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:
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
