Category: Brand Strategy

We are a culture surrounded by losses we haven’t yet processed. Things that are kind of dead but we won’t let them die completely.

So much so that we’ve had to create a whole new raft of words – like ghosting, breadcrumbing, blanding, airspaces, liminal spaces, requels and nostalgia bait – to hold what we refuse to bury. 

I’ve probably bought Sasha Sagan’s book For Small Creatures Such As We at least 20 times in my life for other people. It deals with the concept of endings and death rituals in a way that makes sense of the world and human behavior.

She tells us, “We pretend these rituals are for our dead, but they are for the living, for us.”

Her book has stayed with me because, as a digital native, I could see how unequipped we are to properly, decidedly mark the time something ends or dies. It is so critical to mark that moment. The rhythm of life demands it. 

We cannot make new things when our spaces are cluttered with infinite half-dead brands, platforms, trends, jokes, technologies, ideas and memories that steal endless little fragments of our attention.

We’re weighed down by purgatorial ghosts both in the digital world and the physical one. And now with AI, the ghosts are multiplying. Synthetic content floods Pinterest and Twitter, trained on old material and endlessly recombined with what came before. Our deceased loved ones are reanimated via AI texting agents and holograms. The dead don’t die. They just loop and echo, or even worse, become a template for something else. 

That’s making it harder to imagine and create. When nothing is allowed to end, nothing is allowed to transform.

There are a lot of reasons floating out there as to why so much of culture is effectively undead. Some say it’s the algorithm. Others say its mass accessibility and the death of subcultures. Historians like Will Durant might have said, at least for the US, it’s a clear sign of an empire in decline. All of them are probably right. 

But I also know that if all of our physical and digital ghosts were properly laid to rest and we were left with only the living artifacts of our world, we would almost certainly be reborn. 

This is a time of zombie-like memories and generative content, and the most radical act right now might be learning how to let things die.

And when I say die, what I really mean is letting them permanently end. Intentionally and deliberately. 

(Un)Dead Internet

The dead internet theory posits that the majority of content on the internet has been fake for a long time. If that sounds hyperbolic, try carefully scrolling through Pinterest or Twitter. It might not seem so crazy after you see how hard it is to find a real image or voice.

The viral emotional support kangaroo, a video that perfectly blends highly charged emotions with low-res patina, is a good symbol of what’s haunting us. It might be better to call it the undead internet theory because what characterizes all of this AI content isn’t that it’s lifeless. It’s the pervading sense that something artificial is animating things that shouldn’t be alive. 

In 2021, Kaitlyn Tiffany wrote for the Atlantic that the dead internet theory is “patently ridiculous” but also that “dead-internet people kind of have a point,” as evidenced by the co-opted i hate texting tweet trend of the time. The same ideas and trends are regurgitated over and over, and it’s increasingly hard to find where something originated because we all keep blatantly stealing content from each other for engagement. We started copying ourselves way before AI started copying us. This was destined to happen.

Drew Austin perfectly describes how and why nothing ends:

You may call some of it simple nostalgia, but nostalgia’s real risk is that we take a quirk of the human brain and then platform it. 

A 2022 replication of a long-standing study on musical nostalgia found that listeners’ preferences for new music consistently peak at around 17 years old. Our musical tastes are shaped most deeply at that age and get locked in on social. We live in a prison of our own making, and the soundtrack keeps us stuck in mid- to late-adolescence. 

We have entire unicorn companies that have been zombified, functionally dead but still incorporated. Beyond Meat, once valued at over $10B+ is now barely a mid-sized company at about $287 million.

WeWork ($47B → $750M), Vice Media ($5.7B → $350M), and Bird ($3.8B → $100M) are others on the list. All of them overvalued during their hypecycles, but I bet their PR and investor decks will tell you they’re still culturally relevant. We’ll probably never have a formal tombstone for these companies. 

Myspace isn’t dead but it’s not alive either. Clubhouse’s carcass continues to twitch. Tumblr is making a comeback, but is it? Or is that headline itself also just another sleepwalking piece of content?

Of the 1.1 billion websites that are on the internet right now, only about 17% are actually active. On Facebook, deceased people with ongoing profiles are expected to outnumber the living by 2070. If you count Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to unleash an army of undead AI personas, that tipping point could happen even sooner. 

In the digital world, we fail to bury our deceased, and the seemingly living aren’t really alive.

I’ve been tempted to believe that perhaps all of this will force people to live more in the real world. It’s reasonable (blindly optimistic?) to imagine that a lonely, empty, undead internet would gently push people into the physical and face-to-face realm.

But we have some interesting challenges there, too.

Empty Funerals

I’ve witnessed the passing of a loved one and it’s been my experience that without spiritual or ritual context, death does not present its own innate magic. Despite how badly you need that magic to exist when you stand at their bedside, it does not miraculously appear. You must create it. You have to give the messy, fleshy, corporeality of death your own meaning, so that they can die and you can move on.

The sandwich generation of millennials needs this meaning more than anyone else right now, because the immense stress of raising children while transitioning parents is a lot harder to bear when it doesn’t ladder up to some greater purpose or beauty. Without it, there is no finality. 

What’s puzzling is that we’re also abandoning our traditional end of life rituals at the same time. “Direct cremation”, where the body is cremated with no funeral ceremony or mourners present has soared. About 41% of all US funeral consumers in 2021 chose direct cremation with no formal service. Less than half of people want a funeral when they die, and it’s not always because they have alternative plans like a virtual wake or a living funeral. 

But I don’t see any deathtech companies successfully building the kinds of rituals we need at scale. There are about 1,000 deathtech startups out there right now, and while many of them are doing a great job of removing the administrative hell of managing a dying parent’s estate, there aren’t any standouts in the “marking the ending” category.

The best we get are AIs that let us text dead relatives or play with their holograms, which are quite the opposite of that. 

It’s hard to overstate the fact that we’re not letting our family members properly die. We’re not saying goodbye at the funeral and we’re not saying goodbye to their digitized afterlives.

What is it going to feel like in 5 years when you can easily text your dead grandparents… but you don’t? It’ll be like ghosting a ghost. 

At this point, ghosting could be our new national pastime. We ghost (and are ghosted by) both the deceased and the living. Three out of four people have been ghosted by romantic partners. We’re ghosted by friends from college, children who’ve gone no-contact, recruiters that stopped returning emails, neighbors that moved away (did you know the average person moves at least 11 times in their life?) or… dead relatives.  

These unresolved endings, or “open loops” really tax the brain. One study found that lacking closure leads to greater regret, more intense emotion, and more frequent, intrusive replays of the situation in our minds. When someone disappears without closure, our minds keep cycling through the what-ifs and it prolongs the pain. You would think we’d know better than to forego the endings that life offers up to us. We need them so badly.

Our avoidance of difficult endings, whether it’s ghosting instead of honest goodbyes, skipping funerals, or hyper-nostalgia, might spare short-term discomfort, but the research suggests it creates identity confusion in the long run. 

That’s because we build identity through endings and transitions, finishing one chapter to begin another. But in a culture without marked endings, people drift through infinite selves, never shedding, only layering. You’re still kind of who you were at 15, and 22, and 30 and 45.

There’s a reason why new gym memberships peak in January, why people deep clean their houses in the spring, and why midlife crises happen at 40. We make big changes at the beginning of new years, new decades, and new seasons because we cross a threshold of time. What we’ve lost with our inability to let things end is the sanctity and significance of new beginnings. 

We’re leaving so much value on the table because we’ve forgotten how important death is to renewal. 

And it’s critical we get used to endings right now, because everything around us is about to start dying a lot faster.

Do Not Resuscitate 

Any ideas we had about work and career, ideas of community and family and identity, of creativity and authorship and building – they’re passing and something new is coming in their place, and AI has put it all on rails. But we cannot fully realize the potential of what may be if we don’t find a way to properly honor and let go of what is leaving.

Brands have long claimed to support transformation, but few ever create space for endings. If your users are stuck inside outdated perceptions of themselves, how might you help them mark the death of who they used to be? How might your product, campaign, or community offer a kind of funeral or permission to leave the past behind?

Even brands themselves need to die sometimes. Not just rebrand or pivot, but die. Acknowledge that an era is over and let the next one begin with meaning.

I hesitate to invoke the name Jaguar in a brand strategy newsletter, but they did exactly that. The marketing department caused a lot of hoopla, but they did what almost no brands do nowadays. They made it very clear that something old was dead. They’re transforming into an all-electric ultra-luxury brand and despite the turbulence, they stayed the course and their parent company posted its highest annual pre-tax profit in a decade with long waiting lists on upcoming models. They made that ending matter.

If we want to realize the full potential of what’s next – new kinds of brands, products and connection, new economies and new selves – we need to create space for those possibilities to live. And that means we have to let the old things die. Not disappear or fade, but die with intention and ceremony.

Endings can be incredibly powerful framing devices. They give us the power to define what something means before we move on. When we skip that step and refuse to mourn, we give away our right to shape the story.

Anthropologists mark the emergence of death rituals as one of the earliest signs of complex human thought. To bury the dead is to reckon with mortality and imagine something beyond the present. Our ability to ritualize endings to begin anew is what makes us the ultimate generative being. We need endings in order to be human.

In the Global North, we’re entering our summer and a time of movement. Life is stirring again. It’s a good time to make something new by burying something old. We need to become a death-literate culture that knows how to throw a real banger of a funeral, both literally and figuratively. One that understands that mourning is about the deep satisfaction of metabolizing reality.

That grief, when processed, becomes clarity. Finality, when honored, becomes power.

Death is our missing technology right now. It’s what gives form to change. Without it, we’ll continue to hoard outdated ideas of ourselves and our value systems, and confuse preservation with progress.

Endings will both free us and fuel us.

I took my kids to Disneyland last weekend in 93°F heat. You can plan for the rides and check the weather, but something about that park always manages to surprise you. I know this because I grew up in Anaheim and Disney was my backyard.

The park has changed almost entirely in my lifetime. My favorite childhood attractions have been rebranded and ride operators crack sarcastic jokes now. The experience is largely mediated through your phone, with crowds are so thick you can hardly see the park itself.

But at the end of the day when the weather cools down and people take a load off on Main Street’s curbs and benches, you can spend an hour or two just people watching. And the people are one thing that has not changed.

There will always be teenagers on dates and packs of girls giggling in Minnie ears. There will always be Disney adults and out of state families consuming every ride and food with equanimity. There will always be people offering to take pictures and complementing each other’s niche outfit references.

I study culture for a living and I also know these same people are struggling with jobs and family and meaning. Many of them are anxious and burned out. But in the park, I also get to see how they play and open themselves to wonder. It’s a place where you see people let their guard down and be carried away, despite what headlines and research tell us.

The consumerism can overshadow it, but what you see at Disney is also just a very human attempt to stay connected to each other and ourselves.

That energy culminates on Main Street during sunset. If you sit there long enough, you start to see thousands of people move freely. Lighthearted but in sync. You start to feel a quiet pulse. Proof that in the macro, people always find a way to survive and find joy.

That pulse is getting louder in some corners of culture. Beneath the paralyzing shock of global change, we’re also seeing a quiet reanimation of daily life.

Cool People Who Play

Last March, adults overtook 3-5 year olds as the most important segment for the toy industry, with 43% of people over the age of 18 buying a toy for themselves in 2024. Toys are big business, and this is the first time in history that the business had a customer that could buy its wares without asking their parents.

Out of the top 10 toys adults bought for themselves, #1, #3, #6 and #9 were all some form of Squishmallow.

I’ve had a special interest in the rise of Squishmallows since I first wrote about them in 2023. It started when the Washington Post had published an article about a guy they dubbed “Nick” who was obsessed with the stuffed plushy toys, but didn’t want to use his real name for fear of losing his job.

If tweets about the trend were any indication, Nick was smart not to divulge his identity because people were vicious. In 2022, having an adult toy habit was akin to having a mental illness.

But my oh my, so much has changed in the last 2.5 years.

Major categories of adult gameplay, from boardgames to pickleball, have shot up. Suddenly it’s cool that actor Joe Manganiello is playing D&D in his homemade lair and the Critical Role guys have cultural cache, but the fact is they started making their millions a long time ago. Everyone is playing games for real now. Playing the way children would, getting lost in fantasy worlds without shame or apology.

There’s been a wholesale rejection of cynicism around play that was so apparent just a few years ago. Some stigmas may remain, but they remain the way avocado toast memes linger. Everyone knows the joke is based on a lie.

Adult play is increasing everywhere. Real play. Play that gets you in a flow state, with special rules and special energy. Play that no one thinks of monetizing or turning into a side hustle. We’re re-learning what it means to play simply because it fulfills a deep, human need.

This month in Exposure Therapy we’re studying the cultural catalysts of play and how it both builds the nascent norms of society and breaks them down. Play is deceptively powerful.

Play is how new cultures are born. Play is how we test out the new futures we may choose to pursue.

Ottawa, Canada has named its first-ever Nightlife Commissioner to bring play to the city after dark. In California, Santa Monica’s City Council recently approved a motion to convert its Third Street Promenade into an entertainment zone where (gasp!) you can drink alcohol outdoors while kids play lawn games. Multigenerational playgrounds, adult camps, empty lots converted into creative zones – when we play, we break and remake things.

The play that is emerging will turn into laws and social structures, because play always breaks out into the physical world around it.

Instagram therapists love to say that people who don’t know how to play as adults never felt safe playing as children. That checks out. Or maybe COVID sucked the spirit out of us. Maybe things feel too serious now. But you and I, dear reader, had better learn how to play again because it will improve every other part of our world and our lives.

Play is the starting point of everything we might want for ourselves.

Sydney Sweeney’s Used Bath Water

There are endless thinkpieces and TikToks on the death of social media, but it’s hard to really believe them until you look at the statistics.

The number of people using social has plateaued at 82% since 2021 and it’s not budging. Global minutes per day spent on social media have also plateaued and started to decrease. The numbers are still high but not going higher. Perhaps there was going to always be a ceiling. People still have to live and get things done.

At the same time, attitudes are shifting. More and more people are simply opting out of social, and you’ve probably seen it yourself. My community slack has been talking about this, and I’ve seen it first hand in psychographic research we’re doing for brands and their gen z and millennial audiences. People are increasingly anxious about touching social like it’s something toxic (Jonathan Haidt, no one knows how to name a catchy movement like you do).

Hyper-consumerism, parasocial worship, addictive trend cycles – I think there’s a real chance all of it has peaked. Yes, a changing economy and the enshittification of platforms are part of the equation. But these are also things we wanted to be free of. We’re very tired.

Sydney Sweeney has joked about selling her used bath water. That’s very Sydney Sweeney of her, because she’s made no secret of the fact that she wants to get those brand deals locked down while her star shines bright. You have to respect it.

Naturally, Dr. Squatch partnered with her to sell some used bath water in a bar of soap. The collab did what it needed to do and got lots of tweets and pseudo-discourse and will probably sell many units. But will anyone really care? Was anyone really scandalized? Is anyone truly bothered by what those soaps will actually be used for?

Social media has stretched our limits of caring. Our emotions are not infinite. At some point we have to turn off our phones and preserve what little fucks we have left.

It’s the same reason why the only people who think or care about Liquid Death activations are marketers. It’s why Hawk Tuah girl’s real crime wasn’t blatant financial fraud, but the fact that she didn’t call her crypto “SpitCoin”.

People are pulling away from social because social has given us everything it has to offer and it’s left us wanting. That’s great. It means we want something more meaningful and fulfilling, and now we have a chance at finding it elsewhere.

Working The Good Life

I once knew the founder of a VC studio who had a particular way of recruiting CEOs for the portfolio of startups he was incubating. He looked for McKinsey people in their late 30s who’d stalled on the corporate ladder, and were closely networked to crypto and tech founders with successful exits.

He was looking for someone who felt like they were losing, surrounded by people who were winning, because what he was really after in a CEO was someone with a chip on their shoulder. When you’re in the prime years of your career and you know that your next move is your last chance to prove your worth to your peers and the world, you have a different kind of hunger.

People in that world will always exist because the consulting-to-startup-founder pipeline is efficient and lucrative. It’s not bad or wrong. Everyone knows what the deal is and we all find happiness and meaning in different ways. People needing to prove themselves have benefited larger society since the beginning of time.

The issue today, however, is that hard work and reward are starting to decouple in some pretty fundamental ways. Or at least it looks like that, and perception trumps reality right now. If it seems like working harder, being more loyal, trusting the system or putting in your hours no longer promise greater economic or social capital, then it is a very rational response to de-prioritize work and reprioritize your life.

People feel the shifting landscape of work, but they’re also changing their perceptions of what it means to live a good life and putting work in its secondary place.

Across the U.S. and beyond, there are growing stories of Millennials walking away from conventional career paths to pursue simpler, more fulfilling lives. Major media have profiled burned out young professionals who quit big corporate jobs to move to rural areas or small towns. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But people are experimenting.

22.1 million Americans were working part-time by choice as of this past April 2025, which is nearly 5 times the number of involuntary part-timers. Researchers have been watching this trend for the past few years and attribute a growing portion of it to millennials choosing part-time work and more modest lifestyles in order to keep their mental health in place. Either people are getting lazier or the work-reward equation is so messed up that workers are recalculating their values.

Do you watch #tinyhome content? Do you pay for a #vanlife Patreon like I do? Unfortunately our shared interests are not that special. These two trends in particular have had massive success, and if you read the reddit threads, it’s because they breed the modern fantasy of minimalism and mobility.

While Mr. Beast (who now has more subscribers than Netflix) recently had a leaked memo that reads like a manifesto for audience capture, dearly beloved creators like Outdoor Boys have decided to walk away from money and fame in order to raise their families and live more normal lives. We thought Luke posted because he loves us, which he does, but it was good to be reminded that he loves his kids and sanity more. RIP my favorite channel.

The renegotiation of work and life is a sign of our adaptability. Never underestimate peoples’ ability to find non-obvious ways of making life work. Change is deeply disruptive at first, but then we slowly learn to control our emotions around it. We can’t slow it down, but we can learn to not let it overtake our nervous systems. For many, the first and best way to do that is to change the meaning and significance of work.

A Cultural Audit of Vitality

Sometimes our industry thinks the best way to understand where culture is headed is to study what’s dying. That sounds silly when I write it down. To know culture you have to track what’s coming to life.

Positive signals are indicators of emergent systems and where new values are starting to take root. They’re where energy is gathering for what comes next. If you only study what’s on the doomscroll, you miss the cultural infrastructure that’s being built right under your feet.

Within minutes of walking into Disney one of my kids asked, “Is there a Netflix-land?” (I swear my kids don’t watch that much TV.) He doesn’t know about nostalgia or why a streaming service with no IP might have trouble getting people to spend a fortune on long lines and churros. He thinks that if something plays a role in life, it should show up in the world, too.

When something begins to matter to us, we start looking for it in the world around us. We want to see it echoed in our spaces, our systems, and in the ways we come together. That desire is subtle but powerful. It shapes how culture moves forward, often long before institutions catch up.

The signs of life aren’t usually loud or spectacular, but they are persistent. I don’t think you have to be an optimist to see them, but you do have to be brave enough to look past the naysayers.

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.

For the Intellectually Isolated

I didn’t always know what to do with the parts of myself that overflowed my job.

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