It's Christmas Eve and I'm in Calmshet, a farm-stay an hour or so outside Pune. 'The vibe is bric-a-brac', I tell a friend on WhatsApp, after noticing old rosewood furniture, office chairs (a lot of them), couches with sheets thrown across them and, outside, in a small bamboo grove, a naked mannequin behind a Perspex shield. The friend approves: 'Awh, that is a vibe!!! Sounds gorgeous!!' 

At the lunch table, shortly after I land, a mother is waiting for her 4-year-old to put down his tablet and eat a ball of rice she's been dangling for the longest time; across from her, a father is performing the same ritual with his child. 'Has anyone swum in the lake?', I venture, at the risk of sounding irrelevant. The mother, after looking at me with mild stupefaction, clips back: 'A lake and the swimming pool, they're not the same. It might not be clean, also'. These sentiments are replayed, a couple of hours later, when a woman who I bump into on my way to the lake for a dip tells me: 'I only swim in the swimming pool'. It made sense then why this place would have a tiled, lounge pool on the hillside, away from the lake, its sprat and other water borne organisms. But this too, it turns out, is not for everyone. One guest, after giving me directions on where to find it, adds in an almost apology: 'but it's lake water'. 

The dislike for rough and ready leisure and desire for something more packaged reminded me of a term–'conspicuous expenditure'–adopted by Thorstein Veblen, a 19th Century thinker associated with sociology and economics. Veblen used this to describe the importance, from the point of view of social status, of having spending power, and the exhibitionism required to produce a social identity out of this. 'Throughout the entire evolution of conspicuous expenditure, whether of goods or of services or human life, runs the obvious implication that in order to effectually mend the consumer's good fame it must be an expenditure of superfluities. In order to be reputable, it must be wasteful. No merit would accrue from the consumption of the bare necessaries of life,' he writes. For the crowd at Calmshet, in their late 30s and 40s, consumer preferences dating back to Veblen's time are still applicable. For the younger folk, though, Veblen is suddenly, or finally, outdated. Content creators wanting to mend their 'good fame', or personal brand, on the Internet, purposefully use 'bare necessities' to create the optics of a 'bucket list lifestyle' that is more minimalism and mindfulness than mindless spending.

That evening, Karthik, our host, has set light to two bonfires, to keep the picky eaters from earlier happy. They'd slept off the night before and missed the warm lick of flames. It's not really cold enough, but we wanted to light them for the children, Karthik explains. As the bare necessities stack up–clean air, cool lake water, and now, fire–I'm feeling a smug sense of gratitude for finding this place, even if a friend had actually done that part for me. Just then, as we're talking, the night air starts to carry music from the adjacent campsite. We quickly notice it coming from the other direction now too, the site of a newly built resort. 'It's the flex culture. Everyone wants to show what they have', Karthik says, updating the prophet of conspicuous consumption–Veblen–for the 21st century.  

Within a few minutes of the music starting up, fireworks light up the otherwise light-pollution free black sky. 'It must be an expenditure of superfluidities', Veblen, flashing to mind, again. 'It's Bollywood Goa here now', Karthik says with resignation. 'These are city people doing this, they're not the people from here. There they have to switch off at 10, here they play until 12 or whenever'. It's one expression of flex in particular that he takes exception to–the portable speakers that people, more and more, are carrying on getaway trips. With visitor numbers up in Kamshet, audio is more conspicuous now too, forcing Karthik to take matters into his own hands. 'I had to tell people to stop bringing them here', he says. 'They look big, that's the important thing, but they don't even have proper base, a lot of them. You can't listen to that after a while'. One could understand his predicament: before the bohemian farm stay, he was a creative director for MTV, in Mumbai. At this point, reminded of his own high fidelity Marshall speakers, he chases up the steps to their perch on the veranda, adding another source of music, with bass, to the night. 

The construction all started 3 years ago, when people with houses opted to shift out of the city. 'Covid scared them', Karthik tells me. Then others started building. The pace of construction is unlikely to slow down. Recently, when I dropped into a friend's place in Pune, her husband was in Kamshet prospecting for remaining good-value sites before prices inevitably shoot up. Opulently sized residential builds, as well as the resorts, coming newly on stream, are signs of things to come.  Some long-time residents are struggling to adapt to the incursion of flex culture–the extension to Kamshet's built-up area and changes in the social fabric. 'Now, I don't look sideways', Karthik tells me the next morning when I bump into him on my way for tea. 'I'm going around like a horse'. Only 3 years ago, his nearest neighbour was half a kilometre away, and a few years before that it used to take an hour to drive the 10-kilometre stretch from Kamshet village to Calmshet. Many times, over the course of my stay, I hear Karthik recount this fact to other guests. The more he says it, the more it sounds like a lament. 

While flex is still central to how consumption and social identity reinforce each other, in India and elsewhere, Gen Zs who are facing more and more competition for jobs, comparatively, and being the worst hit by a global cost of living crisis and unrealistic property prices, are less about showing what they have, which they probably can't afford to have anyway, than rooting out 'experiences', ideally ones matching 'life goals', where the personal and professional are seamlessly harmonising. Fireworks and bombastic speakers are a bit cringe but jumping in a lake will make a great IG Reel or Story. More and more, activities that would have generally happened anyway are marketed and in turn consumed  as  'experiences': AirBnB sells 'Ethnic Budget Shopping in Santa Cruz (Mumbai)' for INR3000; 'Cooking and Eating Indian Food with Rita' is INR3500; VeeGee, who hosts the 'Enjoy Mumbai Tour with Sunrise on a Brompton Folding Cycle', is direct about selling an experience for reputation upgradation on social media: 'We will stop on the way to take pictures & then go to our planned location which is a beach location or an open area, and take pictures there too.'  

Back at the farm-stay, a young man is enthusiastically describing a paragliding adventure that he'd had the day before. A formerly extreme sport, paragliding is now a regular item on a young person's 'bucket list'. 'We looked at what all activities are available here and found this one was close by', he says with nonchalance. And since the training on offer would require a 3-day commitment, they did an on-the-spot alternative that didn't require any. There are at least 14 schools for paragliding in Kamshet, I discovered, after a quick look on TripAdvisor, including one called 'Fly Nirvana'. With so many operators, all offering the same activity out of a low-key hill station, the experience economy is clearly in robust state. And not all experiences need Instagram to lend them completion. Poor photo returns from paragliding prompt gliders to use the spoken word to exercise bragging rights or recall the adrenaline rush, just like the pandemic cold sea swimmers who couldn't stop talking about how good it felt to be in the water, regardless of how little anyone who wasn't a swimmer cared to hear about it. Nirvana might be found in the sky, but social dividends accrue from talking up experiences. 

A good number of years back, a new emotion entered circulation–'fear of missing out' or 'fomo'.  This wasn't a 'missing out' motivated by friends and colleagues securing mortgages to buy a house or who could afford an expensive car. It was a discomfiting feeling brought on by seeing your people and a larger net of acquaintances having fun without you; it was having a sense that you weren't living your best life, and that no matter the material possessions or footing on the professional ladder, you were, after all, in the game of life, a loser. 'Fomo' breathed life into a lucrative market segment, defined by a growing population of young people cultivating the attributes of a newer configuration of having it all: passion projects, travel, interesting hobbies (pottery, roller skating, pet portraiture), mindfulness, professional goals interchangeable with doing 'what you love'. And the word for all of this–'experiences', which are by now a large part of the culture, a way of being in and seeing the world. Meeting a friend for dinner recently, I texted to say the google map location was off by 500 metres. Anticipating a little extra leg work, he replied: 'Experience'. On the signboard for a very ordinary looking resort in the Konkan, which I drove past over the Easter break, in huge lettering, easily dwarfing the hotel name: 'Experience'. A friend's adult children planning to spend Christmas and the New Year in India with their resident parents weren't coming here to go sight-seeing. They wanted something more than that. Planning their visit, their mother asked me if I knew of any 'activities' such as 'surfing, tiger safaris, ''experiences'' as they say now…'. Or the 16-year old daughter of an acquaintance in Ireland, on a zoom call for career advice, tells me that living in India must be an experience.  In the miasma of commercialised experiences, with no satiation in sight, only more and more opportunities to experience something that someone else might find interesting, flexing, or showing what you have, starts to look like a quaint relic from when we lived in modern capitalist times.