The trainers everyone has now

In a school in Doha, a pair of trainers was the most wanted thing in the building last winter.

A few boys had them. Older brothers had queued, cousins had brought them back from a trip, one had waited for a restock that sold out in minutes. The rest of the class talked about those shoes the way people talk about cars they will never drive.

By the summer, half the class had them. The shops had caught up, the copies had arrived, the price had softened. And something odd happened. Nobody talked about them any more. The boys who had owned them first moved on to something else, something harder to find.

This is the part that frustrates every seller who finally gets the thing everyone wanted onto the shelf. It feels like the reward for meeting demand should be more demand. Instead, meeting it kills the very quality that created it.

But that is not a malfunction. It is how cool works. Cool is not a property of the shoe, the bag or the song. It is a distance. It describes the thing that is visible but not quite available, the thing some people have and others do not yet. Close the distance and you have not delivered cool. You have dissolved it.

That is why chasing it is a tiring game for anyone selling. The chase never ends, because the finish line moves the moment you reach it. There is a business in being the person who keeps finding the next out-of-reach thing, but it is a demanding one, and nobody stays ahead for long.

The boys in Doha already know the rule. The moment it is easy to get, it is no longer the thing.