I was a sneaker head in middle school. A fat, ethnically ambiguous kid, appearance conscious and unaware of the power to change one's body, I controlled my looks though fashion. Each season I maintained a glimmer of popularity by being the obnoxious kid with the latest gear. I was too young to pretend that I cared about sneakers. I knew it was ploy -- an expensive, effective, and temporary one.

The situation is trickier for adults chasing fashion. Adults master polite deceptions. They gain from deceiving themselves. They find divisions of adults who share their deceptions. Able to construct mirages of meaning, fad chasing payoffs get more real in adulthood. Adults can turn fad chasing into money. Patrons and investors can be fad chasers too. And fad chasing doesn't end, because the eye of fad forever wanders. Adults can follow fad's eye to the next catwalk, strut hard among the crowd arriving with them, and profit.

The peril is that their existence is performative. Their past, inflexible, was a fibrous lie. They learned about laces and sneaker construction, not because they cared about laces and sneaker construction, but because its the through line in their illusion of care. They never invest too heavily in a single fad because fad chasing demands liquidity. The gauge for care reads full on their bank statements, but only because they trained to break the gauge. They filled the hollow of their lives with a little care under lots of motion. They only learn they are empty when the motion stops.