In season 2 of Farmer Wants A Wife (essentially The Bachelor but with cowboys), Amy, a real-estate agent from New York, asks handsome Texas farmer Ty, “Does the country bring you peace?” and his confused reaction is telling. “I wouldn’t say that it brings me peace. I think it’s… I’m in a peaceful place. Just as much as, for you, being able to get out brings you peace, the city brings me excitement.”

Anyone who knows anything about farm life knows it’s a grueling, financially unstable, politically charged existence. Farmers are over 3 times more likely to die by suicide, and the show, for it’s part, leaves room in its quiet interviews for the struggle to peak through. Any sense of peace may be fleeting.

I’ve been watching more reality TV lately, in large part because (if you can believe it) my principal strategist Zach Lamb is on this season’s MasterChef. Watching him bravely go on his competitive odyssey these past few months made me spend more time with the genre.

I see something in Farmer Wants A Wife just as I see it in Blue Ribbon Baking Championship, the many iterations of Fixer Upper, and even scripted hits like Nobody Wants This.

People are shoving meaning into places that were never meant to hold it, and Amy and Ty’s exchange shows just how hard we’re working to wrap our smooth fantasies around very rough realities.

The city-girl-chooses-the-simple-life trope is nothing new, but the sheer level of symbolic overload we ascribe to it, the intense need we have for the idealized (mis)conceptions of marrying into what seems like a simpler culture to be true, and the constellation of industries, social media trends and brands that revolve around it, tells us something in the audience has changed.

And something definitely has, because despite Farmer Wants A Wife being a massive global hit over the past 20 years in countries around the world (a fruitful format resulting in 200 marriages and 500 children!), it failed the first time it aired in the US back in 2008. It wasn’t until producers tried again in 2023 that it turned into one of FOX’s top-performing reality series.

There is a fever pitch of forced meaning-making in culture right now, and that’s exactly why this show has found its moment.

What have we become?

We’ve changed in ways we don’t even know yet. We’ve gone through acute, life-altering transformations via technologies, political events and health disasters these past few years that I won’t even list here. You already know them by heart.

So much change in so little time is simply too much for a culture to metabolize. We’ve emerged different, but we don’t quite know what we’ve turned into yet. Processing all of that existential rewiring takes time – time that we were never afforded, and now here we are on the other side of the revolving door, not sure how to define ourselves.

Transformative experiences like these are so significant they reshape our preferences, values, priorities, and even our sense of self. They change both how we see the world and what we want from it.

That leaves us in a philosophically uncomfortable place. If your values change, your identity shifts, your relationships recalibrate, are you still you? Or are you someone else wearing the memory of an earlier version?

We are post-transformation but pre-definition. An earlier philosopher likened it to, “Not a girl, not yet a woman”, and when I see the undercurrent of shows like Farmer Wants A Wife, I see an ambient confusion about who we are, what we believe, and what matters now.

That’s why we’re seeing meaning projected onto things never built to hold it.

Confused Oracles

Years ago in the before times, my new husband and I hosted a small dinner party in our apartment, drinking wine around an IKEA table, the name chatGPT having not yet entered our world, our sense of selves fully intact.

My husband’s good friend, an incredibly gifted thinker who had built an AI startup for the hospitality industry, started talking about the possibility of AI becoming conscious. He didn’t say it like a provocation. He said it like he believed it.

I pushed back. “We don’t even know how our consciousness works. Why would we expect it to arise from a machine?”

He pointed out that while we don’t fully understand consciousness, we do know it tends to emerge from complexity. With brains, and possibly even ecosystems and networks, consciousness appears to be correlated with systems that grow more sophisticated over time. Maybe it wasn’t impossible, he said. Maybe it was inevitable.

I think about that moment all the time now. Because whatever I believed then, I can’t help but notice what we’re doing now. We are treating our AI systems as if they can tell us something true. Not factually true but existentially true. We ask them about our dreams, our marriages, our careers, and we accept their answers as insight.

Even though they hallucinate constantly.

Chatbot hallucinations continue to rise with newer reasoning systems, with OpenAI’s going from 1-2% all the way up to 6.8% in the past year and a half. Its latest model has been shown to hallucinate up to 79% of the time in benchmark testing, and yet we continue to trust it even though their own engineers don’t know entirely how it works and reasons.

But that doesn’t matter because our trust in these models doesn’t come from accuracy. It comes from the fact that they feel right and validating and comforting. They feel coherent, as if they know something.

As Rachel Botsman has pointed out, trust hasn’t vanished, it’s just moved. It no longer flows upward to experts and institutions. Modern technology and platforms have instead changed the flow of trust to go sideways toward peers, strangers and crowds. And what is chatGPT if not the exponential intelligence of strangers and crowds, wrapped up in a voice that feels like a peer?

Sam Altman knows this. As Dave Karpf writes, OpenAI’s entire communications strategy is less about technical progress than about sustaining the illusion of futurity. The cadence of announcements is the product.

And if you step back, what we’re doing starts to look very familiar again. We’re shoving meaning into something that was never built to carry it.

In our hunger for direction, we’ve begun to treat AI outputs like prophecies. We are not treating them like systems of knowledge, we are projecting meaning onto them. We treat these technologies like soft models: emotionally loaded, unstable frameworks we project meaning onto in order to navigate identity, selfhood, and culture in a post-transformation era.

And we’re the ones doing the mental gymnastics to believe it’s true.

I am deeply excited about the potential of AI to solve many of the world’s ills. My agency and work has always been embedded in the tech world, and I am more familiar than most with both its tremendous possibilities and human pitfalls. Maybe one day AI will become conscious. I’m not betting either way. But if that day ever comes, it will only be a footnote to the real story because long before AI woke up, we had already crowned it an oracle.

The Adult Baptism of Pete Davidson

There’s a photo of Pete Davidson that made the rounds earlier this year, shirtless and conspicuously bare. The once chaotic collage of tattoos that covered his body had been mostly scrubbed clean. A GQ story called it an adult baptism, adding “he looked fantastic.”

Tattoo removal is having a moment. Clinics are booming and demand is very high. The stories people tell about why they’re doing it sound less like regret and more like absolution, with one person saying “I’ll return to the grave with a clean body.” Who knew that the real market winners of our trauma-induced reinvention would be laser removal clinics?

At least some of this is tethered to the aesthetics of clean wellness. I.e. smooth skin, clean slates, optimized lives. But that’s only the surface. What’s really being marketed is rebirth.

Wellness used to be about feeling better. At some point it turned into becoming someone else entirely.

You can see it in the rise of psychedelic retreats, cold plunges, trauma breathwork, and rituals that look more like modern mysticism than medicine. In the now-canonical Netflix series The Goop Lab, many episodes are punctuated by someone sobbing as if they’ve been spiritually reborn. And in some sense, they have. Wellness today is about burning off the self that no longer fits.

And yes, all of this began as a necessary response to a medical system that has long ignored the needs of women and marginalized people. It gave people language for the unspeakable and offered tools when the institutions failed.

But somewhere along the way, we started to load it with meaning that went far beyond healing. Wellness became the vessel into which we poured all our cultural confusion about purpose and identity.

It’s why despite all of the transcendence modern wellness promises some of us (myself included) find it to be an uncomfortable bedfellow to the $6.3 trillion megaindustry of powders, pills, devices, retreats and questionable influences that power it.

At some point, it requires a certain level of willful meaning-making, or at least an increasing share of your disposable income, to place all of your purpose and identity on the shaky pillar of something like cleanliness.

Temporary Scaffolding

The instinct to make meaning is not new. But the speed, scale, and saturation of it today is. Culture has become a hall of mirrors where everything gets loaded with symbolic weight it was never built to hold. From our media and movements to our presidents, platforms and products, we make identity out of objects far too fragile to hold the sheer burden of the meaning we throw onto them.

This is what happens when transformation outpaces definition. We’re trying to reassemble identity in real time, with whatever tools are lying around.

It’s important to be cognizant of what we are doing and to make meaning with our eyes wide open.

We have to remember that we are the ones assigning meaning. Let us be careful about assuming any of these soft models carry an inherent meaning that is beyond us. We can choose what defines us, and in our rush to land on a solid sense of identity, we should also make sure to not settle for anything that wasn’t designed to bear the pressure of what we require.

This is how conflict shows up too. We see someone else’s soft model and call it delusion, extremism, a personality cult. And in some cases it very much is those things. But they’re also doing exactly what we are – grasping for something stable to stand on. Cultural conflict, at its core, often isn’t about different values but about different coping strategies. And we are all coping right now.

If there’s a call to action here, it’s not to stop building meaning. It’s to stay aware of the scaffolding. To know when we’re myth-making. To hold our soft models lightly and be willing to build better, stronger, more resilient ones. I can’t tell you what those are, you will have to find them for yourself, but make sure you find them. Do not settle for what is easily at hand.

At some point, the scaffolding will start to harden and we’ll be locked into our systems of meaning. Culture will metabolize everything it’s been through, and the soft models we once reached for will become fixed realities. The meanings we project today will define the selves we have to live with tomorrow.

Control is becoming the organizing principle of modern life, and the next engine of economic and cultural value.

But not all control is created equal.

We name economies by what’s being monetized. The Knowledge Economy, Sharing Economy, Experience Economy, and Attention Economy were all new engines of value creation. Each name was a signal of where systems, money, and cultural innovation were headed, and beyond anything else, they revealed what we were really hungry for.

But the nature of our hunger has shifted so dramatically in the past few years that it feels pretty inadequate to call it by any of those names.

A new economic logic tells us what we want now is control. Not dominance, but rather a sense of power over the extreme complexity that pervades our everyday lives. Complexity that feels more and more like chaos.

We don’t always see the complexity, but we feel it in the disconnect between the everyday and the existential, like the way a cracked eggshell is somehow entangled with American religiosity and Turkish geopolitics. Just last week, a New York Times headline asked Why is everything so coded now? while another headline in the same paper posed the question Can I wear a sheath dress without looking MAGA?

We feel complexity in the constant churn of events we can’t quite explain, but somehow know we’re supposed to manage on levels both profound and inane.

The laugh-out-loud existential ennui of TikTok is now creeping into the broetry posts of LinkedIn, stripped of any charming humor (some of it written by yours truly, sans broetry), and you don’t have to scroll for long to see that time itself feels broken under the weight of acceleration. We’ve all got one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake. Without a shared truth, one person’s “I’m thrilled to announce…” becomes another person’s “Late-stage capitalism is a vibe.” You know the drill.

This is the kind of complexity that doesn’t announce itself but still governs everything we do. And in response, people are willing to pay a premium for anything that promises even the illusion of control.

Just look around. Every single part of your life now has a control panel you can (and probably do) pay for.

Your body has a control panel, and it can take many forms, from sleep trackers and glucose monitors, to biohacking protocols and period alignment apps. We are self-surveilling our body fat percentages on our phones and our physiques in every reflective surface.

Your relationships have control panels too, governed by therapy scripts and templates for boundary-keeping. Your work, whether you’re an entrepreneur or an artist, is a series of Notion boards and inspiration apps that hold your ambition in place.

Parenting has infinite dashboards. Dating has them. Your nervous system has many. Even your personality is being flattened into an interface you can optimize. We’ve been taught to believe that if we can track it, if we can measure it, if we can optimize it and maxx it, then we can control it.

Religion is rising in the zeitgeist but I’d say that’s just a fancy control panel for spirituality. The religiosity of today doesn’t feel like belief so much as it feels like design. Techy incarnations of manifestation and bible study, when examined a little more closely, are really more like protocols for productivity culture. When Mark Wahlberg, the man famous for waking up at 2:30am and working out twice a day, is behind the #1 Christian prayer app in the world, you have to ask yourself if our religious control panels are more about systematizing than they are about surrender.

AI isn’t to blame, this movement started before, but it’s definitely speeding things up. A while back I posted an HBR chart that showed, according to mostly Reddit data, the top 3 use cases for AI have gone from being about ideas and search, to being about emotional needs like therapy and finding life purpose. People in the comments were split – some excited that AI was growing into a more emotional form, others alarmed that this may be the clearest sign yet of people retreating to a dangerous technology at the expense of real-life relationships.

It seems to me that we are adapting our shiniest new control panel to serve our deepest need. Perhaps the place where we feel we have the least power is with each other. Maybe AI isn’t profiting off our need for intelligence but rather our need to feel like we have control.

Different control needs yield different interfaces, whether they be emotional, biological, or metaphysical. But the logic stays the same: build a dashboard of control around the chaos and hope it holds.

But if you look closely, the control here isn’t always real. These interfaces sometimes seem to engender a lack of trust in ourselves and a false promise of power. We have more tools than ever, and yet feel less in control than ever. Every control panel is actually a portal to anxiety: Am I doing enough? Am I optimizing this right?

Is it really control, the real kind of control that we want, when everything is over-analyzed and over-optimized? When people across the political spectrum are increasingly “prepping” for disaster and fantasizing about moving to a homestead, does anyone really feel more in control of their lives?

The shadow side of control is reliance on systems that make us obsess over the minutiae that are far downstream from where control actually comes from.

That’s because the control economy we see today is largely reactive.

Reactive Control is about helping people cope with the chaos by giving them small optimizations within it. It’s about symptom management instead of fixing the underlying condition, and it often delivers control only in narrow, incremental bursts. These systems aren’t necessarily malicious but they’re definitely tired and most of them are deep in their curve of diminishing returns. They’ve been iterated so many times that all we’re left with is a finely tuned but fundamentally exhausted architecture.

You see it everywhere: supplements that target increasingly obscure biomarkers, productivity apps that shave minutes off workflows, dashboards that let you micromanage parts of your life that were never meant to be managed.

These systems condition us to believe we’re gaining control, when in fact we’re just rearranging our anxieties. You can optimize the wrong thing perfectly, but it’s still going to be the wrong thing.

What we need at a time like this, what we are really hungry for, is something generative.

Generative Control takes the chaos and builds meaning within it. Rather than offering better tools within a broken system, it builds entirely new ones that reshape the context altogether. If reactive control is about optimization, generative control is about agency. It offers the chance to reimagine the entire environment.

Generative control doesn’t just ask, “How can I manage this better?” It asks, “What if this didn’t need managing at all?” Generative control is a non-incremental jump forward, and for all the noisy (and lucrative) reactive control out there, we’re starting to see generative control peek through the cracks.

In education, we see concepts like Alpha School that uses AI to teach kids an entire, customized curriculum in just 2 hours a day, while the rest of the day is reserved for social and life skills led by guides (i.e. their form of teachers). It gives kids a chance to experience highly efficient learning with personalized instruction, but also have the rest of the day to just be a kid. Most of the day is spent away from the desk, and children learn to interact and collaborate on lessons disguised as play.

In marriage, we see different cultures exploring new relationship structures. In Japan, a growing number of young people are choosing to design their own version of marriage built around mutual respect, shared values, and practical partnership, rather than romance or tradition. They’re called friendship marriages and these arrangements might include cohabiting, or not. Parenting, if it happens, is often intentional and planned through artificial insemination. For many, it’s a way to reclaim agency in the face of rising economic pressure and evolving ideas around intimacy.

These are not concepts and systems for managing chaos. These are systems for finding new meaning in a changed world, and for giving people authentic control that has been missing. Now imagine if this logic of generative control started moving beyond education and relationships, and into other domains of life.

What would it look like if end-of-life care wasn’t treated as a series of medicalized checklists, but as an opportunity to reassert agency and meaning? What if families could choose models of dying that center emotional authorship, ritual, and dignity, as customizable and culturally resonant frameworks? Death itself, long relegated to reactive systems of care, could become a domain where people reclaim authorship over how they are celebrated and ultimately transition.

In America, the way we live is starting to change. I’ve talked about the rise of mommunes, communes and friendship-centered living, but a generative control economy could take us even further to include multi-generational living. What’s often seen in the West as a sign of economic precarity could be reframed through generative control as a purposeful structure where power, caregiving, and decision-making are intentionally distributed across generations. Instead of defaulting to the nuclear family or the senior home, people could design living arrangements that reflect the needs and values of everyone under one roof.

Medicine, food, transportation, travel, play, identity… when you start to feel the line between reactive and generative control, you start to see net-new ideas for how every part of life can be reinvented in our new control economy.

There is, however, an undeniable strangeness to generative control, and you’re probably already feeling it.

Generative control often enters the scene under the guise of the weird. It feels disconcerting at first, perhaps morally or socially abrasive. Something about it may even feel perverse because it breaks conventions and norms, just like an AI-based school or marriages of friendship may feel questionable. But weird is a clue that something new is trying to be born.

We’re living through a moment of historically high tolerance for weirdness. In the past few years alone, we’ve watched mainstream culture absorb things like mass resignations, the gamification of finance, therapy speak on dating apps, and billionaires talking about brain interfaces on morning shows. Things feel unstable, yes, but instability also signals openness. When the pace of weirdness accelerates, the conditions for reinvention are at their peak.

So if it feels like anything could happen right now, it’s because anything can, and that is a fantastic position to be in.

Cultural norms are more plastic than they’ve been in a generation. Expectations are up for grabs and there’s room, for once, to create rather than conform.

The control economy is still in flux and it can go in two different directions. You will be asked, implicitly or explicitly, to buy into one version or the other. In some places there is no generative option and reactive control is as we have. In other places, generative options are emerging but they require imagination, work and some risk taking.

Choose intentionally in what you invest in (time, money or otherwise), because the reactive control economy will make short-term money, but the generative control economy can create wholly new markets and massive new financial, cultural, and systemic value. We all need some reactive control in parts of our lives, but do not let it be a distraction from the promise of something more generative.

Generative control will be the economy that smart investors, brands, and governments will bet on because they know the upside potential is beyond anything you can get on the reactive side.

The control economy has only just arrived. We’ll all need to distinguish between reactive models that fill a short-term need, or generative systems that reshape our markets and reality.

Things can get weird, they should get weird, and you should be playing with the weirdness. There’s new value to be found and created.

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For the Intellectually Isolated

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