Meet “Tony,” the 31-year-old author of “Hey, big spender,” a personal essay in Toronto Life that sent Twitter into convulsions last week:

My mom does my laundry and makes my meals. And, yes, I can already feel your contempt. But hear me out. I’m not lazy, dumb or deluded. I’m a pharmacist, and I work hard—sometimes six days a week. I sleep roughly five hours a night. I make $130,000 a year, and I spend the vast majority of it on experiences—wild, rare, unforgettable experiences.

Tony forgoes a mortgage and the other usual adult trappings, he explains, because it allows him to partake in the best of what life has to offer: spending on luxury travel, fine dining, and assorted bro activities with his bros. Among his “wild, rare, unforgettable experiences” is the opportunity to drink wine:

I’ve tasted more than 170 different wines in the last year—I keep track through an app called Vivino. Lately, I’m finding there are downsides to education; back in the day, when I was a neophyte, I could drink just about anything. These days, I know exactly what I like and what I don’t. Tasting a Rothschild is on my bucket list.

The experience of reading the essay is uncannily like being on a less-than-successful blind date. The reader gets to that wine-app bit and suddenly remembers an urgent prior appointment.

What’s interesting about Tony’s manifesto, though, isn’t that yet another millennial has written an autobiographical think-piece around his lack of self-awareness. Rather, it’s that Tony is doing exactly what all the right-thinking advice-givers of our age suggest: He’s valuing “experiences” over possessions. But his gutless confession—he remains anonymous, after all—illustrates the danger in automatically assuming that, to use one of his examples, backpacking through Guatemala should take precedence over stuff. Yes, dinner with loved ones is more spiritually uplifting than ordering shoes online. But is patronizing “the rooftop restaurant featured in The Hangover Part II” and getting “the obligatory Thai massages” somehow more admirable than renting or owning one’s own place?

The superiority of experiences has become our era’s reigning banality. Consider last year’s Time profile of American anti-stuff advocates: “Minimalists like to say that they’re living more meaningfully, more deliberately, that getting rid of most material possessions in their lives allows them to focus on what’s important: friends, hobbies, travel, experiences.” We hear much the same from more recent awestruck portrait in The Guardian of the new Japanese minimalism, from a man who owns just “four pairs of socks”: “Spending less time on cleaning or shopping means I have more time to spend with friends, go out, or travel on my days off.” It’s hard for me to picture how having enough socks to last an entire wash cycle could possibly impede a social life; the reverse seems more likely.