My guilty pleasure is called Selling Sunset.
Not so guilty, actually, because I know I’m sharing this passion for hyper-luxury real-estate porn with millions of post-modern consumers. I know exactly what I’m doing when I press play: I’m signing up for 40 minutes of self-nurturing frustration, watching people glide through 17-million-dollar glass boxes in the hills, while I’m still doing PowerPoint marathons and Teams calls on a very mortgage-shaped planet.
I’ve always wanted to write about this global human recreational insight—this idea of choosing to sit in front of desire that won’t resolve. And then came this brilliant brand activation from Uncommon Creative Studio, which installed a claw machine on West Broadway with an Hermès Birkin bag (valued around $10,000) inside. The ultimate luxury trophy. The creators openly explained that the game was unwinnable: The claw was too weak, the bag too heavy. And still, hundreds of people queued to try their luck, coins in hand, phones ready.
Psychologists have a name for this: benign masochism. It means the enjoyment of negative feelings (e.g., fear, pain, frustration) so long as we know we’re fundamentally safe. We like horror films because we’re not really in danger. We eat food that’s too spicy because we can back away from the plate. We binge shows about lives we don’t have because, once the credits roll, we can still make tea.
Brands, lately, have been building entire experiences on top of this soft, socially acceptable consumerist masochism.
On the Rhode to…nothing?
Take Rhode, Hailey Bieber’s skincare brand. One of the reasons it exploded is not just the “glazed doughnut” aesthetic, but the way you get (or don’t get) the product. Drops sell out in minutes. The Peptide Glazing Fluid once had a 100,000-person waitlist and sold 36 units per second at restock.
Customers know the script: join the waitlist, watch the teasers, set an alarm, refresh the page, get the “Sold Out” banner, repeat. Frustration is baked into the brand story.
You don’t just own the serum; you’ve earned it through a series of small, slightly humiliating failures you can share on TikTok and in group chats. When you finally succeed, the victory is sweeter precisely because of those little digital wounds.
The Puma high to our collective low
Or look at Puma’s “5AM High Drops.” The idea is beautifully cruel: Free Deviate NITRO running shoes, but only for runners who show up at sunrise on specific days, at high points across cities like Boston, London, or Tokyo. The activation plays on the simple statistic that bad weather is one of the top barriers to running. So, Puma inverts it by saying that, if you’re ready to battle the cold and dark of 5AM, then you deserve to be rewarded.
Here, the frustration is conditional. The brand sets a temporal and climatic obstacle course; you decide whether you’re in. There will be more disappointed early birds than happy ones with free shoes. But in both groups, the story is strong: “Remember that insane morning when we went up there in the rain, and it was already gone?”
The benign masochism of branding
What all these examples share—Birkin, Rhode, Puma, Selling Sunset—is a very specific emotional texture:
You’re invited into a system that withholds gratification.
You know, rationally, that you will probably lose.
You stay because the desire and the community around that desire feel worth the discomfort.
It’s not just FOMO. It’s something like stylized, socialized frustration. Not the messy, raw frustration of a delayed insurance payment, but a curated version, framed, lit, and hashtagged.
So far, a lot of this lives in familiar territories: luxury, beauty, high-performance sport. What interests me is what happens when we export this emotional palette to categories that are… aggressively unsexy.
Supermarkets
Imagine your local supermarket as a stage for micro-frustrations. Not the bad kind (“no staff, bad signage”), but designed, narrativized tension. Instead of hiding scarcity, a retailer could orchestrate everyday drops. Mysterious limited runs of banal products. A “phantom” tomato sauce, a once-a-week yogurt flavor, a pack of dish tabs with a secret printed inside. All available only in a narrow time slot or aisle. Miss it, and it’s gone.
The point wouldn’t be to torture people for pasta, but to inject a light quest into a category where everything is usually static and over-rational.
Promotional leaflets and apps would become treasure maps. Social media would be full of “I missed the drop this week” stories. The supermarket brand is no longer just a place; it becomes the director of a recurring, low-stakes frustration ritual.
Home care
Home care is another underrated theater of frustration. Anyone who has stared at a burnt pan or a bathroom covered in limescale knows the feeling of “this will never come off.” Brands usually promise the opposite: “no effort,” “no scrubbing,” “no drama.” But what if, instead of denying the pain, they stylized it?
Picture a campaign built around an “impossible stain challenge.” People are invited to create their worst kitchen or laundry nightmares, then genuinely try to fix them with the product. Some stains fail on camera. The effort is visible, the timelapse is long, the sighs are real. The brand becomes the one who says, “We see your domestic frustration. Let’s play with it together.” The bottle is not a magic wand; it’s a companion in the struggle. The frustration is still there, but it’s framed, named, made shareable. You’re no longer alone with your burnt lasagna tray.
Organic ranges
And then there are the “worthy but boring” categories: organic food, eco-labels, sustainable ranges. They’re full of moral urgency and empty of narrative excitement. We know we should buy the organic version. It rarely feels like a story; it feels like homework.
Here, the brand’s role isn’t just to nudge but to choreograph the frustration of doing the right thing. Think of an organic label that turns constraint into a seasonal game. On heatwave days, only certain climate-friendly products unlock special formats or recipes. The brand app tracks your “streak” of choosing the harder, more expensive, less convenient option. If you break it, you feel a gentle sting. You’ve fallen off the “climate quest,” but you also know thousands of others are watching their streaks, too.
The frustration of paying more, going further in the store, giving up promotions, it’s all still there. But it’s designed through ritualized visuals, specific messaging, and community dashboards. The brand gives shape, language, and aesthetics to a frustration that was already present in our eco-anxious lives. It doesn’t invent the pain, but rather stylizes it so we can own it together.
Think of Frust-Lust as an emotional operating system: a repeatable pattern of wanting, failing, retrying, and storytelling that brands can actually design for.
For supermarkets, home care, or organic ranges, that means turning “just buying stuff” into mini-quests, near-misses, and shared rituals instead of dead time between two meetings. The brands that learn to script this feeling with care won’t just sell more—they’ll own the stories people tell about their most ordinary Tuesday.
Branding, in this sense, is emotional user experience design. We moved from removing frictions (“frictionless journey”) to sometimes re-installing them carefully, voluntarily, with an exit button, and a selfie moment. The question is no longer, how do I make everything smooth, but where could a bit of chosen frustration make this experience more meaningful, more communal, and more alive?
Cover image: ImageFlow