It might feel like the world is falling apart because everything is so fragmented and contradictory, but the truth is that things are not falling apart. They are fusing together.

The reason you keep cracking little bits of eggshell into your omelet is because eggshells are more fragile now, because younger hens are laying eggs, because millions of older hens had to be killed after a bird flu outbreak borne of environmental changes, which caused prices to soar, memes to be made, Trump to get elected, and opened the door for a renewed embrace of religious identity and moral politics. We had to start importing eggs from places like Turkey, whose incumbent government got Elon Musk’s X to suspend opposition accounts amid civil unrest, in a move that only likely happened because the price of eggs is a big part of why Musk got into the government in the first place.

Your omelet has very real political, economic and spiritual implications now.

Your omelet is why everything about your user – their beliefs, behaviors, stories, preferences, aspirations – has changed.

So how can any of us expect cursory trend decks and industry conferences to be enough for a brand strategist to do their job anymore?

If I could give you one piece of advice, it would be this: start diversifying your information inputs.

Everything has become deeply interconnected, but we’re still using first-order mindsets to understand third-order markets. You have to start getting outside of your comfort zone and learning more broadly in order to anticipate what is coming.

Here are some of the unexpected places I look to stretch my own thinking and see where the future is headed with more clarity:

1. Geopolitics 

An area that has always intimidated me until I joined Peter Zeihan’s Patreon. He will help you see the 3rd/ 4th/ 5th order effects and tell it to you in a story that you can hold in your head. Easily the best thing I’ve paid for this year. His quarterly calls are especially enlightening.

2. Threat Tech

This isn’t a thing, I just call it that, but it’s essentially any technology built in response to threat. Digital Twins. Climate Tech. Defense Tech. Palmer Luckey and his cohort. Where threat meets tech is where we get a glimpse of the future under stress.

3. Underground Economies

Vigilante child predator hunters make real money on social and they’re getting more violent. Underground economies pop up when people have such intense unmet needs, they’re willing to break norms and laws. You have to go to Locals and Kick for stuff like this, but I read about it from a distance in articles and Reddit threads.

4. Finance

Gen Z & millennials treat money like manifestation. Money betrays peoples’ beliefs about the future, debt is the only real shame in a capitalist society, and how we save/ spend our cash decides who has power down the road. Watch money influencers, both the straight-laced budgeters and the new-age manifesters. They’re both saying the same thing: money is an emotion.

5. God

God doesn’t look like he used to. Silicon Valley is getting religious in curious ways. Megachurches continue to preach the prosperity gospel. Non religious church experiments continue to fail. When the FDA opened up public comments for the definition of “natural foods”, a surprising number of them referenced god. People like Tara Isabella Burton and Amanda Montell are great follows here.

6. Children’s Media 

If you want to know the values of a generation, look at their children’s films. In “The Mitchells vs. The Machines” the villain is an AI founder. In “Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs 2” the bad guy’s headquarters are in a place called San Franjose. “Toy Story 5” is about the toys vs. Bonnie’s iPad. If our kids films are teaching our youngest generations to be suspect of technology and its leaders, that’s going to shape how they allow it to be in the world.

7. Demographics 

Books like Going Solo really imprinted on me early in my career. The 15-Minute City makes people either really happy or really angry. Mommunes and communes are growing, but so are other non-conventional living arrangements. Pay attention to what happens when people de-center marriage because that will change a lot of things.

8. History 

The big one. Gives you patterns but also perspective. I’ve started re-reading Durant’s ‘Lessons of History’. Perhaps my favorite history book is ‘The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets’ and I’ve bought 20+ copies for friends and community members. I very much regret not paying attention to history when I was in college, but as the saying goes, it takes a mature mind to appreciate the topic.

9. Death

So much activity is happening here as we finally start to grieve all of the people, ideas and promises that died over the past few years. Michael Erard just published a great book called ‘Bye Bye, I Love You’ about first and last words and what we owe each other. Living funerals and regular funerals are getting upgrades. We’re seeing early, stuttering attempts to create new rituals around grief, and we will need them in the immediate years ahead.

I was on a panel a few months ago and when the organizer asked me my title, I found that ‘brand strategist’ just wasn’t enough anymore. So I added ‘cultural futurist’ to my headline. It felt awkward at first, but it quickly became natural to me because it’s the truth.

What we do is literally take in signals, create a model of culture in the future, and build a brand that lives in that future. People either really get the brand and walk into the future to meet it, or really don’t get it and walk away. And that’s the best outcome you could hope for, because the worst outcome is a brand that people think is ‘nice’ but remain largely apathetic toward.

Be that kind of strategist. I don’t think you can afford to be any other kind.

Social Realities

How culture is tunneling, and keeping mental hygiene.

If my husband’s social feed is different from mine, we will literally be experiencing two different realities in waking life.

Which brings up a bigger question: we keep talking about AI, social media, and culture, but we rarely stop to ask, How do our brains construct reality in the first place?

Contrary to what you might believe, current science says our brains don’t passively absorb data from the outside. Our brains are actually nonstop prediction machines, constantly anticipating what will happen next, and our reality is mostly a prediction coming from inside our brains, not the outside world.

That means anomalies, not consensus, often drive belief change.

It was very important to me to get cognitive scientist and philosopher Dr. Mark Miller to come speak with us at Exposure Therapy because this all has big implications for how culture evolves in the age of social media and AI:

1. If our brains are wired to update based on surprise, then the dominant driving force of culture in the age of social and AI is rupture.

2. When outside forces distort our belief networks, they effectively distort the realities we experience.

3. Belief hygiene is crucial. You shouldn’t live in a bubble or ignore hard realities, but you do have to protect the inner scaffolding that builds your outer world. I seek out people and places where possibility, imagination, and optimism are actively practiced, because that’s the world I want to live in. (It’s a struggle, especially in my profession, but I try to keep perspective.)

Reality is so, so malleable that it’s almost a wonder that we expect everyone to be living the same version. We have our own little reality machines in our pockets and offices, yet we haven’t learned how to properly control and use them yet. I think the science gives us more empathy and clarity for understanding the age we’re in.

This is what underpins everything else in the world right now. Remember that culture is just as much cognition as it is content. Watch Dr. Miller explain it beautifully in the clip below.

Read the report below or access it through this link.

There is an incredible decoupling happening at the very heart of our culture, and it will affect brands and people more than anything else over the next decade:

Work is untethering from reward.

And for a country founded on the Protestant mythology where the virtue of hard work means you are rewarded with greater economic, social and political value, it means there is no gravity holding things together anymore.

You can see this decoupling being encoded in our most important systems right now:

• AI means anyone can be a master, so your hard work doesn’t win you more accolades. The marketplace of achievements is suddenly becoming way more unpredictable, and disruptive forces like AI are opening back doors, short-circuiting traditional paths to success, and normalizing a sense of randomness in work.

• GLP-1s mean anyone can be skinny, so your hard work (or maybe just genes?) doesn’t get you more social favor. The ‘morality’ and economics of thinness start to fall apart, and it’s hard to know how we should celebrate work as it relates to the body (which is perhaps the most profitable moral highground, as evidenced by the nearly $7T wellness industry).

• Crypto means anyone can strike gold, so your hard earned investing acumen doesn’t win you special fortunes. A single timely decision could outpace years of smart portfolio-building. Tokens and sh*tcoins proved fortunes could materialize far faster than the usual hard-earned, rags-to-riches story we see in the stock market or the movies we grew up with.

• The TikTok-ification of everything means anyone can have viral content overnight in the slot machine that is social media, and the followers that you’ve spent years cultivating don’t win you extra views or extra reach. And yet brands and influencers alike still cling to follower count because the truth of the matter – the increasing randomness of reach – is just too hard to accept.

When you see work untether from reward in foundational systems like labor, finance, and media, you have to reorient your understanding of the market and the consumer. The future of business and culture is not merely about the value these systems unlock—it’s about the behaviors and beliefs they lock in.

We’re locking into a very different system that dissolves the old moorings of effort and reward, leaving us in a restless current of chance.

Chance and randomness are the dominant energies of our time.

It’s hard to make a narrative story out of that. There is no mythology available to us that will help make meaning out of the decoupling, although we’re seeing different factions of people try. Silicon Valley, faced with the imminent consequences of their own creation, is quickly revamping Christianity to be an absolving version of the prosperity gospel. The victimhood narrative that has characterized the far (over)reaches of politics, most recently America’s vengeful tariffs, may give people some small sense of purpose and understanding in a strange new world, but it will be insufficient.

What makes the decoupling so pervasive is the massive infrastructures that enforce it by default. Influencer culture, self-enhancement medicine, cheatware, min/maxing… the signs were coming for a while, but now we have legit, permanent systems at the heart of everyday life that force the decoupling on all of us.

The void will touch everything. How do we value an employee, a member of the community, a partner, a leader, a teacher, a political movement, an education, a lifestyle, a brand, a product, or an idea when we can no longer point to work and dedication as a reliable measure of shared value?

Where can we extract meaning when the singular measure a life well-lived no longer holds?

Some early signals suggest “we’re cooked” as my principal strategist Zach Lamb likes to jokingly say. We see darker versions of Christianity, politics, dating, tribalism and identity taking hold. Not because people are necessarily cruel, but because these versions are simply better adapted for this new world where beating (or cheating) the system is the only rational strategy.

But we’d be poor brand strategists and futurists if we accepted the next bad thing as our ultimate fate. The long trajectory of history has always pointed toward progress, social innovation, and most importantly, surprises in foresight that look like common sense in hindsight.

So what might those common sense surprises look like?

What we’re seeing now are early, clumsy attempts of a culture trying to reform itself, but there are also lighter versions of things coming into focus: people finding meaning outside of work, radical new forms of community building, psychedelic therapy, enlightened spirituality, and a redefinition of success.

When we can no longer value ourselves or each other by the “work” or the effort, we have to find other ways to decide who and what is valuable. In the short-term, there will be two concurrent tracks we see culture taking: worshipping chance or playing with meaning.

Worshipping chance is a natural extension of a system that has burned through its illusions of fairness. When hard work no longer guarantees reward, our default response is to elevate randomness itself, investing it with a near-spiritual authority. The hustle once revolved around effort, but now it’s about catching lightning in a bottle. The algorithm’s next wave or a stray viral moment can bestow wealth or influence more swiftly than years of honest grind, so chance becomes something to venerate. A chaotic deity in an otherwise disenchanted world.

In practice, this devotion to luck reveals itself everywhere from retail trading frenzies to viral overnight success stories. Instead of following predictable career ladders or carefully planned investments, people chase sudden gains, hoping to decode the next market upswing or social media glitch.

Brands, influencers, and even entire platforms amplify these tales of instant fortune, further fueling the belief that chance might be our last reliable path to success. When we glamorize this volatility, we risk normalizing the idea that pursuing (or even engineering) random breaks is the most rational option.

But worshipping chance also sets the stage for playing with meaning.

Once we recognize just how mercurial success can be, we can move beyond passive acceptance of the system’s randomness and begin actively reshaping our notions of value. There will be people who throw themselves headfirst into the glitch in the system and turn it into an art form. If everyone can cheat their way to mastery, wealth, or beauty, they will see it as a giant permission slip to create new ways of finding meaning.

When effort is no longer the golden path, we’re finally free to invent purpose that isn’t measured by sweat and grind. We can build cosmic parties, societies, religions where creativity is currency. We can remix our social rituals with absurd new rules. We can pursue weirdness like it’s sacred.

And some of that could really happen. Some of it is already happening in our homes, gathering places, and centers of worship.

If the old myth is gone, we are just as likely as not to write new ones so brilliant and so joyful, that they actually thrive in a system that precludes us from making work the pathway to meaning. When chance so often triumphs over sweat, the real opportunity lies in writing narratives that thrive precisely because they reject old rules, and in doing so, create surprising, life-affirming possibilities that might just become the new mythologies we live by.

For brands and their leaders, this decoupling has profound implications. If success can strike at random, then the old playbooks, where you simply celebrate hard work or exclusivity, might no longer resonate with consumers who feel the ground shifting under their feet.

When anyone can go viral, re-sculpt their body, or amass sudden wealth, it becomes harder to sell the myth that effort alone is what makes a product, lifestyle, or status truly valuable (which is how most products and aspirations are branded today).

Instead, you have to help people navigate this unpredictable landscape in a meaningful way. And the good news is that both worshipping chance and playing with meaning open the door for brands to build new kinds of trust and loyalty.

The obvious way is to acknowledge the randomness and empower consumers to experiment, take creative risks, and find joy in the unexpected. Lots of brands will lean into this chance-heavy side of the equation. It’s easier to feed into game mechanics, gambling experiences, and the overall sense of worshipping chance when it ensnares audiences into deeper usage. It can be as simple as a loot box or as sophisticated as an all-knowing slot machine algorithm.

But I think the far more exciting and lucrative path is for brands to play with meaning alongside their consumers.

There are the obvious ways, such as facilitating deeper forms of meaning-making through genuine community, playful engagement, or creative self expression. I haven’t seen any of these formats reliably solved so there’s plenty of room for brands to grow here alone.

But what if brands went further? What if we curate moments of shared wonder and purpose? What if we created joyful new norms around connection, family and belonging? Can you imagine a brand that makes people feel human again? Or makes them feel even more than human? The most exciting thing about all of this is that brands can finally, thankfully, build long term connections that go beyond the next viral spike because people are ready and waiting for it.

I firmly believe brands can help consumers rewrite the script, and transform a disorienting decoupling into an opportunity for collective reinvention.

There is an invisible but open need for a story that makes sense of this all. The decoupling may look like threads coming apart today, but culture always weaves itself back together. We can redefine what value looks like.

We can create new measures of experience and value that go well beyond the idea of work and reward, and help us measure our lives in more accurate ways.