When “Fake” Becomes More Real Than Reality
The surprising connection between China’s “pretend to work” offices, India’s fake weddings, and America’s doom spending—and what it reveals about the future
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Picture this: In Beijing, a 40-year-old professional pays $4 to sit at a desk in an office called “Pretend to Work Co.” She’s not employed there. There’s no salary. But she shows up six days a week, working on her side hustle, surrounded by others doing the same. The founder jokes that one door labeled “Chairman’s Office” opens to the fire escape.
Meanwhile in Delhi, thousands of young Indians are buying tickets (anywhere from $13 to over $100) to attend elaborate wedding celebrations. There’s a baraat procession, mehendi artists, choreographed sangeet dances, a staged varmala ceremony, and mountains of food. The only thing missing? An actual bride and groom. No one’s getting married. Everyone’s just there for the party.
These aren’t isolated oddities. They’re signals of something profound happening globally.
The Pattern You’re Not Seeing
At first glance, these trends seem absurdly specific. But look closer:
In Beijing: People pay to “pretend to work”
In Delhi: Thousands attend weddings with no bride or groom
In America: 1 in 5 are “doom spending” (making impulsive purchases driven by economic anxiety)
What connects them all?
The Numbers Are Staggering
This isn’t fringe behavior. This is mainstream:
$175.8 million: India’s fake wedding market projected by 2032
19%: Americans currently “doom spending”
70%: Chinese who own smartphones, turning attention into income through livestreaming
Performance Without Reality
Both trends involve people paying to perform traditional social roles without any of the actual commitment, obligation, or long-term consequences.
In China’s “pretend to work” offices, people pay to occupy workspace and maintain the appearance of employment without actual traditional employment. But here’s what’s fascinating: the people in these offices aren’t pretending at all. They’re working hard (reinventing themselves, creating new businesses, or monetizing their temporary unemployment).
Fake Indian weddings recreate all the elements of a traditional wedding celebration (the lights, outfits, music, food, and celebration) without an actual bride, groom, or marriage. They offer all the music, food, and celebration without the family politics or financial burden.
The Radical Truth
Here’s where it gets interesting:
These “fake” experiences generate REAL:
Community
Income
Psychological benefits
Opportunities
Meanwhile, “real” institutions:
Exploit
Disappoint
Trap
Break promises
Which one is actually fake?
What They’re Running From
These trends are responses to real, crushing pressures:
🚫 996 work culture (9am to 9pm, 6 days/week)
🚫 Family pressure & judgmental relatives
🚫 Financial burden of traditional milestones
🚫 Systems that promise security but deliver burnout
Since the pandemic, China’s economic slowdown has affected almost everyone. Real estate has slashed local government revenue, banks are lending less, and big tech companies have cut workforces for three years running. Mid-career employees face “the curse of 35” (being replaced with younger, cheaper workers).
In India, traditional weddings are massive financial undertakings that can put families in debt for years. The wedding industry is worth $130 billion, but Gen Z is less tied to life scripts of marriage and property, yet maintains a strong desire for collectivity and structured social experience.
“When the rules are rigged, people rewrite them.”
What They’re Running Toward: The Great Unbundling
For centuries, major life institutions came as package deals:
Marriage bundled: romantic love + social status + financial security + family approval + legal benefits
Work bundled: income + identity + daily structure + community + purpose + status
You couldn’t pick and choose. You took the whole package or nothing.
These trends represent modular identity consumption (picking which aspects of traditional institutions to experience without buying the whole package).
Fake weddings extract: ✅ Celebration, aesthetics, community, Instagram content
❌ Lifelong commitment, in-laws, financial burden, legal entanglement
Pretend work extracts: ✅ Structure, community, psychological benefits, networking, entrepreneurial support
❌ Corporate hierarchy, exploitation, burnout, powerlessness
They’re not rejecting tradition. They’re REMIXING it.
It’s Not Just Coping. It’s Cash.
These aren’t merely psychological coping mechanisms. They’re economic engines.
“Pretend to work” offices become:
Content creation hubs
Real business incubators
One regular visitor, a mother of two who left her finance job, developed an adult product line while renting desk space there. She found support among people who would listen to her sales pitch and make suggestions. She comes in six days a week. The relationships are real. The business development is real.
Fake weddings generate:
Instagram content
Influencer opportunities
A $175M+ industry
In China, nearly 70% of the population owns a smartphone. Livestreaming has become a monetization strategy where any attention is potentially monetizable (people can convert tips from virtual gifts into real money).
The performance isn’t the end goal. It’s the funnel. The “fake” experience generates real content, which generates real attention, which generates real economic opportunity.
The “performance” IS the product.
The Bigger Picture
These trends fit into a constellation of related movements sweeping the world:
Tang Ping (Lying Flat)
↓
Quiet Quitting
↓
Doom Spending
↓
YOLO Economy
↓
Strategic Simulation
Each one is saying: “I see through the promises.”
Tang ping (”lying flat”) began trending in China in April 2021 as a rejection of 996 work culture, with people choosing to lower their professional commitment and prioritize psychological health over economic materialism. The phrase “quiet quitting” (doing only what one’s job demands and nothing more) became popular in the United States in 2022, thought to be inspired by the tang ping movement.
Now we have “doom spending” (19% of Americans making impulsive purchases driven by fear and anxiety about the future). It’s the same logic as fake weddings and pretend work: if the future feels impossible, extract joy from the present.
Consumer spending remains surprisingly high despite economic concerns, coining the term “YOLO economy” (an economy driven by consumers prioritizing today over the future). Fake weddings and pretend work offices are simply the experiential version of doom spending.
Why “Fake” Experiences Feel More Real
Here’s the paradox: these supposedly “fake” experiences often generate outcomes that feel more authentic than the “real” institutions they parody.
Fake weddings don’t pretend to be real. Their purpose is not deception but design. They reveal that ritual need not be rooted in belief to be meaningful, offering rare opportunities for co-presence, role-play, and embodied participation for a generation negotiating solitude and digital fatigue.
The irony isn’t cynicism. It’s armor. It lets people participate in cultural forms they grew up with while maintaining emotional distance from their most oppressive aspects. You can enjoy the spectacle of a wedding without submitting to family pressure about your own marriage. You can maintain work routines without surrendering to corporate exploitation.
One anthropologist explained that pretending to work is a way to show you’re fed up with social norms while remaining psychologically attached to the idea of working. The very word “pretend” implies choice, giving people a sense of control even as it exposes their vulnerability.
This is a collective pretense among people who are jobless or unable to see a future in traditional corporate life. People feel solidarity by coming together, developing mutual understanding of their situation.
The Content Economy Connection
Remember: China has the second-largest consumer market in the world, and any attention is potentially monetizable. People film unemployed couples dumpster diving or stage performances of going to the office, applying the same logic: more likes, more followers, more potential tips.
The creator economy is projected to grow from $191 billion in 2025 to $528.39 billion by 2030, with 41% of U.S. social media users attending in-person influencer events in the past year.
We’ve moved beyond just documenting experiences. We’re now creating experiences specifically for documentation. Fake weddings are designed to be Instagram-worthy with stunning decor, choreographed dances, and photogenic moments everywhere, with hashtags going viral. This isn’t vanity. It’s strategy.
Documentation and sharing of experiences are as important to millennials as the experience itself. But the solution wasn’t rejecting technology. It was using technology differently. The fake weddings and pretend work spaces perfectly capture this duality: they’re real-world, embodied experiences specifically designed for digital sharing.
What This Really Means
This isn’t cultural decay. It’s strategic adaptation.
When traditional paths feel blocked and systems feel rigged, conscious performance becomes a form of agency.
These trends represent a generation saying: “We understand the game is fixed. We know the institutions that stabilized our parents’ lives won’t stabilize ours. We see through the promises. And we’re not willing to sacrifice our entire lives for systems that will discard us anyway.”
But rather than pure nihilism or withdrawal, they’re doing something more sophisticated: they’re performing the aesthetics of traditional life while maintaining emotional and economic optionality.
When systems feel broken, conscious performance becomes agency.
They’re not deluded. They’re radically present to the absurdity and choosing to play on their own terms.
The genius is that these “fake” experiences often generate real community, real income, real psychological benefits, and real opportunities (making them more authentic than the “real” institutions they parody, which increasingly feel like the actual frauds).
The Future: What Comes Next
These trends aren’t going away. They’re early indicators of fundamental shifts in how we’ll organize social and economic life.
Expect to see more institutions get unbundled. We’re moving toward a world where you can:
Rent community without commitment
Purchase celebration without obligation
Perform identity without permanence
Extract meaning without entrapment
The traditional life script (education, career, marriage, homeownership, retirement) is already fractured. These trends show what people build from the pieces: temporary, performative, monetizable experiences that provide some of what traditional institutions promised without the burden.
The Deeper Question
These trends force us to ask: What is “real” anyway?
Is a fake wedding where everyone feels genuine joy less real than a traditional wedding where the couple divorces in two years? Is pretending to work while building a real business less authentic than quiet quitting at a corporate job you hate? Is doom spending on experiences that create memories and content less valuable than saving for a retirement you’re not sure you’ll reach?
Maybe what we’re witnessing isn’t the rise of “fake” anything. Maybe it’s the collapse of the pretense that traditional institutions were ever as real as we claimed.
The wedding was always a performance. Work was always a constructed identity. The difference now is that people are performing consciously, choosing which scripts to follow, maintaining the right to rewrite or exit at any time.
In a world where authenticity feels impossible and traditional paths feel like traps, strategic simulation might be the most honest response available. Not because it’s “true,” but because it’s true to the reality of living in late capitalism’s endgame (where everything is performance, attention is currency, and the only winning move is to play the game on your own terms).
These people aren’t deluded. They’re not checked out. They’re radically present to the absurdity of modern life and choosing to extract whatever joy, community, and opportunity they can from the rubble of broken promises.
And honestly? That might be the sanest response possible.
What’s Your Take?
Have you noticed similar patterns in your community? Are we witnessing cultural decay or cultural evolution?
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Until next time,
Abhijit
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