Businesses have wrongly left the ending to society.

Governments have passed it off to legislation.

And consumers? They’re abandoned at the very end, left to navigate a confusing tangle of jargon, legislation, and chemical codes.

The conclusion of the consumer experience (cancellation, off-boarding, deletion, disposal) is often the most neglected part of the journey. Yet it holds enormous potential to resolve some of the biggest tensions in consumerism.

The Broken Narrative

Humans are wired for stories. Long before the advent of printing presses or digital feeds, stories were how we made sense of the world. And their ending is what brings meaning to everything that came before.

But in consumer experiences, we break that narrative flow. We obsess over onboarding and usage, while ignoring how the relationship ends. The result is a severed connection between provider and consumer. One party moves on. The other is left seeking closure.

And humans are desperate for closure.

Psychologists Donna M. Webster and Arie W. Kruglanski have explored our need for cognitive closure, our drive to resolve uncertainty. We tend to seek this in two ways:

• Urgency: the desire to resolve quickly

• Permanence: the desire to make closure last

But our products and platforms rarely offer either. Brands ghost users, trap them in loops, or drop them into cold off-boarding flows filled with legalese. All while businesses chase the next customer or shiny innovation. We overlook what’s left behind: abandoned accounts leaking data, products discarded early, mental health crises fuelled by endless engagement loops.

A Crisis of Closure

Humans have split their end thinking in two. They look at both a distant fictional dawn, and a near-term disaster. One part believes in abundance and growth, where technology solves all. The other is haunted by irrelevance, obsolescence, and decay.

Historically, religion offered comfort here with the prospect of an afterlife, a perfect realm beyond hardship. Today, we recycle that narrative through technology. Influencers make life look easy, crypto profits make money look easy, and higher resolution games promise an escape from the mess of the real world.

I once spoke at a conference themed around The Metaverse and Climate Change. Most attendees I met were working on voice interfaces, but dreaming of working in Metaverse utopias. Now, both tech themes are fading. And yet we have breached the 1.5℃ climate change event horizon. The technology events have metamorphosed into another heaven-like dream to sell to the next customer. 

Learning to Hold the Ending

We are terrible at seeing the end. At defining it. At designing for it. It took me years to feel comfortable focusing on endings. Businesses and schools train us to ask these questions:

How does it start? Why would they buy? What does it solve?

Ask ‘how does it end?’ and you’ll hear technical or legal answers: This material biodegrades. This complies with EU law. This account can be deleted.

But these aren’t emotional answers. They don’t match the reasons we bought something in the first place. We consume for hope, identity, belonging, yet try to exit through efficiency and compliance.

That disconnect creates friction. And then we wonder why nothing changes.

The ancient Greek philosopher, Epicurus, famously said about death:

“Why should I fear death? If I am, then death is not. If death is, then I am not. Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?”

When I start to work with businesses, I hear a version of this. Where business leaders see little point in spending effort at the end because they don’t see customers there. Yet they are there, abandoned by the businesses they bought from. They are wondering how to delete old pictures, or worried about data privacy.

Designing the Ending with Meaning

The French memorial sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens once said that:

“a good memorial doesn’t just honour greatness, it tells how that greatness was made. It creates space for reflection and meaning.”

That’s what’s missing from most consumer endings. We rush to define the next thing, without pausing to honour what just happened. We need to reclaim the ending. Not as an afterthought, but as a design opportunity and business strategy. It’s a chance to slow down. To build empathy. To give dignity and closure to the people we once invited in. Because the end is not where the experience dies.

It’s where the memory begins.

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Joe Macleod is founder of the world’s first customer-ending business. A former head of design at Ustwo, he’s a veteran of the product development industry with decades of experience across service, digital and product sectors. 

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