Two small marts sit on the corner near my house, set side by side along the same stretch of street. They are supplied by the same distributors and staffed by the same kind of rotating part-time workers from the same agency. Their prices, hours, and stock are identical. By any structural measure I can apply, they are the same shop instantiated twice. And yet for years I have used one and not the other, and the question of why has lately been opening into something larger than I had expected: a piece of self-reflection that I want to try to set down.

The shop I prefer is, by a small but unmistakable margin, the cleaner of the two. The light is warmer. The shelves are kept in better order. The displays bear the trace of someone having recently considered them. The other has a slightly cooler light, a faint air of inattention, the small accumulating fatigue of a room nobody has lately bothered to put right. The stock, again, is the same. The experience of moving among the stock is not.

Until today, just hours ago, I had not really asked why. The answer arrived on a regular Saturday. It is not about safety, and it is not about taste. It has very little, in fact, to do with the function of the visit, which is identical in either shop. What differs is everything that surrounds the function: the warmer light, the order of the shelves, the small accumulated impression that the room makes on me as I move through it. And what I am, very quietly, choosing each time I cross the cleaner threshold is the impression. I am willing to wait an extra minute in a small line for it. I am willing to walk a little further. I am, it turns out, more concerned with how the room receives me than with how quickly it dispenses my purchase. This is something I had not quite known about myself.

Some people will dismiss this as a nonsensical preference, a pickiness of the kind that has more time on its hands than it ought. Others, particularly those who run businesses for a living, will offer a different but no less brisk dismissal: the key to a successful retail operation, they will say, is simply to provide cheaper goods for daily life, and lighting and atmosphere are footnotes. I would not call either response wrong. But I would say each is too quick.

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There is a Chinese idiom which translates roughly as “marking the boat to find the sword.” The story is taught as a piece of classical foolishness. A man crossing a river by boat lets his sword slip overboard. Without hesitation, he takes a knife and cuts a notch into the gunwale where it fell, expecting that when the boat reaches the shore he will be able to dive in at the marked place and recover his sword. The story exists to be laughed at. The boat moves. The river moves. The mark is meaningless. This is the standard reading.

But there is another way to look at the man with the knife. Suppose he is not, in fact, an idiot. Suppose he understood, even as he was carving, that the boat was moving. Suppose he knew, with the dull clarity that follows any small disaster, that the sword was already lost. The mark, in this reading, is not a navigational instrument. It is a ritual. It is a small piece of evidence, cut into wood, that the loss has occurred. He is not trying to recover the sword. He is establishing that there was, at this moment in his life, a sword to lose.

Read this way, the man on the boat is doing something very familiar. We have all had, at some point, a cafe where we used to sit. A corner where we once said something important. A city where we spent a particular weekend with someone we no longer love. The cafe may have closed. The corner may have been repaved. The lover, more pointedly, is not there. We know all of this. We know it with the part of the mind that handles facts. And we go back anyway, because the place is the mark on the boat. What we are visiting is not the lover, and not, in the end, even the place. It is ourselves, some years younger, with hopes that have since been replaced by other hopes. We would like to stand near that earlier self for a moment, in the way one stands beside a grave.

This is not foolishness. It is one of the most sophisticated things the mind does. It is the sword no longer being the point of the mark.

*   *   *

The marts and the river, then, are the same gesture in different temporal directions. In the present-tense version, I prefer the cleaner shop because of the version of myself I would like to remain. In the past-tense version, the man with the knife marks the boat because of the version of himself he no longer is, and would like, even now, to keep accessible. In both cases, the ostensible object (the bottle of water, the lost sword) is not the actual transaction. The actual transaction is the maintenance of a coherent self across time, conducted through small material acts that look, from the outside, almost too modest to mean anything.

A transaction is a small act of self-confirmation.

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I have spent enough years in the technology industry to know that this is precisely the layer the industry has tended to neglect. In the early years of my own career I was, in any honest accounting, assimilated by the culture, and only in the past few years, through some modest entry into the fashion and art industries, have I begun to see clearly what the technology industry has been overlooking.

The technology industry has, of course, the discipline called user experience, and there are good practitioners of it. But the field’s center of gravity is the smoothing of friction. It is about how easily a person uses the product. It is not, on the whole, about how a person feels about himself in the course of using it.

For a long time, smoothness was the right place to put one’s effort. Software engineering was difficult; building anything that did not feel broken was an achievement in itself. This is the era in which Apple earned the credit it earned. While most consumer products of that period offered uneven, halting experiences, the iPhone, the iPod, and the Mac simply worked, and worked beautifully. Smoothness was the differentiator, because most things were not smooth.

But there was a second thing Apple was doing, almost from the beginning, that took the rest of the industry a long time to register. It was building products that were elegant. The elegance was not, in the end, about how the device felt to the hand. It was about how the user felt while holding it. The iPhone did not only present itself as elegant. It made the person carrying it feel, for that small daily moment, like a person of taste, a user of elegance, which is a different and quieter category.

Around 2015, with the rest of the industry catching up on smoothness, the second layer began to matter more. Less friction is no longer a ceiling. It is a threshold. With the arrival of code-generation tools, with software engineering becoming gradually accessible to people who would have been excluded from it ten years ago, low-friction, high-efficiency product-making is not, in any meaningful sense, the binding constraint anymore. The newer subject, the one I think is now visibly emerging, is how a product treats the user’s self-perception. How it shapes it. How it welcomes it.

The products that understood this from early on tend to win unusually decisively. Apple, as I have said, is one. TikTok is another, and the case becomes cleaner still in the company’s earlier incarnation as Musical.ly. The platform’s growth, in those years, came less from the quality of its videos (YouTube and Vimeo had access to far better content) than from the way using it made teenagers feel they were the makers of the cultural moment, originators of a trend that radiated outward from wherever they happened to be standing. The video was a side effect. The self-perception was the offer.

This kind of knowledge, I should say, is not at all new. The fashion industry has understood it for centuries; so have the salons and ateliers and the older luxury houses. What was new was the technology industry’s late arrival. For most of its life, the field’s main subject was capability: what a system could do, how powerful, how fast, how scalable it was. The user’s interior was someone else’s department.

I think this is changing now, for several reasons at once. Software engineering is becoming widely accessible; the product-making bottleneck is loosening. People are positioning themselves differently in the presence of AI, having noticed that the machine is, in a great many narrowly defined intellectual tasks, more capable than they are. As the shape of products changes, the question of what the products do for a person’s image of himself becomes harder to ignore.

Meanwhile, a great many ordinary businesses still have not noticed that this layer is available to be worked on at all. They concentrate on the standardized product, sound and reasonably priced, and assume that fairness in goods and pricing constitutes the whole of the offer. The result, especially as engineering becomes cheaper and faster, is a wave of products that look identical to one another. Trading platforms have all converged on the same shape: sign up, deposit, trade. Streaming platforms have all converged on the same shape: sign up, subscribe, watch. There is a strange flatness to all of it, a sense of having walked into the same shop several times in succession.

This false diversity makes very little sense. In physical retail, multiple identical-looking businesses are coherent because geography forces them to be. There can be a cinema in Hong Kong and a cinema in Tokyo because no resident of either city can casually use the other. Online, this constraint does not exist. Localization is not the difficulty it once was. In the absence of geographical separation, the question of what a second platform is offering, against an established first, becomes acute. By 2026 this is the central commercial question, and it is not a hard one to answer once one is willing to take it seriously.

The answer, I think, is that the customer needs to feel, in some specific and personally addressed way, more like himself for using the product. The mid-century logic was not actually different. From the 1940s through the 1970s, the standardized product was a positive virtue: it stood for modernity, neutrality, equality, quality, reliability. The customer felt elevated to participate in it. The mechanism, even then, was self-perception.

What has changed is what makes the customer feel elevated. Standardization no longer does the work. Supply is no longer the binding constraint; most categories are oversupplied. What customers lack, in this configuration, is the sense that the product was made with their particular self in view. They no longer want to take a standardized object home and customize it themselves. They expect the customization, even if only a gestural one, to be present in the offer from the beginning.

*   *   *

Even where the product itself has nothing to do with self-perception, the apparatus that surrounds it (the brand, the marketing, the visual identity, the tone of voice) is doing the self-perception work whether anyone has decided to attend to it or not.

If the apparatus signals “using this product confirms a version of myself I am pleased to acknowledge,” the product has an enormous tailwind. If it signals “using this product places me, in my own internal taxonomy, among the people I do not wish to be,” the product faces an enormous headwind, almost regardless of its functional virtues.

This is, in fact, the hidden flaw in a great deal of contemporary marketing. The aggressive discount campaign can produce remarkable short-term growth, and the dashboards will reward it; but it is worth asking which audience the growth has actually attracted. The loud public commitment to being the cheapest in the category communicates with admirable clarity that the brand is the right choice for price-sensitive people. A great many of the customers the brand needs to attract experience this as a quiet insult, an invitation to identify themselves with a category they do not wish to occupy.

Take a fast-food chain. It is disastrous to build the entire narrative on “we are cheaper.” The right move is closer to “this is the right place for you and the people you bring with you to spend an unhurried hour together.” That image already does the work of distinguishing the chain from the very quiet, very expensive, more selective restaurants without ever saying so, and it preserves what is actually true about the offer: that it is affordable enough for a larger group to gather and enjoy themselves there. The price will still be on the menu. It will not be what is being offered.

The same mindset, I should say, applies well past marketing. It applies to how a business positions itself in the world. A business that has positioned itself as a standardized, neutrally presented version of its category, in 2026, has positioned itself for slow disappearance.

We are at a turning point, and some of the change is unsettling, especially to those who built careers on the older logics. I am, as it happens, an optimist about it. The bottleneck of capability has loosened. More people’s initiatives can now be expressed, and the question of which initiatives find audiences is a question about self-perception more than about resources. This seems to me a good development. It widens the field of possible lives, including my own.

The right business question, in any case, is no longer how to provide the goods more efficiently. It is how to fulfill the customer’s particular self-perception in the encounter with the product.

*   *   *

When the day’s transactions are over, when the various platforms and shops have closed for the evening, when the marketing has been turned off for the night, the person who returns to himself in the quiet of the room continues to conduct a long, private argument about who he is willing to be.

The brands that endure across decades, the rituals that survive across centuries, the small daily preferences that hold a person together over the course of a lifetime, are all participants in this argument, whether they recognize themselves as such or not. The newborn technology company is in the same argument. So is the small shop on the corner near my house. Those that recognize this, and treat it with the seriousness it deserves, tend to be remembered. Those that do not, that mistake the goods for the transaction, the place for the visit, the sword for the mark, are quietly forgotten by people who could never quite say why they had stopped showing up.

I have long known the sword is gone. I keep the mark for another reason now.