interaction — with its pauses, its tangents, its lack of soundtrack — starts registering as low-fidelity. Noise.
So you retreat to the screen. Where the signal is clean. Where the emotional hits are precise. Where every interaction has been pre-selected for maximum impact. And this retreat further narrows what your system considers worth engaging with. The threshold rises. Real life falls further below it.
It operates like addiction because it is addiction — not metaphorically but structurally. Each cycle demands more compression, narrower bandwidth, harder signal. The range of things that register as meaningful contracts with every scroll. First you need the reunion video to feel something. Then you need the reunion video with the military parent. Then you need the one where the kid doesn’t know. The algorithm provides. It always provides.
You are not becoming more connected. You are becoming a more brittle agent in a world that feels increasingly flat.
The Demand-Side Question
Here’s where I have to be honest about the limits of this framework, because it’s dangerously close to moralism if I’m not careful.
It’s easy to scold people for choosing marshmallows. It’s harder to ask why the marshmallow is the rational choice.
Someone watching cooking videos at midnight isn’t malnourished because they’re lazy. Maybe they work two jobs and don’t have the energy to cook. Maybe their kitchen has a hotplate and a microwave. Maybe the ingredients for the meal they’d love to make cost more than their daily food budget. The compressed version isn’t just more convenient — it’s what’s available. Calling it a failure of taste when it’s a failure of access is bullshit.
The same applies to social connection. If you’re working 60 hours a week in a city where you know nobody, and the only social interaction available at 11pm is your phone — that’s not a moral failure. That’s a structural one. The marshmallow economy doesn’t just exploit weakness. It exploits constraint. It fills the gaps that our economic and social architecture creates.
So the question isn’t just “why do people consume compressed connection?” It’s “what conditions would make the uncompressed version accessible?” And if you can’t answer that, you don’t have a framework. You have a sermon.
The Way Out Is Through the Question
I don’t have a neat solution. I’m suspicious of anyone who does. But I know the direction has to account for both sides: the supply and the demand.
On the supply side, the platforms will keep optimizing for engagement because that’s what pays. The engagement will keep increasing while the nourishment keeps dropping. The metric will keep substituting for the thing it claims to measure. This is structural, and wishing it away changes nothing.
On the demand side, we have to stop pretending this is purely a matter of individual choice. The loneliness epidemic isn’t happening because three billion people simultaneously decided to be shallow. It’s happening because the architecture of modern life — the housing, the work hours, the urban design, the economic pressure — has made real connection progressively more expensive in time and energy, while making compressed connection progressively cheaper and more abundant.
The marshmallow economy will keep growing because the incentives are there. But the question that actually matters isn’t “why are people eating marshmallows?” It’s “what would it take to make real food available, affordable, and accessible to people who are starving?”
Because the hunger is real. Every study confirms it. We are as malnourished as ever, surrounded by the simulation of the thing we need.
The answer isn’t backward. It’s structural. And it starts with asking better questions than “why can’t people just put down the phone?”