Things have been getting weird lately. I’m not talking about “shock value weird” or “gross weird”. I’m talking about the kind of weirdness we feel when we’re forced to embrace contradictions, and contradictions are starting to show up everywhere.
Think off-grid influencers, breadwinning tradwives, crypto-bro environmentalists, and the voters that picked both AOC and Trump on the same ballot. But don’t get caught up in the moral discourse here.
Instead, pay attention to the contradictions that are being forced together. Try to feel for a moment what it means to reject society and have millions of followers on TikTok, or believe in democratic ideals and trust a republican leader to make them happen. More and more people are openly embodying conflicting truths, and if you ask them about it, they’ll tell you it’s freeing. It’s who they are.
Humans are messy and in an algorithmic world where two-dimensional authenticity has forced us into shallow labels and binary tribes, we’ve been ignoring the fact that in our most authentic state, humans are not easy to categorize at all.
Certainly not anymore, at least. Suddenly it’s impossible to describe who a typical feminist is, where a typical Republican is from, where to draw the line between a critic and a conspiracy theorist, or how to tell the difference between an entrepreneur and a blue collar worker. In our industry, people love to talk about how the algorithm has homogenized culture but they fail to see that what it’s really done is fragment identity.
This is what post-authenticity looks like. An open embrace of weird contradictions that make it impossible to draw generalizations.
What most people don’t understand is that what may look like a contradiction from one angle looks just as much like concordance from a different one. When AOC asked her constituents why they voted for both her and Trump, one voter said, “I feel like Trump and you are both real.”
Post-authenticity feels weird because we’ve willingly flattened ourselves and each other into tidy cultural boxes for so long that we’ve forgotten that people can have moderate views, vote for more than one party, redefine their self-interests and reject the need to explain themselves to everyone else. We forgot that people have always contained multitudes, and their multitudes are where they find meaning.
In the coming years, we will see more and more people publicly embody contradictions, and that will make it hard to categorize them in the algorithm of our minds. We will be forced to find beauty in the weirdness we’ve tried to optimize away. Merriam-Webster named authentic Word of the Year in 2023, but on the eve of 2025, it turns out we’ve been inauthentic this entire time.
A rough map of the cultural eras takes us from conformity to aspiration to authenticity to now post-authenticity, and the trending line that connects all of those things together is the journey inward.
We’re going from external validation to internal discovery, and that aligns with the broader trend of culture becoming increasingly introspective, personal, and self-reflective. Of course we’re still desperate for validation, but the rising tide of weirdness tells us that perhaps the cost of validation is becoming too high.
I think that’s a good thing. In fact, I think that’s a great thing because weird is an excellent wayfinder for brand strategists.
I gave a keynote address at TikTok a couple months ago about how to predict the future, and one of the things I talked about was how weird signals usually give us a glimpse into the future we can’t see yet. Every major cultural shift that changed our lives once started as a small anomaly in the system.
Muscle Beach was a small anomaly in the 1970s, and it was very weird. But it wasn’t weird because people were exercising (exercise was becoming more widely adopted at that time). It wasn’t weird because women were in bikinis. It wasn’t weird because it was a gym on the beach.
It was weird because men were flaunting their physiques.
Up until that point, vanity was considered a woman’s domain and men were meant to have purely intellectual pursuits. Seeing men obsess over their muscles and celebrate their bodies was so weird that Muscle Beach was met with a tremendous amount of public disdain.
Of course today bodybuilding is a massive industry, and men flaunting their bodies isn’t seen as vanity. It’s seen as self-respect, dignity and aspiration.
This story gives us a really important lesson about weird signals. Things that are weird for the sake of being weird do not matter. The weird that matters – the kind of weird that can help us see and create the future – are things that trespass our invisible boundaries and norms.
It’s usually the kind of weird you feel deeply in your body when you first encounter it. It can be good-weird or bad-weird, but either way you feel it in your bones. It’s a trespass you will feel within yourself before it registers in your brain because it’s triggering a deeper truth.
Like I said, weird is a great wayfinder. And now that our weirdness is escaping the algorithm, the signals are multiplying.
Mommunes (homes where single mothers live and raise children together) were in the news earlier this year and it made people feel all kinds of things. New forms of living arrangements are actually popping up everywhere throughout the world right now: eco-villages, inter-generational living, digital nomad co-housing and even the resurgence of traditional communes.
People think these things are weird because they take away autonomy, but if you interrogate their emotions you’ll find that people feel weird because there is a norm being challenged here.
For the first time ever in our culture, we are de-centering romantic relationships and instead centering friendship. Mommunes, especially, signal the fact that people are ready to build their lives and families outside of the norms of marriage.
Think about what that means for brands that play in relationships. What does it mean for parenting or community brands? If you want to create the future here, are you creating a future based on who we fall in love with, or instead based on who we choose to trust? Because it’s starting to look like who we fall in love with and who we trust aren’t always the same person anymore.
There was a time not so long ago where if you were a titan of industry and a billionaire, you would build huge monuments in the middle of the city that not only celebrated you, but also our collective progress. That’s why we have Rockefeller center, the Getty, and Carnegie Hall.
But our billionaires today aren’t building monuments in the middle of town. Instead they’re doing something much weirder – building small cities and apocalypse bunkers on private islands, away from the masses and solely for a select few.
What does that tell us about being wealthy? Is true wealth about building society or is it about exiting society? How does that affect what people aspire to? For brands that play in status, Is it a status symbol to be famous or is it a status symbol to hide?
If you pay attention to the right kind of weird, it will tell you where old values are crashing into new ones, and those new values are what you can build the future on top of. The most successful brands tapped into our new values before we even had the words to describe them, and they got an outsized return by betting on them early.
There was a time in Middle English when weird referred to someone who could control fate. In texts like Beowulf, weird is a central theme referring to the inevitable course of events. If you look, you’ll find myths and stories throughout the histories of different cultures that interpret weird the same way. We’ve always had an innate understanding that when things feel strange, they’re often premonitions of what is to come.
As we wrap up the year and think about what’s ahead, I invite you to reframe your understanding of what weird is.
Don’t run from it. Learn how to spot it and chase it.
Trust that even though things are about to get really weird and unfamiliar, you can use that to gain a better understanding of your user and your market. You can use those signals to create the future you want.
The world is still revealing itself.
P.S. I’ll be writing a report about this topic, with deeper insights, future signals and actionable takeaways for brands soon. Stay tuned.
