Curating Lore: When everything needs a backstory

The best experiences become stories. But are we starting to choose experiences solely for the lore they’ll become?

Apparently, everyone has lore now.

A friend casually mentions the summer they spent living on a sailboat. A coworker you thought you knew turns out to have an unlikely obsession and a long, strange history with it. Online, saying someone “has lore” means you just found the context that makes them far more interesting than their surface suggests.

On October 14, Sprout Social named “lore” its 2026 social media word of the year, reporting more than 10 million mentions. In its announcement, the company read the word as a sign that audiences want depth and backstory more than quick, throwaway posts. A fair warning: Sprout sells social listening tools, so it has a stake in spotting trends. Treat this as a signal, not a verdict.
It’s a signal worth reading, though, because I think it points at something more interesting than the word itself.

Lore appeals to us because it’s the opposite of polish. We’re seeing the word “polyester” being used as Gen Z slang for things that feel cheap and overly slick, as a word to watch in 2027. Lore is the messy, specific, unplanned history that makes a person real: the sailboat summer nobody set out to turn into content.

Lore usually develops without anyone planning it. You learn the backstory after the fact. But once that lore becomes a kind of social currency, it gets tempting to start building the experiences that will supply it.

And anything people value eventually gets noticed by the people who sell to them. The unplanned backstory may be becoming something we curate, anticipate, and perform.

So here’s the question I can’t shake: what happens when we start wanting an experience because of the story it will let us tell?

An old instinct with new machinery

We’ve always used stories to make sense of our lives. We explain how we ended up in a job, why a place matters to us, what changed our minds. That’s healthy.

We’ve also always used what we buy and where we go to show other people who we are. In 1899, Thorstein Veblen coined “conspicuous consumption,” arguing that people spend money, and even spend their leisure, partly to be seen doing so. That habit was described more than a century before social media.

What has changed is the scale, the speed, and the incentive structure. Platforms profit when sharing is effortless. Brands profit when a product arrives with a narrative attached. And companies that sell listening tools profit when they can tell those brands which narratives are rising.

Sprout points to McDonald’s as proof that lore is worth real money. The Backrooms is an internet horror mythology about endless, empty rooms, and its fans have a running joke that a working McDonald’s is hiding somewhere inside it. On May 29, the day A24’s Backrooms opened, McDonald’s posted a creepy, analog-horror-style video built on that joke, and Sprout reports the campaign drew more than 16.6 million views.

But notice what happened. A joke that belonged to a fan community–the kind of shared lore that feels like the opposite of advertising–became a campaign almost overnight.

The story behind the thing

A jacket keeps you warm. A jacket you can repair and keep for decades says something more. Patagonia’s Worn Wear program supports repairing, trading in, and recirculating used gear. It connects practical products to a philosophy about consumption, allowing what you own to say something about your values. The same goes for travel that signals curiosity or a hobby that becomes shorthand for who you are.

I’m not calling any of this shallow. People genuinely care about their values, interests, and communities, and a purchase can be useful and meaningful at the same time. But identity is also a sales channel, and sometimes you become the protagonist.

Every year, Spotify Wrapped takes your listening data and hands back a personalized account of your musical life: the artists you played, the songs you couldn’t quit, the patterns that supposedly say something about you. Spotify supplies the material, you supply the main character, and when you share the result, Spotify rides along.

A small 2025 study of university students found that they appreciated the personalization and also questioned how the platform represents identity and uses personal data. You can enjoy seeing your taste reflected back and still wonder whether a year of listening really explains you.

In each case, you’re being offered more than a product: a role, a point of recognition, a way to belong. Giving a product some lore is one thing. Choosing something because of the story you expect to tell about it is another. The first changes how you understand a product. The second could change what you decide to do.

From telling the story to choosing the lore

Picture a hike. The view at the top is stunning, and before you’ve taken in any of it, your hand is already reaching for your phone.

That reflex is ordinary. We usually think of the story as coming afterward: we take pictures to remember a trip, tell friends about the restaurant we found, and use the story to keep what happened and make sense of it. But what if the chance to tell a good story becomes part of the appeal before you ever go?

Research gives us reason to take that seriously, though no single study settles it. A 2011 study found that people with a productivity mindset were drawn to unusual, collectible experiences, sometimes ones they expected to enjoy less, as a way of building an “experiential CV.” The point isn’t always to enjoy it. Sometimes it’s to have done it.

In 2013, Cornell University found that people talk more about experiences than possessions and get more out of doing so, both before and after the experience itself.

And in 2017, researchers at NYU found that taking photos to share them reduced enjoyment compared with taking photos for yourself, because people worried more about how others would see the experience and engaged with it less. That doesn’t mean snapping a photo ruins a good time. It means an imagined audience can change how you show up.

None of this proves that we choose experiences mainly for the stories they’ll make. But it points to a tension worth taking seriously: we increasingly treat experiences as things to accomplish, talk about, and share.

How much does the story we expect to tell shape what we choose in the first place?

You can see where I’m going with this. The destination that’s appealing partly because it’s recognizable. The activity that feels more worthwhile because it makes a better account of who you are. The purchase that signals you belong to a group. You don’t have to be staging your life for that to happen.

When platforms make sharing effortless and brands attach narratives to products, the lore becomes one more way to evaluate a choice.

When meaning becomes performance

People want to make meaning. They want to understand themselves, find others who share their interests, and live by values that matter.

Brands don’t have to invent that desire; they can build products, communities, and campaigns around it. Those meanings can be real. Someone can care deeply about sustainability and buy the jacket for reasons that have nothing to do with being seen in it, and someone can love a band without caring whether anyone knows they went to the concert. The point isn’t to question anyone’s authenticity.

It’s that meaning itself can become part of the market.

If you’re a marketer, that’s an opportunity and a responsibility. There’s a difference between helping people express something that matters to them and turning their desire for meaning into one more reason to buy.

For everyone else, it’s harder to see from the inside. We rarely want something for just one reason. You can want the jacket and what it represents, or enjoy the trip and the story you’ll tell about it.

Both can be true. The trouble starts when proving the meaning begins to compete with having the experience.

In Purpose Over Performance, I call one version of this purpose-washing: narrating ordinary ambition as moral depth, as if “living my purpose” were a more flattering way of saying “pursuing a more impressive version of success.” This is its experiential cousin.

The trip has to show growth. The hobby has to reveal an interesting side of us. The purchase has to express our values. Even an ordinary afternoon starts to feel like a missed opportunity if it doesn’t add up to something worth telling.

I wrote Purpose Over Performance about work and achievement, but as we know, the question doesn’t stay at work: what happens when performance stops serving a larger purpose and becomes the measure of our worth? It follows us into our free time, our purchases, our relationships, and the way we present ourselves.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting your choices to reflect who you are. The trouble begins when every choice has to make a case for you.

Tough but worthwhile questions

The next time you’re about to buy something, book it, or sign up for it, ask yourself:

• Would I still want this if no one heard about it? Not because your life should be a secret. It’s just a quick test of what’s really pulling you toward it.
• Am I enjoying this, or collecting it as “lore”? Some experiences are worth having for the sake of having done them. Just know which kind you’re choosing.

Stories help us understand our lives. They connect us to other people and give shape to what matters. But the story you might tell about an experience is not the same thing as the experience itself.

The question isn’t whether our lives contain good stories. It’s whether we can enjoy an experience without thinking about how we’ll tell the story later.