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.
