Right now, somewhere near you, a few hundred people are standing in a line that wraps around a block for a slice of pizza from a place that just opened. The slice is good, but no slice is ninety-minutes-of-your-Saturday good. They are there because being there means something. The line is the product. The pizza is the receipt.

This is identity construction, happening in real time. We tend to think we adopt identities to express who we already are. The opposite is true too. We adopt them to sort ourselves from the people who aren’t in the line, and the sorting is the entire point. An identity is only ever a wall, and a wall only works while someone is on the other side of it.

If you want to watch that mechanism run its full course, from birth to death to strange afterlife, you could pick almost any of today’s labels. But most of them are too young to have finished the cycle. So it’s worth looking at one that already did, slowly enough that you can see every stage. The foodie.

In 1980, a New York restaurant critic named Gael Greene reached for a word that didn’t quite exist and wrote foodie. It was nearly a throwaway, faintly silly, the way you’d say groupie. Four years later two British writers turned it into The Official Foodie Handbook, a field guide written as comedy, one of them crowning himself King Foodie. The satire and its target were the same person, which is the first thing worth noticing about how identities form: they almost always begin as a half-joke, a label loose enough that you can wear it without fully committing, deniable enough to try on.

The word worked because it threaded a needle the older words couldn’t. There was already a vocabulary for caring about food, and it was a vocabulary of intimidation. The gastronome treated eating as an intellectual discipline. The gourmet was trained and demanded the best. The gourmand wanted more of everything without apology. Each sorted you into a small, forbidding room with a high bar to entry. Foodie opened a room anyone could walk into. It asked for a sensibility, not a credential. And here’s the second mechanism: a new identity spreads fastest when it lowers the cost of belonging. It has to be claimable. The barrier has to be low enough to cross but high enough to still mean something on the other side. The foodie got that ratio exactly right, and it arrived precisely when a rising middle class wanted to say I care about this without having to prove it.

For thirty years the wall held. To be a foodie was to not be the person who didn’t know about the new place. That gap, that small exclusion, was the whole engine.

Then everyone crossed the wall, and here is where the third mechanism shows itself, the one nobody building an identity wants to hear: success is what kills it. The Food Network made chefs famous. Dinner stopped being the thing before the movie and became the whole evening. The phones came out and we started staging plates, the halved egg for the overhead, the pasta lifted for the pull. By 2022 #foodie passed two hundred million posts. That looked like the movement’s peak, and it was its death as well. A wall everyone has crossed is not a wall. The word that once told people something now told them nothing, and Greene herself called the term toxic by 2012. The people who’d used it to signal they knew things went quiet, the way you retire a band shirt the week the band sells out stadiums. They hadn’t changed. The signal had collapsed.

But the death of the word is not the death of the behaviour. An identity, once released into the culture, does not disappear when its name dies. It splinters. The impulse goes looking for smaller, fresher rooms to sort itself into, and it finds them everywhere.

Watch where the foodie went. When the world shut in 2020, a large part of it started feeding flour to a jar and naming the jar. Sourdough was never about bread, it was more a comforting, stress-relieving project when commercial yeast ran out. It evolved into a lasting lifestyle trend driven by the “slow food” movement, the appeal of clean ingredients, and potential gut-health benefits.

Then look the other way, at the person eating alone on purpose with OpenTable reporting a 19% year-over-year increase. Not the sad desk lunch but the reservation for one, the bar seat booked in advance, the tasting menu taken solo and unhurried. Solo dining reservations grew faster than any other party size last year, and restaurants noticed fast. This could be viewed also as part of the “Me Time” craze. According to OpenTable, the vast majority of solo diners deliberately book tables to unplug, read, people-watch, or enjoy the peace and quiet.

The foodie went out to be seen having taste; the solo diner goes out to be seen needing no one. The wall here isn’t the line you stand in. It’s the comfort being alone in a restaurant.

And then the supper club, where a home cook charges admission to a dinner party. This trend is seeing a massive modern renaissance, driven by a cultural shift away from nightlife and towards intimate, curated, and community-focused dining. It offers a hybrid of a dinner party and a restaurant fusing delicious home-cooking, unique venues, and new friendships. The foodie wanted to be seen having taste; the supper-club host wants to be seen owning the room, holding the one wall nobody can storm, because she decides who gets a seat.

Now here is the part that should make you look differently at every label currently going around. The foodie had a thirty-year runway. It got those decades because it was born slow, in print, before the machine that now manufactures and disposes of identities at speed. The labels minting today do not get thirty years. Cottagecore, clean girl, mob wife, the quiet luxury person, underconsumption core — these arrive fully formed, peak in a season, and hollow out in two or three years, because the wall goes up and gets stormed at the speed of a feed.

The cycle that took the foodie three decades now runs in roughly three years, and the generation raised inside that acceleration has internalized the whole arc. They adopt the label, perform it, and drop it the instant the line gets too long, without ever announcing the exit. They have learned, correctly, that the name is disposable and only the behaviour persists.

So the question worth sitting with isn’t whether the foodie is dead. It’s what your own current label is doing. It’s either still a wall, still leaving someone out, still carrying a charge. Or it has gone the way of the foodie while you weren’t watching, and you’re holding a badge for a crowd that stopped checking. The people at the front of that pizza line will not call themselves anything. They’ve already learned the lesson the foodie taught the hard way: the tell was never the food. It was that the doing got loud enough to make the word redundant, and the only move left is to keep finding a quieter room.

I'm Kima Sargsyan, and this is Perceptio, where I write about taste, identity, technology, and the way culture forms, travels, and collapses. I've spent fifteen years as a strategist helping brands understand the cultural rooms they're trying to belong to. If you're working at that intersection, or just think this way too, I'd love to hear from you.

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The industry talks about Gen Z constantly. It talks to them less often, and listens even less than that. There is an entire apparatus built around figuring out what young people want, and almost none of it involves actually asking them. Grace Zhou is an art director at the start of her career with a visual instinct she did not learn from a brief. She knew what she liked before anyone told her what to like. That clarity shows up in how she works, what she notices, and what she refuses to let flatten into trend. This is what it looks like from the inside.

About Grace

Grace Zhou is an Art Director at Citizen Relations in Toronto, and the 2026 National Young Lions Silver winner. She comes from a strong visual arts background (dance, piano, painting) and has been building her practice around one belief she’s held since grade four: that the best feeling in the world is making something that only existed in your head and watching someone else want it.

This is a conversation about visual instinct, the taste you carry, and what it looks like to know what you like before you can fully explain why.

Can you tell our readers and listeners a bit about you?

Grace: My name is Grace. I'm an art director working in creative advertising, specifically in PR. I come from a strong visual arts background in dance, piano, and painting, so creativity has always been a central part of my life. That's what led me here. Outside of work, I'm also a professional daydreamer and a dedicated nail salon frequenter.

How would you describe your taste? And do you think other people would describe it the same way?

Grace: Honestly, pretty inconsistent. I like a little bit of everything and I'm always open to trying new things. How do you know if you like something if you haven't tried it? If I had to simplify it, I gravitate toward things that feel a bit more niche. Not niche in an exclusionary way, but things you don't see ten times scrolling through TikTok. Things you can't just buy off Amazon. That specificity gives something more charm. And I think people around me would agree. I always have something new to talk about or show off from my bag that week.

What have you been obsessed with lately?

Grace: I finally finished Attack on Titan. I watched seasons one through three years ago but dropped off at season four because it felt like a completely different show. Different characters, different energy, I just didn't care. But my friends kept pestering me to finish it, so I finally binged it a few weeks ago. It reignited my love for the whole thing. Confusing at times, there were definitely moments of whose side are we on exactly? But I'm glad I went back.

What is the first thing you remember loving that no one around you understood?

Grace: In grade four or five, we had a school project called Project Business where you had to create a product, advertise it, and sell it at a school fair. My best friend and I made these little 3D beaded charms I'd learned to make from YouTube videos. I remember everything: picking out the beads, choosing the colors, drawing the ads we'd tape up around school. At the fair, we were the only team that sold out. I was so proud. Looking back, I think I did most of the work, but at the time I was just having the time of my life. That feeling of making something and watching someone else want it never really left me.

Is there a connection between that experience and what you do now?

Grace: It’s exactly the same feeling. A spark of inspiration in my head, and then eventually getting to hold the actual thing and having someone else respond to it. Whether it’s paintings I’ve exhibited and sold, or ideas at work that get produced, it never gets old. I hope it’s something I never grow out of.

What’s the most popular piece of advice in your field that you think is just wrong?

Grace: I've heard that juniors, especially in creative fields, need time to develop their taste. But I've always pushed back on that. Young people are the tastemakers. There's a reason every brief and every brand is trying to reach Gen Z: they're the ones actively determining what's culturally relevant, what's in fashion, what's worth paying attention to. The idea that that instinct needs to be earned over time doesn't really hold up.

What’s something in culture right now that people are talking about for the wrong reasons?

Grace: The protein thing. Protein coffee, protein skincare, protein everything. It's become exhausting. It's a symptom of this broader wellness trend where nothing is allowed to just exist for enjoyment. Your coffee has to have adaptogens. Your smoothie has to have a function. But there's a real pushback happening. People trading the clean girl aesthetic for a spontaneous Tuesday night out, ditching the ten-step routine. There was a post I saw on Instagram where someone shared their smoothie and someone in the comments asked if it was for losing weight or gaining weight. Their response was just: purely for enjoyment. That felt like a cultural moment to me.

Can you recall something you made where the process completely surprised you?

Grace: I tried making press-on nails for a bit, and it was so much harder than I expected. The shaping, the layers, the UV lamp that wouldn't cure properly. I genuinely thought, I understand why this costs a hundred dollars now. It gave me a real appreciation for nail techs. Sometimes the most humbling creative experiences come from things that look deceptively simple from the outside.

What did you believe about work five years ago that you would argue against now?

Grace: I used to think that if an idea wasn't fully formed, it wasn't worth saying out loud. I'd hold back unless I had something complete and airtight. But working in the industry now, I've realized that half-formed ideas are often the most valuable ones to share. They spark something for someone else, they get built on, expanded. The idea doesn't have to arrive whole. That's what collaboration is for.

If someone went through your room, bookshelves or your search history, what argument would they make about your taste, and would they be right?

Grace: They'd think I can't pick a lane. Yoga mat next to a Lego collection next to a bartending set next to art books. Nothing cohesive, no singular aesthetic identity. And honestly, they'd be right. I'm in my twenties, everything is trial and error, and I'm genuinely open to trying most things. She does a lot of different things. That's the accurate read.

Is there a part of your professional identity that gives you something that you haven’t found anywhere else?

Grace: The space to make something that only existed in my head. There's still this part of me, the same part that was there in grade four, that sees a finished thing in the world and thinks: that was a PDF two weeks ago. I made that. No matter how many rounds of approval it went through, that feeling doesn't go away. Someone liked it enough to spend money on it. That never stops meaning something.

As a National Young Lions winner, is that changing anything for you?

Grace: It puts more eyes on you, which is great validation. Proof that your ideas land. But I don't think it changes how I think or what I put forward. If anything, it reinforced something: when you're working under pressure with limited time, you have to trust your instincts. Everything you've learned has prepared you for the moment. I'm glad to be a 2026 Young Lions winner.

Is there something you love that you haven’t found a way to use in your work yet?

Grace: All those niche aesthetics and designs I find while scrolling. Specific visual worlds that don't usually make it into briefs. I'd love to find a way to bring more of what I actually find interesting into the work. That's the version I'm still working toward.

Connect with Grace on LinkedIn and check out her portfolio.

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Everywhere you look right now, people are gathering.

Run clubs grew their membership by nearly sixty percent in a single year and replaced the bar as the place Gen Z meets. Supper clubs, art salon style gatherings, sober raves, hiking groups, the whole architecture of the “third space” is being rebuilt. The headline of the moment is connection. Community is back, and the brands have noticed.

So here is the strange thing. Underneath the visible return to the group, the nearer future of identity is running hard in the opposite direction. We are joining more rooms and belonging to fewer of them. The community you can see is real, but it’s a place you visit, not a thing you are. You go to the run club at seven and you are no more a “runner” in the old tribal sense than you are a regular at a coffee shop. The membership is light, optional, un-costumed. You can be in five communities and identified by none of them.

What’s actually forming, in the gap the old tribes left behind, is something more private. Identity is moving off the group and onto the individual, and it’s becoming a stance rather than a style: not what you wear or who you stand with, but the specific decision you’ve made about how to survive a world that won’t hold still.

There are, right now, four of these forming. You’re almost certainly already one, even if no one’s named it for you yet. And unlike a subculture, you can’t spot any of them in a crowd, because they don’t live on the body and they don’t need anyone else to exist.

There’s the Free Agent, who refuses to go all-in on anything: not one career, not one city, not one belief, not one defining relationship. Keeps every option open on principle. Reads as flaky to people who grew up on commitment, reads as sane to anyone who watched a single bet wipe someone out. The market already serves this one without naming it. The “portfolio career,” several income streams held at once, is being sold in 2026 as the only safety net left, and the spending follows: diversified, hedged, allergic to the single big commitment.

There’s the Obsessive, the whole self organized around one deep thing pursued past the point of reason: the fermentation person, the vinyl person, the one who knows everything about a single shipwreck. The identity is the rabbit hole. This is the consumer brands are quietly reorganizing around, away from mass reach and toward the narrow, paying, fanatically engaged niche, the knowledge product and the membership, the people who will spend disproportionately on the one thing they care about most.

There’s The First Mover, who lives at the front edge of culture rather than tech alone, first to the neighbourhood, the diet, the app, the take, the new destinations. The whole self is being ahead. The quiet fear underneath is being caught behind.

And there’s the Low Profile, for whom privacy is a worldview: the relationship kept offline, the trip announced only after, a standing wariness of anything built to be performed. Being un-googleable is the flex. Attention is guarded like money, because it is. The clearest tell is in your hand: dumbphone sales rose roughly a quarter in 2025, and the people buying a $799 Light Phone to do less are not nostalgics. They are paying a premium to be harder to reach, harder to track, harder to monetize.

Notice what they have in common, which is nothing visual and nothing collective. A Free Agent and an Obsessive could be wearing the identical outfit, standing in the same run club, scrolling the identical feed, and be living in opposite directions. The identity isn’t on them and it isn’t around them. It’s the line they’ve drawn, alone, about what exactly they refuse to leave exposed.

So why these four, and why now? Because the same instability driving people into run clubs is what’s privatizing their identities. We are in a polycrisis: climate, economy, geopolitics, AI, institutions, all destabilizing at once and feeding each other, so the whole is more dangerous than the sum. The ground that used to hold an identity in place, a stable job, a single career, a culture slow enough to belong to, is gone. You can join a community to feel less alone in that, and people are. But community is comfort, not identity. When the ground actually moves, people don’t pick an aesthetic and they don’t outsource the answer to a group. They pick a stance, privately.

Here is where most futurists get it wrong. The consensus says we’re all softening: that ambition drained out of a generation that watched the old deal collapse, and now everyone just wants a calm little life, a soft business, an exit. It’s a comforting story and it’s mostly cope. Look at what people are actually doing and you don’t see surrender. You see armor. The drive to compete, to win, to be the one who can’t be replaced, none of it left. It re-routed. Under pressure ambition doesn’t disappear; it gets harder, quieter and more strategic. The Free Agent, the Obsessive, the First Mover, the Low Profile are not four ways of giving up. They’re four ways of staying in the game when the rules stopped being legible, right as AI dissolves the two-century link between the work you did and the person you were.

These won’t be the final names. We’re maybe two years from the shapes settling, and they’ll have settled into something else by then, because that’s what identities do now. They float, they recombine, we each run several at once. The point was never to pin down a permanent new category. The old subcultures were permanent, and collective, and that was the whole arrangement: you joined one and it held you. What’s replacing them isn’t another set of groups to join. It’s the opposite. The group became a place you pass through, and the identity retreated inward, to a decision only you can see yourself making.

The old subcultures asked who you'd stand with. The new identities ask something colder: what you won't hand over, even when it costs you. The Free Agent won't surrender their options. The Obsessive won't dilute their one thing. The First Mover won't fall behind. The Low Profile won't be made visible. This is why the old marketing playbook fails: you can't target a stance the way you targeted a look. Brands and founders need to shift from decoding the aesthetic or sponsoring the run club. Instead, work out what each of these four is protecting, and earn their way in by being the rare thing worth letting past the line.

Want to keep talking? Message Kima Sargsyan, strategist and creator of Perceptio.

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I wrote twenty essays here since January. I’ve been counting.

What I haven’t been counting: the tabs I’ve opened, saved, abandoned, reopened at midnight, and finally!! decided to share with you.

That’s what this issue is. The pile, the curation, the best to check out from other authors & creators. The things I kept meaning to send.

But first, something I have to tell you. Perceptio is getting a podcast. Here, on Substack. The first episodes are recorded. I have done the thing I said I would do, which is terrifying, because now there’s no taking it back.

To be honest, writing is home to me. Podcasting is someone else’s neighborhood lol louder, less controlled, more face. I’m moving in anyway. Growth lives in the uncomfortable zip code, apparently.

More very soon.

For now, scroll. See what grabs you. Follow the thread that makes you go wait, tell me more. That’s the whole point.

With love, Kima

2 articles, 2 songs, 2 quotes

Work, credentials & the Internet

• Janel Abrahami watched a furniture flipper go viral with her almost exact words and her exact thesis. And instead of just being mad about it, she asked the more uncomfortable question: so what? The credentials she’d spent years accumulating weren’t the point. They never were, at least not in the space they were both suddenly playing in. This is the most honest thing I’ve read about credentials, attention, and who actually gets to be an expert now. Read it:

  Going Places

  Millennials have a "credentialed class" problem.

  Read more

  a month ago · 177 likes · 35 comments · Janel Abrahami

• Benjamin Antoine writes about a related disorientation: the asymmetry between watching full-time creators and trying to imitate them while holding down an actual life. The fitness influencer whose entire day is structured around the routine they’re selling you. The advice that was never designed for your actual life structure. This one is for anyone building something on the side on top of a full-time job and quietly wondering why the playbook keeps not working.

  The Work That Holds

  Stop Trying to "Grow" Like a Full-time Creator

  Have you ever watched a “Fitness Vlog” online…

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  a month ago · 47 likes · 10 comments · Benjamin Antoine

Cinematic, if You'll allow it

Two songs. No common thread except the one you’ll find yourself. Put them on and let the afternoon get a little bigger.

Things worth sitting with

The Paris Review has been publishing interviews since 1953. Somehow they still find the sentences that stop you mid-scroll. 2 quotes by two legends.

I think about recipes the way other people think about gossip with a deep suspicion of the official story. When someone calls something a French dish, I want to know which France, and when, and whose hands were actually in that kitchen. The croissant, the most French thing imaginable, is Viennese. Most “national” foods are accidents of history that got nationalized later.The clean national story is almost always a compression. The real story is messier and more interesting: layers of hands, migrations, colonization, things taken without credit, things invented independently on opposite sides of the world by people who would never meet.

So when people started saying the Internet was dead(again), I recognized the feeling immediately.

In January 2021, a user posted a thread titled Dead Internet Theory which is now a famous conspiracy theory: Most of the Internet is fake. His argument: the internet had died somewhere around 2016. What remained was “empty and devoid of people” — a loop of bot-generated content, recycled threads, and manufactured engagement designed to serve corporate interests. It felt paranoid. It also felt correct in a way that was hard to shake.

The Atlantic covered it that September under the headline Maybe You Missed It, but the Internet ‘Died’ Five Years Ago. Their verdict: “wrong, but feels true.”

That was 2021. Then a Guardian columnist updated the theory in 2024: “In 2021, the internet felt dead because aggressive algorithmic curation was driving people to act like robots. In 2024, the opposite has happened: the robots are posting like people.”

Then in 2025, Spotify removed 75 million AI-generated spam tracks in a single year — bots gaming royalty pools with content that looked like music the way a shadow looks like a person.

The bots are real. The AI slop is real. But the more interesting problem started before any of that. It started the moment platforms decided context was friction.

The internet was supposed to solve the recipe problem. The whole promise was that you would never just encounter a thing, you would encounter its origins, the chain of hands it passed through, the argument it was part of. Hyperlinks were the architecture of meaning. You could always go deeper.

What happened instead: platforms optimized for attention, not understanding. The feed replaced the search. The recommendation replaced the curiosity. Cory Doctorow calls the inevitable end-state enshittification, every platform begins by serving users, pivots to extracting them, and ends by hollowing itself out in service of shareholders. Context became friction. Friction got removed.

What remained was the feeling stripped of origin, authorship, weight.

Time collapsed first. A song from 1983 and a song from last Thursday sit in the same algorithmic feed: equal thumbnail, equal thirty-second window, equal chance of going viral. This felt liberating for a moment. The archive opened. Everything was available. Read more about this in this amazing piece by :

cultivated variety

Does 'new' music matter?

In the mid-aughts, music felt like a river with a single, aggressive current. Growing up, I only listened to the ‘now’ – a frantic inventory of Top 40 charts and whatever physical stock occupied the racks at HMV or Sanity (RIP…

Read more

2 months ago · 5 likes · 6 comments · Ollie Hall

But flattened time was only the surface problem. The deeper shift is something harder to name: not just when stopped mattering, but who. You don’t just encounter a Kate Bush song without knowing it was recorded in 1985 — you encounter it without knowing who she was when she made it, what it cost her, what it meant to the people who heard it first. You scroll past an essay that changed someone’s thinking without knowing the writer spent three years arriving at that argument. You share a meme whose original image was made by an artist who never got credit, built on a reference that came from somewhere else, which itself was borrowed from somewhere further back.

Context-agnostic isn’t a media problem. When the who disappears from what we consume, we lose the ability to be changed by it. Being changed requires knowing where something came from, what world it was made against, who paid the cost.

This does something brutal to new work specifically. A creator making something today isn’t competing with other new creators. They’re competing with the entire archive of human cultural production, equalized by the algorithm, stripped of the accumulated meaning that gives older work its gravity. The catalogue has decades of weight the new work hasn’t had time to earn. And a context-agnostic feed doesn’t give you time. It gives you a thumbnail and three seconds.

The response has been real, if uneven. Paywalls multiplied. Substack grew. People started assembling what you might call a subscription stack: a deliberate portfolio of things worth paying for, and by extension, worth knowing who made them.

The paywall is, at its core, a context-restoration device. It says: this came from somewhere specific. Someone made it. Here is their name. Every subscription is a small act of locating a creator in the world which turns out to be a prerequisite for being genuinely changed by what they make.

The irony is that the people who most need a context-rich internet, the ones actually making the culture, are the ones most likely to be priced out of it. Artists, writers, musicians, teachers, independent creators. They’re also, more often than not, broke. They can’t afford sixteen Substack subscriptions. They can’t pay to exit the bad feed. So they end up taking what brands offer instead — the free concert, the invite-only dinner with a sponsor’s name on the invite, the pop-up that feels like a community gathering until you notice the logo. It’s not selling out. And it comes with a feeling most people don’t say out loud: grateful for the access, resentful that access required a sponsor.

The uncomfortable truth underneath all of it is simple: authentic culture became a luxury product. And the people who produce it often can't afford to consume it.

Here’s the thing: you can’t actually kill context. You can make it hard to find. You can bury it under an algorithm, price it behind a paywall, drown it in AI slop. But it doesn’t disappear, it just moves into smaller spaces, slower conversations, rooms where people still bother to ask where something came from.

Context is surviving in the small rooms: the newsletter where the writer still answers replies, the server where someone posts a link and someone else asks do you know the story behind this, the group chat where recommendations travel with the person still attached.

These spaces are not scalable, not optimizable, and will never be acquired for two billion dollars. That is exactly why they work. They are running on the same logic as a good recipe passed hand to hand: the transmission is the meaning.

The reader became the last hyperlink. When you tell someone where something came from, not just share the link but say this person has been building this for ten years, here is what it cost them. You’re doing what the internet was designed to do and gradually stopped. The practical version is less romantic than it sounds: follow the thread back. When something moves you, find out who made it. Subscribe, not just save. Tell someone else, with the context still attached.

It’s a small act. It compounds.

On that note, please share and subscribe.

Gen Z coming up online didn’t choose context-indifference. They inherited an interface that made context optional, then irrelevant, then invisible. They’re not incurious. They were handed a feed that answered every question before they thought to ask it, and quietly trained them out of the habit of going deeper.

Which is why the small rooms matter beyond the people already in them. Every time you carry the name with the work, you are doing something the feed cannot do and will not do: you are insisting that things have authors. That authorship is not metadata. That knowing who made something is not a bonus feature, it is the thing itself.

The recipe was never just a recipe. It was everyone who cooked it before you, every substitution made under constraint, every technique that crossed a border without a passport. The internet was supposed to hold all of that. For a while, it tried.

It can still be pressured into trying again. Not by the platforms. By us.

There's a group of people who never accepted the context-free feed. The ones who know every collaborator on every album. Who can tell you which animator did that one scene. Who build wikis at 2am for things the rest of us scrolled past. Who care, loudly and specifically, about the who behind the what. We called it obsessive. We called it cringe. We called it doing too much. But what they were actually doing (unpaid, uninstructed, purely because they couldn't help it) was keeping the thread alive. Fandoms are the most functional archival system the internet ever produced. The nerds turned out were the answer we were too cool to copy.

The curated internet is already here. A few people whose taste you trust. That’s it.

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So, it is 2040. You and me, my dear reader, are old but wise (I hope). We are both watching how somewhere prominent maybe New York, London, Paris, or Hong Kong, the auction room is full. People are here to spend real money on something that represents a very specific time in the history.

Let’s assume for the sake of the exercise, the object on display is small. Unassuming, almost. A few people near the back can’t quite make out what it is. Someone leans to the person beside them and whispers: this is from the beginning of the 2000s. The person nods slowly, the way you nod when something confirms what you already suspected. When the hammer falls the number on the board is $40,000.

The room goes quiet.

Now here is the question: what is the object?

Not what you hope it is. Not what feels significant to you right now, inside this moment, where you cannot yet see the shape of the era you are living in. What it actually is. What survived. What someone in 2040 recognizes as irreplaceable evidence of how this particular world felt from the inside and is ready to pay for accordingly.

This essay is the attempt to answer that. Which means it is also, inevitably, about right now. About what we are making, what we are discarding, and what we are failing to understand about the value of the things passing through our hands.

The first thing to get right is the taxonomy. Because we collapse three genuinely different categories into one word, vintage, and in doing so lose the entire mechanism that makes any of them valuable. I will use fashion as an example, although this piece is not limited to fashion in idea.

Old is just old. Time passed. The 2009 mall dress. It existed. Nobody is coming for it in 2040.

Vintage requires more than time. Vogue places it at roughly twenty to under a hundred years for clothing, but the years are almost beside the point. What matters is rarity, proven quality, a specific cultural mood crystallized so completely that the object becomes evidence of a period rather than a souvenir of it. A souvenir is commemorative. Evidence carries weight. The 1997 Prada nylon bag is a quintessential example of a movement led by Miuccia Prada that redefined luxury by intentionally rejecting traditional, opulent beauty in favor of industrial, functional, and intellectually subversive design. That utility could be luxury. That anti-glamour with enough conviction became the most glamorous position available. That decision is gone. The bag proves it happened.

Archival is something else entirely. Not just era-specific but vision-specific. Significant pieces from a designer's past that carry collector weight because of what they represent within a singular body of work. All archival items may be vintage, but not all vintage items are significant enough to be archival. The Mugler SS1992 construction. The Galliano for Dior F/W 2000 Haute Couture. These trade like art because what they carry is irreproducible — a mind at the height of its argument, in quantities that were always finite, inside a cultural context that has not returned.

Mugler Spring 1992 or Thierry Mugler Spring/Summer 1992

ARCHIVAL F/W 2000 Christian Dior by John Galliano Haute Couture

What produces lasting value across fashion, cars, furniture, wine, ceramics, and increasingly digital objects that found a way to become physical, is a set of conditions that time alone cannot manufacture. They were either present at the moment of making, or they were not.

Material irreproducibility. The thing was made in a way that cannot be replicated today. The Bottega Veneta intrecciato weave takes fifteen hours (sometimes even up to 40-100 hrs) of skilled artisan work per bag and loses what it is the moment it’s automated. When the process disappears, what it produced becomes irreplaceable. Not because the object is rare, but because the way of making it is gone.

Cultural crystallization. The object embodies a specific mood so completely it stops being a product and becomes proof. You cannot restage the moment. You can only find what survived it.

Scarcity through attrition. Most things are discarded. The objects that survive do so because someone chose, deliberately, to keep them, which means someone recognized value before the market did. Survival is its own form of curation. This applies to physical objects and increasingly to digital ones: when a platform dies or pivots, what was made on it becomes inaccessible. Myspace pages, early YouTube, the Tumblr era... Already partially lost. What survived is already scarce.

Insider legibility. The most valuable vintage objects only make sense if you already know what they are. The Margiela white label to the untrained eye is an unfinished garment. To someone who knows, it is a precise refusal of the entire system of fashion celebrity. The knowledge is the currency. It always is, and the more rarefied the knowledge required, the higher the ceiling on value.

The contrast effect. Objects become more desirable as the present moves away from what they represent. Vinyl became collectible after streaming. Film cameras became meaningful after the iPhone. The combustion engine is becoming mythic as EVs normalize. In 2015, Kim Kardashian published Selfish: a physical book containing images that already existed on her Instagram, printed and bound and distributed at the exact inflection point before the culture got embarrassed about the selfie era entirely. It is more interesting now than it was then and will be more interesting still in 2040. The contrast effect only compounds. The greater the distance between what an object represents and what the world has become, the more it functions as proof of something lost.

The vintage window is not fixed at twenty-five to thirty years. It depends entirely on how fast the preceding era closes, and eras close at different speeds depending on how completely the next paradigm replaces them.

Fashion cycles run twenty to twenty-five years. Y2K peaked around 2000 and became coveted around 2023. Furniture takes thirty to forty. Mid-century modern peaked in the 1950s and became collectible in the 1990s. Cars were running twenty-five to thirty-five years until the shift from combustion to electric compressed everything, because paradigm breaks don’t wait for the average. The 1970s Porsche is already mythic not because enough time has passed but because what it represents, the mechanical era, the analog relationship between driver and machine, is visibly ending.

Technology objects move fastest of all. The original iPhone is proto-vintage at nineteen years old. The world it represents is already historical. Does it have vintage or archival value though?

Which means certain years carry more weight than others. The year of production is not just a number. It is a position relative to the ruptures.

Pre-2007 is already historical. The before-picture.

2007–2019 is in early vintage formation. The full DTC decade, peak algorithm, the experience economy at full height. The 2012 Supreme drop. The first Kinfolk run. The Céline tote under Phoebe Philo. The natural wine from the producer who stopped. Some of these already have waiting lists.

2019 is the last year of the old normal. Objects produced that year carry a specific weight in retrospect. Made without knowing what was coming. The last collection before the pause.

2020–2022 carries something historically unusual: objects made during a collective suspension of ordinary life. The hand-thrown ceramic bought from an independent maker when physical retail collapsed. The risograph print produced when no one could gather. The rupture is already inside the object.

2022–2024 has the quality of fever. Revenge dressing, revenge travel, revenge spending. Daniel Lee’s brief, intense Bottega era. Already a closed chapter. Already being looked back at.

2025 is the last window before AI mediates everything at scale. Objects made entirely by human hands, human minds, human creative direction with no AI involvement in their conception or production will carry a designation in 2040 the way pre-war carries one now. The provenance will be the point.

So. Back to the auction room.

The object on the block in 2040 is not what you think it is. It is probably not the thing you are most proud of from this era. Not the most famous thing, or the most expensive thing, or the thing that got the most coverage.

It might be a first-edition Kinfolk from 2011. A Phoebe Philo-era Céline bag from 2013. A natural wine from a producer who stopped. A specific Supreme drop. A printed, numbered, hand-distributed zine from 2020 made by someone who turned out to matter. A Substack archive, printed and bound, from the window when independent writing felt like the most radical act available.

It might be something you own right now and don’t know what you’re holding.

The vintage market is not a nostalgia economy. It is a collective unconscious audit running in real time on everything the previous era produced. The objects that pass it were not trying to become antiques. They were made with enough conviction, enough singularity, that time had nothing to erase.

If you are making things right now, building brands, directing creative work, deciding what is worth producing and how, the auction room in 2040 is the most honest brief you will ever receive. It is already happening. The bids are already being placed, in the form of what people choose to keep.

The hammer falls. The room exhales. And somewhere in 2000s, with or without knowing it, someone made the thing that just got sold.

They probably didn’t keep a copy for themselves.

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John Berger believed we should study the art of the past to understand how we got here, and to think harder about where we might go. Look backward, he said, in order to see forward. It is good advice. The question is where, exactly, to look now.

Not at the institutions. They are busy managing their own decline.

Not at the people who succeeded loudly in the last decade — many of them are still technically winning, but you can feel something contracting in their work, a subtle defensiveness, a shrinking of the frame and the fame. They optimized for an era that is ending and they know it, even if they haven’t said it out loud. They are a warning to us all. The old system is gone, the new is not born yet. Our lives and careers are going to be significantly different from previous two generations. To get to the possible futures, we have do to many things and they will feel… cringe at times.

That is the tell.

The person who posts too earnestly, the one who went independent before it looked safe, the newsletter, the pivot, the business idea on shaking ground… everything could be labeled cringe. It is showing you where the consensus has broken down.

Cringe is not a taste response anymore. It is what a dying consensus does to protect itself from the people who can already see past it.

This is the thing most cultural commentary gets wrong about cringe. It focuses on the behavior being labeled, not on the function the labeling serves. The person typing cringe in the comments is not always expressing distaste. They are drawing a boundary around something the current order cannot accommodate. They are enforcing, on behalf of a system that no longer fully works, the cost of deviating from it.

The cost used to be real. When the consensus was working, when the safe path actually led somewhere safe, cringe did legitimate regulatory work. Stay on the road. Do not let your ambition show before you can back it up. Build credentials. Wait until you’re ready. This worked, for a while, inside systems that rewarded patience and compliance.

This is what reading that career advice feels like in 2026. The map is gone but people are still trying to sell you their career advice from 2018.

This was genuinely good advice, once, inside systems that rewarded the accumulation of credentials and the careful management of risk. It is now the sound of someone describing a game that has changed its rules.

The cringe enforcement often comes from here. From people who have something real to lose if the old logic stops holding. You can feel the difference between someone who calls your idea too much because they have thought carefully about it, and someone who calls it too much because your willingness to begin is a small reproach to their decision to stop.

Simone Weil, one of the most prominent thinkers of the last century, wrote that the greatest human need is to be rooted: in a community, in a place, in a shared past and in collective future hopes.

For that, we need collective imagination, for a group of people to look at the present together and say: here is what we are building toward. Here is the future we are orienting around.

We do not have this right now. What we have instead is a lot of people separately trying to figure out the new rules while performing certainty they do not feel. Calling each other cringe whenever someone’s uncertainty becomes too visible. The cringe response is what fills the space where collective future hopes used to live. It keeps the real question from being asked: what are we actually building toward, together?

The problem was never the digging. It was not knowing what you were digging toward. Stopping one step before the diamonds is not a failure of effort. It is a failure of imagination.

Sometimes you find your way back to imagination through other people.

You meet someone three years into something that looks like chaos from the outside and like the first true thing they have ever done from the inside. You read something at 1am that names exactly what you had been feeling but had no words for. You watch someone do the cringe thing (post it, start it, say it, mean it) and survive it, and something loosens in you that you hadn’t noticed was tight.

Berger would recognize this. This is what looking at the right work does. It does not give you a strategy. It gives you evidence. Evidence that the attempt is survivable. That building before the ground stabilizes is not recklessness — it is the only available option if you want to build anything at all.

These people are not the ones with the most polished answers. They are the ones already living inside the question. Already constructing, badly and publicly, some early version of the collective future that has not been ratified yet. You hear them and something in you orients. You understand, suddenly, that the cringe response was never really about them. It was about the size of the life you were allowing yourself to imagine.

Weil’s rooting requires collective future hopes — spoken, shared, built in the open. You cannot build them while performing cool detachment. You cannot build them while the cringe response is still running as the default, flagging every sincere attempt as evidence of poor judgment.

The era that’s ending demanded compliance. The one being born does not know yet what it demands. That gap is uncomfortable. It is also, if you are paying attention, the most honest place to be.

Let the cringe go. Yes, it does cost something. But the alternative is organizing your one specific life around the preferences of a consensus that is already over.

You don’t need a map. You need people who are also, right now, trying to draw one.

Find them. Or be one.

If you want to keep pulling on this thread, I hold Office Hours for paid subscribers. Come think through it with us.

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When my brother visited Canada, I took him to a diner in Ottawa. He had never been inside one. Neither of us grew up in North America, and the diner is a deeply American concept not just a type of restaurant but a whole argument about who deserves to be fed and at what hour and without having to perform for it. I wanted him to feel what I had felt the first time: not comfort, exactly. More like walking into a room that already knew what you needed before you opened your mouth.

That feeling has a name. The industry is spending billions trying to buy it back.

The diner began not as a building but as a gap to fill. In 1872, a pressman in Providence named Walter Scott converted a freight wagon, parked it outside the Journal offices, and started selling coffee and sandwiches to workers coming off the late shift, the people the restaurants had already closed on. The lunch wagon went stationary by the early 1900s, got prefabricated and shipped across the country in the 1920s, and became the luncheonette: smaller, faster, built for the worker with forty minutes and no illusions about it. The Greek diner is a later chapter in the same story. Greek immigrants arrived with few options, took the jobs no one else wanted, paid attention, saved, and began buying out exhausted owners often with a brother or a cousin. By the 1990s, two-thirds of New York City’s diners were Greek-owned. One wave fed into the next. The form changed hands and kept its function.

Here is where the diner stops being a restaurant story.

The independent restaurant sector lost over 9,500 locations in 2025 alone shrinking 2.3% while chain locations grew 1.4%. Around three hundred diners remain in New York City, down from thousands. The closures aren’t mysterious: rents that doubled, then doubled again; a generation of owners’ children who looked at the hours and the margins and made a different choice. What replaced them isn’t always a ghost kitchen or a luxury condo. Sometimes it’s a rebranded version of the same place — a clean sans-serif logo, a menu edited to twelve curated items, a reservations system, a QR code where the laminated menu used to be. It kept the word diner. It removed the thing the word pointed to.

I have a regular diner now. Lake View, on Dundas West in Toronto, open 24 hours. The server doesn’t write down your order. The coffee appears before you’ve formed the thought. There is a shorthand between a regular and the person across the counter that operates without language, almost without eye contact. It is built from repetition until it becomes something closer to care.

What’s interesting about diners is that the customer knowledge doesn’t live in a system. It lives in the body of the people doing the work. The line cook who knows the couple in the corner booth wants the window seat, that she takes her eggs over easy, that he stopped ordering the hash browns three months ago and won’t say why. Losing that person is not just a staffing gap. It is the loss of the accumulated record, years of observation that never existed anywhere except in practice, in the body of someone who showed up every morning and paid attention.

The gap is visible in the data.

80% of customers say their issue was resolved through AI or hybrid AI interaction. Only 22% say the experience made them prefer the company. Resolved, but not loyal. That gap between closed and felt, between transacted and remembered is the whole problem. And it’s a problem the diner never had, because the diner wasn’t resolving issues. It was building a relationship, over time, through proximity and repetition and the particular intimacy of a short-order kitchen operating under pressure across a very long shift.

What made it possible in the first place was constraint. The short menu is not a limitation. It is a position. We know what we do. We do it without apology. That legibility is what trust is built from and it is the first thing to disappear when something gets rebranded into a concept, or when a loyalty platform needs to justify its renewal to a board, or when a product team adds a feature because the roadmap required it.

Which means there is a vacancy. Not a nostalgic one. A structural one.

There is currently no orientation in brand building, no dominant model, no celebrated case study, no funded startup that treats knowing its people not as a feature but as the whole point. Every personalization play in the market is built on data the customer didn’t knowingly give, optimized for behavior the customer didn’t consciously choose, toward outcomes the customer wouldn’t recognize as care.

My brother still talks about that diner in Ottawa. Not the food or the booths. The feeling of sitting down and being expected, not performed for, not optimized at, just quietly expected. Like the room had been keeping a seat. We used to build things like that.

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This is the companion piece to Your Customer Is Three People. That essay mapped who your customer is. This one is about how you build for them, not as a rational actor moving through a funnel, but as a nervous system navigating states it didn’t choose.

A few weeks ago, Monica Vinader sent an email with the subject line: “Rather not hear about Mother’s Day?”

That was it, just a quiet acknowledgment that for a meaningful portion of their list, the promotional cascade that was about to begin was not a gift but a wound and an opt-out button that asked nothing in return.

I’ve been thinking about that email ever since because of what it understood that almost nothing else in my inbox does. It understood that before I am a customer, I am a nervous system. And that nervous system had already decided, in the milliseconds before I read a single word, whether this was a safe place to be.

Attention spans aren’t declining because people are lazier. They’re declining because the nervous system has learned, correctly, that most digital environments are not safe. Not in the clinical sense in the deep, pre-conscious sense that neuroscientist Stephen Porges described in his polyvagal theory. Before your brain makes a decision, your autonomic nervous system has already scanned the environment for threat. The process takes milliseconds. Porges called it neuroception, a below-conscious surveillance that routes the body toward openness or away from danger before the thinking mind has voted.

Consider what makes thrifting feel different from buying the same item online.

The thrift store is, by every metric of conversion optimization, a disaster. No personalization, no recommendations or reviews. No “only 2 left.” The inventory is random, the lighting is often bad, and nobody is trying to close you. And yet people describe finding something at a thrift store the way they describe falling in love — the specific thrill of the Levi’s jacket in exactly the right wash, the ceramic bowl that was somehow waiting. The desire feels real because it is. Nobody manufactured it. The nervous system was never under pressure, so when want arrived, it had somewhere to land.

Ecommerce inverts this entirely. The product is surfaced because an algorithm calculated that you would want it. The social proof is pre-loaded. The scarcity is engineered. Every element of the page was tested to produce a decision. And it works up to a point. But what it produces isn’t desire. It’s compliance. The nervous system was managed toward a purchase, and somewhere in the body, it knows the difference. This is why return rates for algorithmically recommended purchases are often significantly lower than those for self-sought items, particularly when the recommendation leads to an impulse buy. The body is correcting a decision the funnel made for it.

What a regulated nervous system actually enables isn’t better decision-making. It’s fuller presence. Sensation, emotion, cognition, the impulse toward action, wonder, aesthetic perception don’t operate in sequence. They are expressions of the same underlying state. A person whose nervous system has found safety doesn’t just think more clearly. They feel more. They notice more. They can be moved. Curiosity becomes possible. The aesthetic registers. The desire has somewhere to land.

A confusing onboarding flow, a wall of testimonials that feel pressured, a countdown timer. These aren’t just bad UX. They are physiological events, ones that collapse that texture before the person has read a single word of your offer. They’re being escorted out by circuits that are older than language, and what leaves with them isn’t just a decision. It’s an entire quality of aliveness.

The infrastructure of persuasion we built over two decades (education section, desire amplification, case study stack, urgency trigger, final CTA) was designed for a person who could be reached through argument alone. It assumed that if the logic was sound and the benefits were clear, the sale would follow. It left the nervous system out entirely. And the nervous system, it turns out, was always the whole game.

So what does a nervous-system-informed experience actually look like?

Not calmer or slower, necessarily but more sequenced. The shift is from designing for a rational arc (stranger to buyer, one section at a time) to designing for physiological state.

The question stops being “does this section/campaign/website educate?” and starts being: “what state is this person arriving in, and does what I’ve built meet them there?”

If you read Your Customer Is Three People, you already know that your customer isn’t a unified actor moving cleanly through your funnel. They are a mirror self, a severed twin, a shadow buyer — each with different hungers, different hours, different tolerances for friction. Here is the part I didn’t say then: those selves also have different nervous systems.

The mirror self, the person who finds you through a piece of content, a share, a recommendation, arrives regulated and often curious. They chose to be here. This is a nervous system in ventral vagal territory: open, socially safe, capable of absorbing nuance and identity signaling. This is the state where a brand voice lands, where an aesthetic registers, where someone decides whether you’re for them. The move here is not to convert. It is to not dysregulate. Hit them with a pop-up, a flashing notification, a density of competing CTAs and you’ve burned the only moment they were ever going to be fully present.

The severed twin with the abandoned cart, the half-finished application, the email sequence ghost, arrives activated. There’s a low-grade threat encoded in returning to something unfinished. You’re asking them to revisit a version of themselves they didn’t commit to. This is where most re-engagement sequences make the fatal mistake: they amplify. More testimonials, more benefits, a sharper deadline. But urgency applied to an already-activated nervous system doesn’t persuade, it confirms the threat. What actually works here is co-regulation. You were looking at this and it’s still here, no pressure. The phrase that converts isn’t the most exciting one. It’s the one that makes the person feel safe enough to decide.

The removal is even simpler: find the urgency trigger in your re-engagement sequence and delete it. Replace it with one sentence that acknowledges the pause without judging it. That’s the whole intervention.

Instead of: “Only 3 left — complete your order before it’s gone.”

Try: “We’re keeping one for you, whenever you’re ready.”

No deadline, no scarcity, no restatement of the case. Just an acknowledgment that the pause was legitimate and a door left open without pressure. The nervous system reads the absence of urgency as its own signal. Safe to return and safe to decide.

The shadow buyer, the one who purchases at 11:47pm, no research, no deliberation, doesn’t need to be sold. They’ve already sold themselves, in a previous session, in a previous version of the day. What they need is … almost nothing. A frictionless checkout, a single confirmation, the feeling that this transaction is simple and the outcome is certain. Any content that treats them like a new reader is a dysregulation event. Every extra word is a reason to close the tab.

But before you can design for these states, you have to learn to read them.

And the good news is you already have the data. You’re just not asking it the right question.

• Time of day is a state signal. The person opening your email at 7am on a weekday is in a fundamentally different physiological register than the one who clicks at 11pm on their phone.

• Entry point is a state signal. Someone who arrives via a referral from a trusted friend has a nervous system that’s already partially regulated aka trust was pre-loaded before they got to you. Someone who arrives via a retargeting ad is the severed twin, carrying the low-grade dysregulation of an unfinished decision. Treat them accordingly.

• Scroll depth and session time are state signals. A person who reads slowly, all the way through, is regulated enough to deliberate. The one who bounced at the third scroll is telling you their nervous system called it before their mind did.

• Content behavior is perhaps the most underused signal of all. Someone who watches a video to the end is in a different state than someone who skims headlines. Someone who returns to the same page three times without converting isn’t confused about your offer, they’re a severed twin whose nervous system hasn’t found safety yet. The re-engagement email that acknowledges this quietly, without pressure, will outperform the one that adds urgency every time.

Most analytics dashboards are built to tell you what people did. The more useful question is what state they were in when they did it. Those two questions have entirely different design implications.

Nervous system as a new data layer

The behavioral signals described above time of day, entry point, scroll depth, session count, content completion are not just proxies for state. They are the beginning of a nervous system map. Right now, brands treat them as engagement metrics. The more useful reframe is that they are physiological data, collected passively, at scale, every time someone interacts with a digital environment. You are already running a nervous system study. You just haven’t named it that.

The next move and some brands are already making it quietly is to build measurement infrastructure around state rather than action. Not “what did they click” but “what were they ready for.” Not “where did they drop off” but “where did the nervous system call it.” This reframes the entire analytics stack. Session replays stop being evidence of UX failure and start being diagnostic tools for dysregulation. Email open rates stop being vanity metrics and start being state signals — a 40% open rate at 11pm from a returning segment is a shadow buyer population, already decided, waiting for a frictionless path to completion. Cohort analysis stops being demographic and starts being physiological: who arrives regulated, who arrives activated, what does each cohort actually need.

The brands that move first on this are not building a better funnel. They are building a different kind of relationship with their customer’s body. That sounds strange until you realize it’s what every good physical retail experience has always done intuitively — reading the room, adjusting the pace, knowing when to speak and when to step back. The difference is that it’s now possible to do this at scale, systematically, with data you already have. The thrift store has always known this. The question is whether ecommerce is finally willing to learn it.

The more useful architecture separates by state, not by content type. Discovery experiences are built for regulation first — safety before proof, warmth before credentials, the absence of urgency as its own form of trust. Re-engagement is built for tone, not information density. Its job is to reduce threat, not add reasons. One unhurried sentence does more than a three-email nurture storm. And the conversion moment (the sales page, the checkout, the booking link) should be designed to do almost nothing. Remove the persuasion. You already did it. Let the person complete the action they were already moving toward.

The traditional funnel reverses this. It leads with desire and assumes safety is implied. That worked when attention was abundant and nervous systems weren’t trained to retreat. Neither of those is true anymore.

Monica Vinader sent this email probably because someone on their team understood that their list wasn’t a uniform audience moving through a rational sequence, it was a collection of nervous systems in different states, some of them carrying grief that a promotional cascade would activate before a single product image loaded. The opt-out was not a concession. It was co-regulation at scale. And it built more trust in one subject line than most brands accumulate in a year of nurture sequences.

The ones that will feel different are building something harder to copy than a feature. A nervous-system-informed brand doesn’t just have better copy or a cleaner checkout. It has a different theory of its customer, one that starts with the body, not the brief. That theory, built into the measurement stack, the content architecture, the re-engagement logic, becomes compounding. Every interaction teaches the brand more about what state its customers arrive in. Every sequence gets more calibrated. The distance between that brand and one still optimizing for argument grows wider every quarter.

The infrastructure of presence-based commerce is being built right now, mostly by people who don’t have a name for it yet. They just know that something about the old model stopped working, that the list is large but feels inert, that the conversion rate is fine but the customers don’t come back, that something is being produced that looks like loyalty but isn’t. What they’re sensing is the gap between compliance and desire. Between a nervous system that was managed toward a purchase and one that arrived there on its own terms.

The question isn’t whether to design for the nervous system. You already are. The only question is whether you’re doing it intentionally or leaving it to chance, and to whoever figures it out first.

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In a recent episode of Talk Easy, Sam Fragoso asked director Ryan Coogler how he reckons with the fact that his dreams pushed him away from home. Coogler’s answer was: “Sometimes home is the cost of the dream.” I’ve been thinking about that sentence ever since, not because it’s comforting, but because it’s honest in a way that almost nothing about ambition is anymore. It names the trade without softening it. The dream and the displacement are the same transaction.

He’s not the only one who has named it that honestly.

In 2018, Brady Corbet was in Norway, seven years into trying to make a film nobody wanted to finance, when he got the call he’d been waiting for. Just another Monday morning where his daughter needed piano lessons and someone was offering him a job that would solve everything and cost him only a year or two of his life. He turned it down. He kept writing, two to three hours every night after fourteen-hour editing days, what he later called “a sickness.” The Brutalist took seven years to make. He deferred his entire salary to get it financed. He and his partner made zero dollars on their last two films combined. The movie received ten Oscar nominations. He found out while directing commercials in Portugal, the first paycheck he’d seen in years. Not every story ends with a phone call. Most of them just end.

These stories are about a specific kind of wanting: irrational, embarrassing, privately held, inconvenient to everyone including the person doing the wanting. The kind that doesn’t make it onto a vision board because it can’t be made to look aspirational yet. The kind that reorganizes a life around an absence, costs things before it gives anything back, and cannot be explained to someone who doesn’t already understand.

The backlash against hustle culture was earned. But somewhere in the correction, desire got a rebrand. The vocabulary shifted: growth, alignment, intentionality, becoming. Aspiration with the embarrassment removed. And the embarrassment, it turns out, is load-bearing. It tells you the wanting is real. It tells you the thing you're reaching toward is specific enough and yours enough and large enough to be worth protecting from other people's judgment. Without it you are not at peace. You are just not trying.

Every category of building runs on the same fuel. Products, companies, brands, movements, the things that turned out to matter were almost always made by someone who wanted something that couldn’t be justified in advance, that required them to become a specific and inconvenient kind of person to produce it. The conditions under which certain things get made that could not have been made any other way.

But slop isn’t only a content problem. It’s what happens to products built without inconvenient conviction. To brands assembled from validated consumer insights rather than from something a founder couldn’t stop thinking about at midnight. To companies that optimized the wanting out of their culture in the name of scalability and psychological safety and quarterly coherence. Slop is the end state of desire fully managed. We have had slop problem even before AI.

Real wanting doesn’t scale. That’s the point. And the thing that doesn’t scale is, right now, the scarcest thing available.

Sometimes home is the cost of the dream. Are you willing to pay it or are you still looking for the version that doesn’t cost anything yet?

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***

First Kill. A League of Their Own. Vida. The L Word: Generation Q.

One season. One season. Cancelled. Cancelled.

The list is long enough that queer women have a reflex for it now. Find the show, love it fast, grieve efficiently. Don’t get too attached to the renewal.

There’s a name for the industry convention that made this inevitable. “Bury your gays” the unwritten rule, enforced long enough to become the norm, that queer characters don’t get happy endings. They die, they lose everything, they end up alone. It wasn’t subtext or personal bias. It was policy, baked into network standards, into what writers were told was permissible, into decades of stories where queer love was allowed to exist only as tragedy.

The escape from it felt like oxygen. Heartstopper, Red, White & Royal Blue, Heated Rivalry. Audiences lost their minds not because the stories were radical but because the endings were. The relief was the point. But look at the list. All of them are about men. Gay male love got its reprieve. The “bury your gays” era ended for one gender. Sapphic stories are still mostly dying. Or being cancelled before they get to an ending at all.

In 2022, Netflix cancelled First Kill, a lesbian vampire show starring a dark-skinned Black lead, two months after release. In its first full week, the show pulled 48.8 million hours viewed in a week, peaking at number three globally, sitting behind only Stranger Things and Peaky Blinders. It flirted with 100 million total hours in its first month. Heartstopper, which was renewed for two additional seasons, pulled 14.5 million hours in its first week. Less than a third of First Kill‘s numbers. The official explanation cited completion rates and cost. While First Kill had strong initial viewership, it did not have the "staying power" of other hits and failed to meet internal thresholds for completion rates. Reports indicated that only 43-44% of viewers who started the first episode finished the entire season, a key metric for Netflix renewals.

The successful shows didn’t just get investment. They arrived pre-validated. Heartstopper was a graphic novel with a massive devoted readership before a single frame was shot. Red, White & Royal Blue was a bestselling novel. Heated Rivalry had a passionate book audience that de-risked every commercial decision before the writers’ room opened. The studios didn’t take a leap of faith. They followed a paper trail of demonstrated demand.

The industry does not apply the same logic to sapphic stories. It never has.

Then, Netflix announced that Bridgerton season five will centre Francesca and Michaela, a sapphic love story inside one of the most expensive, most watched romance franchises on the planet. The conversation that followed was framed as fan outrage, adaptation betrayal (Michaela is Michael in the book), culture war cosplay.

That framing is a distraction.

The actual story is simpler and more damning: sapphic love has never been properly invested in at this scale. And the industry has spent decades mistaking its own disinvestment for a market signal.

The logic is circular and it has always been circular.

Lesbian stories are niche, so they get small budgets. Small budgets mean limited reach. Limited reach confirms the niche assumption. The assumption never gets tested because the test would require spending money the industry decided in advance it wouldn’t spend. The cancellations get logged as data.

Heated Rivalry is the clearest example of what actual investment looks like, the full production, the full press tour, the full algorithmic push. Straight women built shrines to Shane and Ilya. The show crossed over because it was built to cross over. It didn’t find a mainstream audience. It intentionally created one.

Sapphic shows have not been built with so much intention.

As a strategist, I have been in the rooms where people talk about target audiences and in many cases heard “the audience for this or that is too small” said with total confidence, by people who had never run the campaign, never given the idea a real budget. My co-author Elio on this essay is that audience, the one the room decided, without evidence, was insufficient. We came to this argument from different positions. We arrived at the same conclusion: the industry didn’t measure the appetite for sapphic love. It assumed it. Then it built a system that confirmed the assumption and called it the market.

— Kima

Historians will say they were best friends.

Eloise this, Eloise that. Mourning this, grieving that, so many excuses for the online rejection of the unreleased, unedited and still-filming season 5 of Bridgerton. Michaela Sterling was introduced on season 3 of the show, not as an immediate love interest for Francesca, but as a wink, a callback, a taste of something new. The writers are brewing a beautiful sapphic love story, and in response we are seeing the most thinly veiled, excused homophobia online.

A story that’s not just interracial same-sex love, but true to the show’s brand. Bridgerton thrives on diversity, every flavor of relationship drama, desire, intimacy, the exploration of female sexuality and overall, gossip. This fits perfectly.

The real shock is that the loudest haters are straight women. The same audience that can “hey girl hey” their way through five seasons of Heartstopper is now saying “ew girl no” to a sapphic Bridgerton storyline. A storyline that is, for the record, completely on brand. Bridgerton has always been about desire in all its forms — intimacy, scandal, the exploration of female sexuality, the thrill of wanting what you’re not supposed to want. A queer love story at its centre isn’t a departure. It’s an arrival.

And the homophobia isn’t even clean. It hides behind Eloise, behind book canon, behind concern for Francesca’s character integrity, a character they apparently loved so much they never noticed she’d spent three seasons being profoundly uninterested in men until she wasn’t. Loving a quiet, introverted woman who takes time to discover herself and then assuming that self must be straight is not literary loyalty. It’s a failure of imagination.

Queer suffering sells. It always has. The industry learned this long before it learned anything else about queer stories. That tragedy travels, that grief gets reviewed, that audiences will stream a queer love story right up until the moment it asks them to simply want the happy ending. Suffering gives the mainstream viewer an exit. The bury your gays rule wasn’t just policy. It was a business model. And even now that the explicit rule is gone, the emotional logic of it persists in which queer stories that earn cultural prestige are almost always the ones where someone pays a price. Brokeback Mountain. Carol. Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Beautiful. Devastating. Safe, in the way that loss is always safe, it asks nothing of you except feeling.

Joy is a different ask. Joy just requires you to want these two women to have each other. No lesson, no permission, no tragedy to process from a comfortable distance. Just wanting it the way you’ve wanted it for every Bridgerton before. That’s what makes some people so uncomfortable. Not the love story. The unambiguous happiness of it.

Here’s what I know from the inside of that audience: we show up. We have always shown up, for scraps, for subtext, for the one episode where something almost happened. Give us a full season, a real budget, the Bridgerton treatment and we will burn the internet down in the best possible way.

Straight women love inserting themselves into gay men’s love stories. The Heated Rivalry TikTok edits have billions of views. So the question isn’t whether there’s an appetite for watching women love women. The question is whether anyone is ready to admit that appetite exists beyond the queer community that it was always there, waiting for someone to actually make the thing.

Bridgerton is making the thing.

— Elio

There is one more layer the industry’s risk model has never accounted for. Michaela Stirling is a dark-skinned Black woman. The love story being asked to sell is not just sapphic, it is sapphic and interracial and centred on a Black queer woman as the object of desire, as the romantic lead in a lavish period drama that has historically reserved that role for a very specific kind of body. This combination has never been given this much platform. And it is worth saying plainly: First Kill was also cancelled, despite its numbers, with a dark-skinned Black lesbian lead at its centre. Bridgerton season five is, among other things, a second test of something the industry failed the first time.

Season five will be watched. Massively, undeniably, historically watched. For the first time, a sapphic love story arrives with every advantage those successful gay male adaptations had. A proven franchise, a global platform, a showrunner with creative control, and an audience that has already demonstrated, four times over, that it will show up for this world. The excuse the industry has used for decades, no proof of demand, too niche, not enough data, is gone. Bridgerton is the proof of concept the industry asked for and never funded.

The numbers will come in. And the industry will face the question it has avoided by starving sapphic stories before they could prove anything: what do you do when the market you said didn’t exist turns out to be the biggest story of the year?

Whether it finally reads the data. Or finds a new way to call the evidence a niche.

— Kima & Elio

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Fran Leibowitz often says, without apology, that she finds most people profoundly boring and has no interest in pretending otherwise. She says it in that particular Leibowitz way: not cruel, not performed, just stated, the way you’d report a weather condition. The audience or the interviewer usually laughs nervously.

Right now, everyone is talking about taste, especially here on Substack. Which references you’ve absorbed, whether you can tell the difference between something technically excellent and something that merely appeals to you, how to develop an eye that isn’t just a mirror of your algorithm. These are real ideas. The most interesting versions of the conversation, the ones asking whether taste is a skill, or how personal style gets swallowed by trend, are circling something true.

But they keep stopping at a particular door.

The door that opens onto the question of whether developing real taste requires you to sit with things that don’t want to make you comfortable. Not things that are bad. Things that are honest.

Susan Sontag was not comfortable. Neither was James Baldwin, nor Joan Didion at her sharpest. These are figures we claim to admire. We quote them in bios. We put their books on our shelves. What we don’t do, not with any real consistency, is let them actually land.

Sontag's argument in On Photography is that taking a picture is a way of refusing an experience converting it into something possessable, a souvenir, a proof which is not uncomfortable until you recognize that this is exactly what we do with ideas we admire. We collect them. We photograph them. We do not let them alter us.

Didion's argument in The White Album is the other side of the same problem. "We tell ourselves stories in order to live," she opens but the essay that follows is not a celebration of narrative. It is about what happens when the story stops holding. She describes imposing a narrative line upon disparate images, using ideas to freeze what is actually shifting and incoherent and what she's diagnosing is not a failure of intelligence but a survival mechanism. The stories work, and because they work, we never interrogate them. The problem is we rarely notice the moment they stop being true and start being protective.

These arguments don't ask you to agree. They ask you to hold still while the logic reaches you, and then recognize it in yourself.

Taste conversation should not just be about aesthetics.

The good news, or the version that feels true at first, is that we all have taste. It already lives inside us. This is something a lot of Substack writers on the topic have gotten genuinely right: taste isn’t about what’s trending, it’s about what lights you up before you’ve had a chance to talk yourself out of it. That quiet inner yes. The small spark before the justification kicks in. Most of us have had the experience of being drawn to something, a song, a room, jewellery, clothing or a sentence that we immediately second-guess because it doesn’t fit the aesthetic we’re performing.

We used to think the threat to taste was the algorithm. That infinite scroll and optimized feeds were flattening everything into a beige sameness, serving us back what we’d already clicked on, narrowing our world into a mirror. This is true and worth taking seriously. But there is a subtler version of the same problem that the algorithm conversation misses.

Palatability, the condition of being acceptable to receive, has quietly become an ethical position. The idea, now widely internalized, is that discomfort in the receiving is evidence of harm in the delivery. That to be made uneasy by an argument is a legitimate reason to dismiss it. That the package determines the worth of the contents.

This is different from asking that ideas be made accessible. Accessibility matters. The willingness to translate, to meet a reader where they are, is a real form of generosity. But accessibility and palatability are not the same thing. One is about clarity. The other is about advance permission. And we have confused them so thoroughly that the confusion now shapes what we’re able to actually hear.

Leibowitz is not accessible in the palatability sense. Her way of covering topics can be considered terse, occasionally contemptuous, and entirely uninterested in softening her premises so you can feel held while you receive them. Neither was Sontag at her most rigorous dissecting how we sentimentalize suffering, how illness becomes metaphor before it becomes policy. These are uncomfortable arguments. Not because the delivery is hostile. Because they name something you already sensed and had been hoping to avoid.

You can usually tell where someone’s taste ends and their comfort zone begins by watching which parts of an argument they can hear. The parts that critique something they already distrust land cleanly. The parts that require them to hold still while the same logic is applied to something they’re invested in a community, a self-image, a belief they’ve organized their identity around suddenly require a different tone. More caveats, warmer framing, better manners.

Admiration is not the same as alignment. We know this intuitively when it comes to aesthetics, you can find a room beautiful without wanting to live in it. But we rarely apply it to ideas. We collect thinkers the way we collect references. We build a very curated library of voices we’ve decided represent our taste, and then we engage only with the parts of those voices that confirm what we already believe.

This is not just a taste problem. It is what happens when comfort becomes the unit of measure for a whole epistemic culture when the question shifts from “is this true” to “does receiving this feel okay.” Leibowitz, Baldwin, Sontag: we keep them on the shelf because they signal something about who we are. We don’t let them do what they actually do, which is make the existing map insufficient. A thinker who only confirms the map you already have isn’t a thinker you’ve actually read. They’re a reference you’ve acquired.

What would it actually mean to develop taste when it comes to how we think?

It would probably look uncomfortable. It would mean sitting with a Leibowitz or a Baldwin not just to extract the quotable parts but to follow the argument all the way to where it stops flattering you. It would mean noticing the moment you reach for a reason to dismiss something and asking whether that reason is principled or just protective.

The taste conversation has a lot of good ideas about how to train your eye. Fewer about how to train your tolerance for being genuinely unsettled by what you see or read.

The question isn’t whether every uncomfortable idea is worth your time. Not all friction is instructive. Some things are just wrong, or cruel, or not worth the energy.

The question is harder than it looks: what has actually moved you lately? Not upset you. Not offended you. Moved you in the direction of a thought you didn't have before.

If the answer keeps being same type of ideas by same thinkers, you haven’t developed taste.

You’ve built a very refined cage and called it a curation.

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Kima Sargsyan is a strategist and futurist writing Perceptio, exploring the honest contradiction between what categories expect and what only you can credibly do.

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Someone told me recently that I was doing great personal branding. For my level (I am a senior director of strategy), they said, it was important to build that recognition, to be known, to be findable, to make myself legible to the right rooms. It was meant kindly. I accepted it that way. And then, a few days later, it started to bother me.

Not because they were wrong about the effect. But because I realized I had never once tried to build a personal brand in the way they meant it. I have no content calendar, no three-word positioning, no deliberate architecture of recognition. Whatever I am building, I have been building differently and I didn’t have clean language for what that was. Which meant the compliment, however generous, was praising me for something I hadn’t done, in a framework I didn’t operate in, toward a goal I wasn’t sure I wanted.

That gap between what they saw and what I think is what this essay is about.

The advice that froze in place

In 2016, a career coach named Dan Schawbel published a guide called Me 2.0, updated from his 2009 original, and the core advice hadn’t changed: pick your niche, claim your keywords, optimize for search. The book sold well. The logic was sound, for its moment. There weren’t that many people publishing, so legibility was leverage. If you had a clear lane and showed up in it consistently, you accumulated followers, credibility, opportunities. The mechanism was essentially visual: be recognizable. Give the algorithm, and the humans behind it, a clean signal.

What nobody anticipated was that everyone would do it.

Legibility, universally adopted, becomes noise. A feed of clearly-branded, consistently-posting, niche-identified people is not a gallery of distinct voices anymore. It has become a recognizable wallpaper you scroll past without stopping. And yet the advice persisted, it is still being given, still being followed as though the conditions that made it work hadn’t dissolved entirely.

Legibility became the floor, not the ceiling

Pierre Bourdieu spent much of his career mapping how taste functions as social currency how what you signal you know positions you within a hierarchy before you’ve said anything substantive. The personal brand, at its peak, was a perfect Bourdieusian instrument: a portable display of cultural capital, optimized for rapid legibility across platforms. The problem is that when everyone deploys the same instrument, the hierarchy it was designed to produce collapses. You cannot distinguish yourself through a mechanism that has become the default.

You can follow someone for two years, recognize their face, know their content pillars and feel absolutely nothing when they leave the platform. They were present. They were never felt.

What actually stays with you

There is a different kind of person. Quieter in their surface, harder to describe in a sentence. You don’t always notice them entering a room. But something shifts when they do, the conversation slows into something more specific, people start saying what they actually think, the evening gets a texture it didn’t have before. Weeks later you find yourself mid-sentence trying to explain them to someone else and realizing you can’t. Not because there was nothing there. Because what was there doesn’t reduce.

We have good language for charisma. We don’t have good language for this.

The closest word is presence, but presence has been flattened into a synonym for confidence or command, which is not what I mean. What I mean is something more like tuning the sense that someone has decided, at a level below performance, what frequency they’re operating on, and holds it consistently enough that other people can actually feel it. Not admire it. Feel it.

Erving Goffman argued that all social interaction is performance, that we are always managing the impressions we make, adjusting our presentation to the demands of the stage we’re on. He was right. But he was describing a constraint, not an aspiration. The people who stay with you long after the conversation ends are the ones who found a way to perform the same person in every room. Not rigid, not unchanged by context, more recognizable and continuous.

This is easier to recognize in other people than to build in yourself. Which is, of course, the point.

The accumulation problem

Most personal brands are mirrors. Held up to whatever the culture is valuing this quarter the references, the aesthetic, the three-word positioning and you cannot find the person behind them.

The accumulation problem runs deep. There is a version of personal richness vast references, many interests, the aesthetics of intellectual abundance that substitutes volume for signal. The person who has read everything and wants you to know it is performing a kind of presence, but the performance is pointed outward. It asks you to be impressed. It is not interested in whether it has moved you. Moved you not as in made you emotional, but as in: changed something in the room, left a mark on the afternoon, altered the way you hold a thought afterward.

Being noticed is something that happens to your surface. Being felt is something that happens to the other person. Let’s call this sensorial identity (perceived by the senses).

The question the old model never asked

The attention economy built an entire infrastructure for being noticed through feeds, metrics, the curated life and almost no infrastructure for the other thing. The clear, the loud, the consistent-in-a-recognizable-way: these travel. What doesn’t travel is the quality of someone whose presence you can only describe by its effects. She walked in and the conversation got more honest. He left and the room felt smaller. I don’t know what she said exactly, but I’ve been thinking about it for weeks.

These people are simply way more located. They know what they actually believe, not what they’ve read, not what they’re supposed to believe, not what the room seems to want and they hold it without apology and without performance. The result is not intensity. It’s warmth with a spine. A stillness that isn’t absence.

The distance between those 2 questions is not a matter of strategy. It’s a matter of whether you’ve done the slower, less legible work of knowing what you actually are and whether you’ve stopped cycling through versions of yourself long enough to find out.

I don’t know if what I’ve built has a name. The people who felt it knew.

Further Reading

For readers interested in how identity gets performed, optimized, flattened and occasionally inhabited the following offers useful context:

books

• The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman (1959)

• Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste by Pierre Bourdieu (1979)

essay

• “The Attention Merchants” — Tim Wu (2016)

documentaries

• Abstract: The Art of Design (2017–2019)

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I went back to One Battle After Another three days after it won. The win didn’t surprise me but because the loss felt different after. The film I’d been ambivalent about became something I needed to settle, on my own terms, with the result already in the room. I sat with it differently the second time. More carefully. Like I was looking for the thing the room had seen that I’d missed.

This is not how the attention economy is supposed to work.

What the Oscars produce is something slower and stranger , a loop that runs in both directions. The ceremony sends you back into the work. The work sends you forward into the ceremony. Meaning accumulates in the interval between them, in a place the feed has never figured out how to reach.

There is a Japanese concept for what that interval is doing: ma. Written 間. Usually translated as negative space, which is accurate but not entirely. Ma is not emptiness. It is interval, the active presence of what is not there. The rest that gives the preceding note its weight. The silence after a question in which meaning is still being formed. Ma is not the container. It is what the container makes possible.

The Oscars, unintentionally, are a ma machine. Your brand content calendar, almost certainly, is not.

The feed doesn’t want you to build sequence. It wants you to fill it.

The attention economy’s founding logic is that attention is a commodity, it’s always extractable, optimizable, tradeable. What gets optimized is the rate at which new stimuli replace old ones before the nervous system finishes processing them. Engagement metrics measure stimulation, not comprehension. Virality measures transmission, not understanding. The system was never designed to produce discernment. It was designed to produce return visits.

This is the logic most brand content cycles are built on, even by people who know better. Post consistently. Stay visible. Feed the algorithm or it will deprioritize you. The editorial calendar becomes a treadmill: not a strategy, but a maintenance regime. Something to keep the brand present enough to avoid disappearing, busy enough to feel like progress.

What it produces is a brand that is always speaking and never arriving. Volume without cadence. Presence without shape. The content exists. The audience has nowhere to go with it.

Sequence is a design principle. Most brands have never used it.

The person who watched every nominated film before Sunday didn’t do it because an algorithm served them efficiently. They did it because a future event gave their attention a shape, a reason to sustain it past the point where the feed would have moved them on. The ceremony functions as a horizon. It tells you that what you are doing now will mean something later, in a specific context, in conversation with other people who did the same thing.

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It is a design principle. And it is almost entirely absent from how brand content gets built.

Sequence means your October piece creates a question your November piece answers but only if the audience stayed. It means a product launch isn’t a moment but a structure: a signal that something is coming, the thing itself, and then a return that rewards the people who were paying attention from the beginning. It means your audience can be in an arc rather than just a feed. The difference isn’t production volume. It’s intentional shape.

Awards season works as sequence because each event does something the previous one couldn’t. The nominations create stakes. The guild awards build evidence. The ceremony resolves or refuses to resolve the tension that’s been accumulating for months. Each piece of the sequence retroactively changes the meaning of everything before it. One Battle After Another winning Best Picture made every earlier guild win mean something different in retrospect. That is ma as architecture. The interval between events isn’t dead air. It’s where the audience does the work of caring.

Most brand content has no such architecture. Each post is complete in itself, optimized for the moment of contact, designed to perform on the day it drops and be forgotten by the week after. There is no before that creates context. No after that rewards attention. No interval that accumulates meaning. Just fill.

The evacuation of the interval.

This is the attention economy’s most efficient move: not destroying the horizon event, but removing the ma from inside it. Leaving the structure standing while optimizing away the thing the structure was built to protect.

Brands do this version constantly. The campaign structure exists. The content calendar holds. But the interval, the space designed to let meaning accumulate, gets filled in. A teaser followed immediately by the reveal. A launch followed immediately by the recap. No gap in which the audience develops anticipation, investment, the particular attention that only comes from waiting for something that matters. The architecture of sequence, hollowed out.

This is what your analytics are measuring when engagement looks fine but nothing sticks. The audience is touching the content. They are not inhabiting the arc.

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The ceremony is over. Somewhere, right now, someone is watching Sinners for the first time because it won on Sunday. They didn’t need the marketing. They needed the horizon, and the season that built toward it, and the result that sent them back.

That gap between the event and the meaning it generates, between the release and the audience it slowly finds, is a design problem. And it has a design answer: build the interval. Give your audience somewhere to be between the things you make. Let the sequence do what the feed cannot.

The only question is whether you’re building a content calendar or an arc. They are not the same thing. Only one of them compounds.

Kima Sargsyan is a strategist and futurist writing Perceptio, exploring the honest contradiction between what categories expect and what only you can credibly do.

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The pomegranate (nur) is an Armenian symbol of fertility, abundance, good fortune, and the resilience of the Armenian spirit. This famous closing line for Armenian fairy tales, “Three pomegranates fell down from heaven: One for the story teller, one for the listener, and one for the whole world,” symbolizes the sharing of wisdom, the connection between people, and the spread of stories. The phrase is traditionally used to conclude Armenian fairy tales, ensuring the story's lessons (the "pomegranates") are distributed to the narrator, the audience and the world at large.

***

I spent part of my early career trying to convince people to visit Armenia.

I was inside a travel agency, responsible for translating a country, its mountains, its khachkars, its apricot-colored light into something that would make a stranger in a foreign city open a browser tab and think: yes, that one. That’s where I’m going.

I did not fully understand, at the time, what I had been handed. I do now.

You may wonder why I’m writing about this now, in the middle of … well, everything. The answer is simple: when the world feels unstable, people reach for somewhere to belong. Destinations don’t matter less in chaos. They matter more. The need to feel held by a place, to be somewhere that has a texture and a logic and a version of hospitality that predates the news cycle, doesn’t disappear when things get hard. It intensifies. Which means the people responsible for translating places into feeling have never had a more important job.

Destination marketing is one of the most demanding forms of storytelling that exists in professional practice. I don’t say that the way people say every industry is creative if you look at it right, because I don’t actually believe that. Some things are richer and more resistant and more interesting to communicate than others. A country is one of the hardest. A country where the people doing the communicating are working against a century of being misunderstood, unmapped by the mainstream cultural imagination, reduced to a handful of facts the world half-remembers — that is something else entirely.

Questions the brief doesn’t ask

The Armenia brief, as I came to understand it, was a cascade of questions that had no clean answers. How do you describe food through a screen? Make someone feel the sourness of matsun, the weight of dolma assembled by a grandmother who learned from another grandmother, the specific pleasure of lavash that was baked that morning? How do you establish safety without the word safety, which announces the anxiety it’s supposed to dissolve? How do you hold the mythology lightly — the first Christian nation, the wineries, the genocide that reorganized a diaspora across three continents without making it a burden the traveler has to carry? How do you say: we speak your language, meaning not linguistically but culturally, meaning you will not be lost here, meaning the hospitality is real and the curiosity goes both directions?

The most honest brief in the industry

Strategist and marketers should practice destination marketing at least once. Not as a specialty. As a discipline. It is a compressed version of every hard communication problem that exists. The place punishes abstraction. It demands specificity in a way most briefs never force you to confront. If you can learn to describe a place, its smell, its texture, its social contract, through a screen, to someone who has never been there and is not yet sure they want to go, you can communicate anything.

Here is where destination marketing stops being a tourism question.

Every country has an official story and a lived one. The official story is flatter, safer, more photogenic. The lived one has texture and contradiction, the kind of specificity that makes people feel, when they encounter it, that they’ve been trusted with something true. The real job is to find that story and make it legible without destroying it. Not flatten it into stereotype. Not over-mythologize it until the locals don’t recognize themselves. And not sanitize it into content, drone footage of something ancient, a tagline about discovery, a traveler’s face expressing the correct amount of wonder. Beautiful. Inert. A place they’d like to visit someday. Someday is not a booking…

Three paintings, three Californias

Fast forward many years. I no longer work in the travel industry. But after visiting the Bowers Museum last year, I found myself wishing I’d had a chance to tell the stories of California.

I was there for a client meeting, Santa Ana, not the California of the imagination, not Venice Beach or Napa or the highway Joan Didion used to drive like a reckoning. I had a few hours before my flight back to Toronto. I found the Bowers Museum. And I stood inside it thinking: this is the thing. This is what it looks like when a place becomes a subject rather than an object.

The Bowers is a strange and beautiful institution. Its permanent collection holds more than 100,000 objects spanning pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, Native American art, Asian and African traditions, Pacific Islands and threaded through all of it, a gallery dedicated to California’s own visual history. The argument the museum is making, just by existing as it does, is that California is not one story. It never was. It is where the Pacific Rim arrived. Where Mexican and Spanish traditions became architecture and land and rancho and then became other things. Where Indigenous life was systematically erased and then partially recovered and then held alongside the erasure, both things true at once.

I stood in front of a painting called Jeff, the Horse Ambulance Driver of the County Hospital, by William Joseph McCloskey. Jeff is a person. A specific person, named, assigned a role that sounds like an institution unto itself. It stopped me completely, it was so particular. This was California rendered as character study, as portraiture of labor and daily life, not as golden hills and infinite promise. A few steps away, La Buenaventura by Charles Percy Austin using his wife, Martha Austin, as a model for the tarot card reader depicted. Entertainments like fortune telling and flamenco were staged for tourists during pageants and fiestas at the California missions.

And across the room, an untitled work by Emilío Vásquez, the Chicano muralist the Bowers had commissioned decades earlier, “The Godfather of Chicano Artists,” whose work insisted that California’s face was also brown, also Mexican, also working-class and sacred simultaneously.

Three paintings. Three entirely different Californias. All true. None sufficient on its own.

California doesn’t need to be marketed. I loved it way before I ever landed there. I read Didion and I read Steinbeck and I arrived already knowing what I was walking into. I landed fluent. The place felt like recognition rather than discovery.

But what the Bowers made visible is that the California marketed for export, the one I absorbed through literature and film, is one slice of a deeply layered identity. The rest of it is there: in the plein-air paintings and the Chicano murals and the Mesoamerican artifacts that remind you this region’s cultural memory stretches thousands of years before IG, influencers, content.

This rarely happens on purpose. It happens because someone found a true detail and refused to simplify it. Didion wrote about California’s Santa Ana winds as moral weather — hot, electrical, the kind that makes people behave badly and suddenly the state had an interior real life description that no tourism board had commissioned.

Mayes wrote about a farmhouse in Cortona named Bramasole (meaning "to yearn for the sun"), that needed everything, it was in need of extensive renovations, having been vacant for years, with a vineyard overgrown with brambles. Suddenly, Tuscany became the geography of reinvention for a generation of readers who had never been there and already loved it.

These were not campaigns. They were specific acts of noticing. And they traveled further than any tagline.

The gap between what a place carries and what it’s been given credit for

What I learned from trying to market a country is that the best destination work plants something that grows after the campaign ends.

That gap between what a place carries and what it’s been given credit for is where every honest campaign begins. Most campaigns never find it. They start instead with the version that’s already legible, already expected, already a little flattened. And they produce beautiful content that confirms what people already assumed.

The destination marketer’s job and the strategist’s job more broadly is to go one layer deeper. Past the official story. Into the specific, resistant, living thing underneath.

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My Spotify Wrapped told me my listener personality was 21 years old this year. I am not 21. The culprit was phonk, a genre I had no conscious plan to spend so much time with, made almost entirely by bedroom producers in their teens and early twenties who don’t share a stage, a label, or a city. Between them, they have generated hundreds of millions of streams. None of them asked the industry for permission to do it. Most of them didn’t need to.

Where it all came from

Phonk is, at its origin, an act of archival devotion. The word itself is a misspelling of funk, coined by SpaceGhostPurrp, a rapper from Carol City, Miami, who used it to describe his relationship to the underground hip-hop of 1990s Memphis, the chopped and screwed, tape-dubbing, deliberately lo-fi sound that artists like DJ Screw, Three 6 Mafia, and Tommy Wright III built in the margins while New York and Los Angeles collected the record deals. Memphis rap was the first workaround: when labels wouldn’t sign you, you burned cassettes and passed them through record stores and car windows. SpaceGhostPurrp formalized the term with his 2011 SUMMA PHONK tapes and 2012 debut album Mysterious Phonk: Chronicles of SpaceGhostPurrp, describing phonk simply as “slang for funk”, a living link to the G-funk he’d grown up hearing.

For most of the 2010s, phonk lived where Memphis rap once had: underground, devoted, largely invisible to anyone not already looking. Between 2016 and 2018 it was among the most-listened genres on SoundCloud, the hashtag #phonk consistently trending within a small but dedicated global community. The industry wasn’t paying attention. It rarely does to things it didn’t seed.

What changed everything was a mutation, and the mutation happened in the last place most people would have thought to look: Russia. A cohort of Eastern European producers, working independently, often anonymously, in what they would call drift phonk, took the Memphis textures and stripped them of their contemplative drag. They sped everything up, foregrounded 808 cowbells and distorted bass lines, and produced something that felt designed for motion: kinetic, loop-able, mood-establishing within four seconds. This wasn’t the slow, hazy introspection of classic phonk. It was the sound of a car taking a corner too fast at midnight. It was, almost immediately, exactly what TikTok needed.

A world that looks like it sounds

Phonk is not just a genre. It is a complete visual language, and understanding that language is essential to understanding why it spread the way it did.

The original phonk aesthetic was built on deliberate degradation: VHS distortion, purple-tinted photography, the grain and static of analog tape, 1990s luxury sedans shot from below. Album covers featured skulls, occult symbols, graveyard imagery. The visual references were simultaneously nostalgic and menacing — not the nostalgia of comfort, but the nostalgia of something dangerous that has been half-remembered and half-invented. Drift phonk added racing culture, anime characters with electric neon auras against black backgrounds, the JDM car scene’s Tokyo street aesthetic. Brazilian phonk brought more saturation, more aggression, angry protagonists from Jujutsu Kaisen or Dragon Ball Z, glowing at the edges, surrounded by dark.

What all of these aesthetics share is a consistent emotional proposition: intensity without explanation. Nothing in the phonk visual world asks you to understand it before you feel it. The imagery is designed to produce an immediate physiological response — adrenaline, unease, focus — the same way the music is. This coherence between sound and image is not accidental. It is why phonk attached itself so readily to workout videos, drift clips, and anime edits: the music and its visual world were already speaking the same language, and content creators discovered that pairing them was not necessarily creative work but recognition.

The aesthetic also does something more subtle. It signals exclusion. To know what the imagery means (the skull, the VHS distortion, the specific shade of purple, the particular anime character chosen for his aggression rather than his charm) is to be inside the world rather than outside it. For a generation with a highly developed sensitivity to things packaged for them, this distinction matters enormously. Phonk looks like something that was not made for you to find. That is precisely why people keep looking for it.

The artists the industry didn’t make

The figures who emerged from this moment resist every assumption about how music careers are built.

Kordhell is Mick Kenney, a 46-year-old guitarist from Birmingham, founding member of the extreme metal band Anaal Nathrakh, who started producing drift phonk in 2021 when he heard the genre and recognized something familiar in its darkness. His single “Murder in My Mind” has accumulated over 860 million Spotify streams. DXRK is Tahar Bendjedi, an Algerian producer who began 2022 as an unknown and ended it as the most-streamed artist from the entire Middle East and North Africa, with 19 million listeners across 182 countries. DVRST (real name Valera Zaytsev) is Russian, his “Close Eyes” a gym anthem on multiple continents. Hensonn, from the Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia, started producing at 15, taught himself entirely through tutorials; his track “Sahara” has accumulated more than 24 billion streams on TikTok. Slxughter, born in Russia and now based in Brazil, reached 981 million unique YouTube users in a single month in early 2026, more than twice Taylor Swift’s audience and more than six times Bad Bunny’s, according to data YouTube provided to the New York Times. His official channel has 189,000 subscribers. He doesn’t appear in the platform’s top 100 weekly artist rankings.

These artists share more than a geography of outsider status. Most of them prefer not to use their real names. Many give no interviews, maintain no public persona, and have never appeared on a stage. Hensonn, when contacted by journalists, communicates by email and asks not to be identified by name. This is not unusual in the scene, it is the norm. Black 17 Media, the label that signed most of the first wave of drift phonk producers, has described its roster plainly: many of the artists prefer anonymity and aren’t terribly social. Phonk, in their own framing, is outsider music.

The anonymity is worth taking seriously. In a cultural moment when personal branding is treated as prerequisite for artistic credibility, when the behind-the-scenes content, the parasocial relationship, the disclosed process are considered as important as the work itself, phonk producers have collectively refused the premise. The music has to stand without them. There is no face to attach to the feeling, no story to pre-process the experience, no artist persona to accept or reject before you’ve decided whether the track works. Do they think of themselves as artists or musicians? The question rarely gets asked, partly because no one can find them to ask it.

The few who do speak tend to frame what they do in functional terms:

• Production, not performance.

• Making tracks, not making statements.

Hensonn, in a rare written response, described his relationship to Memphis rap as one of emotional identification “the raw emotion and authenticity of that sound” without any aspiration toward the identity of artist in the traditional sense. He was a kid in Ukraine watching tutorials, then making things. The audience arrived uninvited.

The dismissal and what it costs

There is a familiar critique of phonk, and it is consistent enough to deserve examination rather than dismissal.

The genre is formulaic. The structures are short, repetitive, built for looping rather than listening. It samples without creating, loops without composing. It is, in the most damning version of this critique, functional music: a soundtrack in search of its content, engineered for the doomscroll rather than the listening session. The New York Times piece that brought Slxughter’s numbers to public attention captured this tension in its headline: “The Soundtrack of the Doomscroll Generation.” The phrasing is mildly damning — music as passive absorption, the unconscious hum beneath hours of vertical video. And there is something true in it. Most people who have heard phonk did not actively choose it. It arrived while they were watching something else.

But the critique misses the structural point. The formulaic qualities of drift phonk the dark intro, the slow crescendo, the sudden heavy drop are not evidence of laziness but of precision. The structure was engineered, consciously or intuitively, to serve the specific demands of short-form video: a lead-in that builds anticipation, a drop that lands at the moment of visual climax. It is form following function as rigorously as anything in commercial design. The question is not whether this constitutes art in the traditional sense but whether the traditional sense is the right measure.

The same pattern played out with Memphis rap. Underground sounds from young men with no cultural capital, ignored for decades, later recognized as foundational to virtually everything that followed in American pop music. The critical establishment’s relationship with underground music has historically been one of belated recognition followed by retroactive elevation. Phonk is not different in kind, only in speed and scale.

The dark side of the drop

Phonk’s explosion on TikTok was explicitly linked, from early in its viral spread, to what the Times piece called “alpha male culture” a loose constellation of gym content, dominance signaling, and anti-vulnerability masculinity that found in the music a perfect sonic embodiment. The aggressive forward momentum, the visual grammar of skulls and racing and barely-restrained violence, became shorthand for a particular performance of masculinity that is having a significant cultural moment. Phonk did not create this culture. But it became its soundtrack, and in doing so it inherited the culture’s ambiguities.

The genre’s audience is predominantly young, predominantly male, and predominantly outside the cultural centers that used to define mainstream taste — Eastern Europe, South America, Southeast Asia. These are places where the original Memphis scenes are not historical reference but pure mythology, received through the internet without the context that would have constrained interpretation. This is the condition of any cultural form that travels far enough from its origin: Memphis rap had context — a specific city, specific circumstances, a specific community that shaped what the darkness meant and who it was for. When that music was absorbed by producers in Russia and Ukraine and Brazil, some of that context was preserved in genuine reverence for the source, and some of it was discarded. What remained was the feeling. And feeling, unmoored from context, is available for any use.

The genre’s anonymity, a genuine expression of its DIY ethos, also makes accountability difficult to locate. There is no artist to hold responsible for how the work is used, no label to pressure, no face to address. The music floats free of its makers and means whatever its audience needs it to mean. This is not a failure unique to phonk; it is the condition of viral culture. But it is worth naming, because the same qualities that make phonk compelling as a model — the refusal of persona, the primacy of the work, the independence from institutional scaffolding — are also the qualities that make it impossible to steer once it’s in motion.

Black 17’s Tyler Blatchley, reflecting on the difference between his first wave of artists and the newer generation, put it plainly: the pioneers each had their own creative logic, their own sound. The new generation, he observed, are watching the algorithm to see what performs and adjusting accordingly. They want hits and they want money. This is not a moral failure, it is the rational response to a system that has made viral success achievable from a bedroom at 19. But it is the point at which a culture becomes an industry, and something is always lost in that transition, even when everyone involved gets paid. Which is worth sitting with, because phonk is not the only thing currently making that journey.

What we’re really talking about

Here is where phonk stops being a music story.

Look at what the culture you actually consume is made of right now. The films everyone is watching are assembled from borrowed mythologies, genre references stacked on genre references, sampled emotional registers from properties that already worked. The social media content that spreads is short, mood-establishing in four seconds, designed to attach to behavior rather than stand alone. The advertising that cuts through has abandoned narrative for sensation: a vibe established in the first frame, a drop, a hold.

Short and hitting and passing, borrowed textures reassembled by bedroom producers (or writers, or directors, or brand strategists) who taught themselves on tutorials, optimizing for the drop, building for the loop, indifferent to whether it constitutes art in the traditional sense because the traditional sense stopped mattering to their audience before they started making things. The anxiety the cultural establishment currently feels about this — the sense that nothing is original anymore, that everything is a sample, that attention has collapsed into a series of four-second mood transactions — is the same anxiety the music industry felt about phonk right up until a producer from Russia and Brazil had a larger monthly YouTube audience than Taylor Swift.

The establishment’s mistake, both times, is the same: treating the form as a symptom of cultural poverty rather than as an adaptation to new conditions. Phonk didn’t emerge because its producers had nothing to say. It emerged because they understood, earlier and more precisely than anyone with institutional access, what the conditions of attention had become and what form would survive inside them. The culture we’re all making and consuming now is doing the same thing. It is not a lesser version of the culture that came before it. It is the culture that learned to live in the world that actually exists.

The only question left is whether you are building for the world that existed, or the one you’re actually in.

Kima Sargsyan is a strategist and futurist writing Perceptio. She helps brands locate the honest contradiction between what their category expects and what only they can credibly do. If your team needs someone to show what else is possible and challenge comfortable assumptions: let’s talk.

Polymarket recently announced a partnership with Substack, embedding live prediction market odds directly into newsletters. It sounds like a product update. It's actually more than that. Prediction markets have crossed a line from niche financial instrument to something everyone can use to narrate the stories and the future. That crossing is worth examining. Because the question was never really about accuracy. It's about what we want from knowing.

It’s a story about what happens when the infrastructure of belief and perception gets formalized. And I think brands are almost completely unprepared for what that means.

But first

The oracle was always there. Now it has a payout structure.

The term “oracle” is a nod to ancient Greece, where leaders went to the Oracle at Delphi to get answers on matters of state. When the oracle speaks, it doesn’t describe the future. It participates in making it. The prophecy shapes the behavior that produces the outcome.

Prediction markets are not new. The Iowa Electronic Markets ran their first election forecast in 1988 and outperformed professional pollsters 75% of the time. Best Buy and many other companies seemed to run internal prediction markets to surface what their own employees actually believed versus what they said in meetings.

What’s new is that the oracle is now public. And it’s pointed at everything.

Polymarket, one of the prominent prediction market platforms, now hosts contracts on product launches, company decisions, cultural moments, creative outcomes. Substack announced a partnership with them in early 2026, embedding live prediction markets directly into newsletters.

This is the moment worth pausing on. When a writer embeds a live prediction market in her newsletter, she’s no longer just analyzing what might happen. She’s creating the instrument through which her readers price it. Her editorial credibility becomes the liquidity that makes the market function. Her audience’s engagement becomes the mechanism that moves the probability. The line between the analysis and the bet, between the writer’s conviction and the reader’s wager, dissolves. I could easily add one just from dropdown menu as I was creating this post. It is that easy.

Readers can choose not just consume analysis anymore. They can price it. And the writer who shapes what they believe about the world is now, structurally, shaping what they bet.

The question this raises isn’t “is this useful for forecasting?” The question is: what happens to a brand and to a society in general when its future becomes a tradeable contract and the people setting the odds are the same ones writing the story?

A prediction market doesn’t just measure belief. It creates it.

Some people treat prediction markets as measurement tools with better forecasting, cleaner signal and less noise.

When a market assigns 34% probability to your product launch failing, that number gets shared. It gets written about. It gets seen by your potential partners, your press contacts, your next hire who’s deciding between you and someone else. The market’s forecast becomes part of the environment your launch exists inside. Perception and price become the same thing.

Brands have always lived inside reputation. What’s changed is that reputation now has a ticker.

The frame is always open now.

There’s a structural irony worth naming: the brands that built their power on narrative control, on carefully managed stories released on their own timeline, are the least prepared for this.

The legacy brand playbook is: control the frame. Choose when to speak. Shape the arc. Reveal, don’t expose.

Prediction markets invert all of this. The frame is always open. The market speaks whether you do or not. Silence doesn’t protect the story, it gets priced as uncertainty, which in a prediction market reads as risk.

The brands that thrive in an oracle economy aren’t necessarily the ones with the best products or the most loyal customers. They’re the ones with the most legible intentions. When people can read what you actually stand for, not what you claim, the market prices that clarity as confidence. Opacity becomes a liability.

The tool built to aggregate information rewards the brands that have already made information unnecessary. If what you do is consistent with what you say, there’s nothing to bet against.

Are prediction markets gendered?

There’s a harder question underneath this one, and it doesn’t get asked enough.

Whose crowd is doing the predicting?

According to SimilarWeb, Polymarket’s user base is 70.79% male. The same approximate ratio shows up in sports betting, in financial trading, in most structured forecasting environments. This may not be just a demographic accident. The platforms were built by specific people, for specific behaviors, and they attracted the communities that fit those behaviors. And that crowd has a particular relationship to risk, to confidence, to which futures feel worth betting on.

When a prediction market says your next cultural move has a 28% chance of landing, it’s worth asking: landing with whom? Whose priors are embedded in that number? Which communities aren’t in the room when the probability gets set?

Build something the market can’t price.

The obvious plays are avoidance and optimization—ignore the market and hope it stays peripheral, or learn the system and manage toward favorable probabilities. Both lead to the same place. One just gets there faster. The market prices your absence as uncertainty and your optimization as theater. Neither move changes what people actually believe about you.

The harder, more interesting option is to build something the market can’t easily price.

Not because you’re hiding from scrutiny. Because what you’re building operates on a timeline, a logic, and a set of values that don’t map cleanly onto a binary contract.

Complexity as strategy looks specific. It’s not “be authentic” or “have values.” It’s the deliberate construction of a brand that functions across multiple registers simultaneously, so that no single outcome can define it, and no single contract can contain it.

Complexity isn’t diversification for its own sake. It’s the accumulation of evidence across different surfaces, over time, that what you stand for is structural, not a position you took, but a condition you operate from. It makes you legible enough that people trust you, but irreducible enough that no single probability can hold you.

Don’t get good at being priced. Build the kind of cultural infrastructure that resists simple pricing through genuine complexity.

The bet became explicit.

Prediction markets are revealing something the last decade of brand strategy tried to smooth over: the market has always been betting on you. The Twitter conversation, the Reddit thread, the group chat where your campaign got dissected the morning after launch—these were always informal prediction markets, running without formal contracts, settling without payouts.

What’s changed is formalization. The bet became explicit.

And with that formalization comes a clarifying question that every brand now has to answer whether they want to or not:

That gap between the story you tell and the probability the market assigns is where strategy lives now.

Kima Sargsyan is a strategist and futurist writing Perceptio the honest contradiction between what your category expects and what only you can credibly do.

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Right now, as I write this (my 30th post on Substack), Hermanos Gutiérrez’s “Rain God” is playing in my ears. This has become my ritual—calming music, just instrumental flow. I can’t write into rhythm. I need the kind of sound that holds space without demanding much attention.

It’s a small thing. But it’s also everything. The music marks this as writing time, not scrolling time. It creates a boundary. Without it, the words don’t come the same way.

I think about rituals like this—how many we’re losing without noticing. How many transitions we shove under the rug and keep moving. The friendship that faded. The career chapter that ended. The version of ourselves we’re not anymore. We go about our day, but the event stays unprocessed in us, accumulating like dust we never wipe away.

We’ve learned to sell belonging faster than we’ve learned to build the conditions for it.

In January 2026, a fashion brand tried something different. Beit Kotn opened above Kotn’s London store—a creative residence for artists and creatives from across the Middle East and North Africa working on projects in London. It’s invitation-only, not commercial. You request a stay through their portal, describe what you’re working on, and if space is available, you can stay for free. No transaction.

It’s too early to say if it works. But the attempt matters. Kotn is building toward infrastructure for rituals we don’t have words for yet: how creatives belong somewhere temporarily while making work, how they build community without permanence. Whether it becomes a genuine third place depends on whether the community claims it, not whether the brand markets it.

This matters because we’re losing both ritual and third places simultaneously. Ritual has been aestheticized into content. Third places have been optimized into stores with communal tables. What made them work—repetition, stability, lack of transaction—has been stripped away.

But people are building new rituals anyway. For transitions businesses don’t recognize. In spaces that don’t photograph well. This essay maps that territory across three time horizons: what’s shifting now, what could crystallize next, and what worldviews might ultimately emerge.

PRESENT TENSE: We optimized for performance, lost the infrastructure

Ritual marks time, creates boundaries, anchors meaning. But we stripped the infrastructure while scaling the aesthetic. Morning routines became content engines. Meditation became something you track. The mechanism was simple: aesthetics photograph, infrastructure doesn’t. Performance converts to metrics, repetition doesn’t.

Third places followed the same pattern. Starbucks optimized for mobile orders because transactions are measurable, lingering isn’t. WeWork sold community aesthetics while designing for churn.

Here’s the connection: ritual needs somewhere to happen repeatedly. Third places provide that ground. When you optimize third places for transaction, they stop being places people return to. When people can’t return to the same place, ritual becomes something they perform once for content, not something they build over time.

The rituals people are building anyway

When a close friendship ends through slow fade, some people create closing ceremonies. One woman I know held a “friendship funeral” with her ex-friend before they went their separate ways. A designer created a bound book of every project from a ten-year chapter before resigning. An artist marks the end of a creative era by destroying one piece—not as failure, but as acknowledgment the work is complete.

These are rituals for losses businesses won’t name. No bereavement leave for “the self I used to be.” No ceremony for the creative direction you’re abandoning.

What Western frameworks miss

The Western framing is narrow—ritual as optional, third places as amenities. But in many Arab cultures, hospitality is obligation. The majlis assumes your door stays open. In Japan, ritual is woven into daily life—tea ceremony, seasonal festivals, how meals are served. Many Indigenous cultures don’t separate “place” from “relationship”—the gathering creates the place.

The rituals emerging in Western contexts don’t fit our frameworks. We lack language for what people are building. Or maybe we’re looking in the wrong direction entirely.

CONDITIONAL TENSE: 3 ways this could go

Presence becomes luxury product. Time without optimization becomes premium offering. Genuine third places as members-only sanctuaries. The wealthy pay for what used to be free: somewhere to return to, permission to not perform. Beit Kotn hints at this—currently free for MENA creatives, but the model could easily gate. Imagine: $5,000 annual membership, waitlist to join. What was built for creative community becomes amenity for those who can afford it.

Or ritual infrastructure goes hyperlocal. People stop waiting for brands. Monthly dinners rotate through homes. Grief circles meet in libraries. Artists’ studios open monthly for creative witness sessions. Discord servers prototype the coordination layer—not the ritual itself, but the scheduling that makes ritual possible without permanent place. The infrastructure is distributed, maintained collectively, owned by no one.

Or ritual design becomes accessible practice. Ritual design could democratize: templates for closing ceremonies, scripts for transitions, frameworks anyone adapts. Open-source, like recipes. A GitHub for grief rituals. A wiki for life transitions. The practice becomes transferable skill.

These aren’t predictions. They’re trajectories. Which crystallizes depends on who builds what, and whether they can let go of ownership.

SPECULATIVE TENSE: When ritual becomes essential infrastructure

Presence gets protected status. Like religious observance in some cultures, ritual time becomes legally protected. “Ritual leave” recognized like bereavement leave—not just for deaths, but for friendship endings, career transitions, identity shifts. Third places given tax status similar to libraries—communal infrastructure, not commercial real estate.

Or ritual becomes portable practice. If third places keep dying, ritual adapts. Becomes something you carry, not infrastructure you visit. This already exists in diaspora communities, digital nomads, climate migrants—people building ritual without permanence, connection without proximity. The question: can it scale, or do humans fundamentally need stable ground?

Or the Western framework itself is the limitation. This entire analysis assumes ritual and third place are separate concepts needing connection. Other cultures don’t split them. Gathering is ritual. Ritual creates place. Place enables gathering. The rituals we need might already exist in cultures we’re not studying. The third places we’re recreating might require ownership models we’re not considering—commons, not commerce.

What this means for brands: Support infrastructure you don’t control

The shift:

NOW: Ritual as performance, third places as branded experiences
NEXT: Ritual as infrastructure, third places as commons
AFTER: Presence as protected right, gathering as obligation

Most brands stay in NOW. Few reach NEXT: supporting infrastructure they don’t control, building spaces community shapes, accepting slow timelines. Almost none imagine AFTER: some human needs should exist outside markets entirely.

What NEXT looks like:

Coffee company creates conversation guides for difficult talks, gives them away free. Supporting the conversation, not just fueling it.

Calendar app enforces rest periods, treats silence as valuable as productivity. Making rest the default, not the add-on.

Creative tools company hosts monthly sessions for abandoned projects. The gathering becomes ritual container for creative grief—the ideas you’re letting go.

Restaurant holds monthly dinners for disenfranchised grief. Friendship breakups, career endings, identity deaths. The space provides what therapy can’t: communal acknowledgment.

The catch: none optimize for quarterly metrics. All require giving up control. Most will feel wrong to marketing departments trained to own community.

But brands that understand this—that support infrastructure without claiming it—earn something deeper than engagement metrics. They earn trust through generosity that expects nothing back.

The truth still holds: you can’t manufacture community, can’t brand belonging. The moment you try to own either, you destroy what makes them valuable.

Perceptio is now also on Instagram in case you want to follow: @perceptio.substack

I explored why third places can't be manufactured in this piece. The same problem applies to ritual: the moment you try to own it, you destroy what makes it work.

You can access the previous publications in The FUTURES series below:

Kima Sargsyan is a strategist and futurist writing Perceptio, exploring the honest contradiction between what categories expect and what only you can credibly do.

Few people bridge brand and product, which is exactly why it matters

In a job market being simultaneously hollowed out by AI and reorganized around who can actually ship, the conversation about specialized expertise versus generalist capabilities misses the real edge. The strategists who will remain dangerously important aren’t the ones who can “do a bit of everything”, they’re the ones who can move fluidly between brand vision and product execution without losing fidelity in either language. They’re not T-shaped. They’re not full-stack. They’re something else entirely: people who can see the system whole and intervene at the level where brand philosophy becomes product architecture, where cultural intuition becomes roadmap decisions, where the story you’re telling and the thing you’re building are the same act of authorship.

Jennifer Palais has lived this for 15+ years at Mozilla, Media Arts Lab and R/GA and other agencies working on clients such as Apple, Netflix, Google, Hyundai and Intel coordinating engineers and creatives, naming products and browser engines, orchestrating 50 million dollar production budgets across nine partner agencies to create cultural moments and world class products. This conversation is about what that actually requires, what it costs, and why most organizations say they want this integration but structurally often prevent teams from achieving it.

The “unreasonable” space between

Kima: At Mozilla, you were described as someone who “ensured brand principles were reflected in all product and UX decisions.” That’s the work most organizations say they want but actively resist because it slows things down and forces uncomfortable conversations. When you’re in the room and you see a product moving in a direction that violates brand truth, not just aesthetic consistency, but philosophical integrity, how do you intervene without becoming the person everyone learns to route around?

Jennifer: The truth is that sometimes I was the person who was routed around, and sometimes I was actively sought out.

You can’t be great in every room. In the product orgs I worked in, some partners recognized the value of what I brought and pulled me in early and often. They understood that when I pushed, it wasn’t about taste or preference, it was about making the product stronger as a system.

Others didn’t. Especially with a legacy product like Firefox, where long tenure can make change feel personal. In those environments, even well-supported decisions can feel threatening, and curiosity can give way to defensiveness.

What I learned at Mozilla is that this ultimately isn’t a logic problem, it’s a belief problem. Even people who claim to be purely rational are operating from a set of values about what matters and what doesn’t. I had user research clearly demonstrating the need for stronger brand expression in the browser, but if someone fundamentally doesn’t believe that aesthetics, emotion, or identity belong in software, no amount of data will convince them.

The way you avoid being routed around isn’t by forcing the argument harder, it’s by understanding where belief already exists and choosing your battles accordingly. With the tech client I work with now, belief is shared. They hired experts precisely because they want brand DNA embedded in the product itself, not layered on later as an afterthought. That alignment changes everything: the speed for delivering value increases directly because there is trust and ultimately the quality of decisions is more sound.

And increasingly, this is becoming the norm. It’s very hard to argue that brand doesn’t matter given the volume of evidence we now have. Brand won’t save a bad product, but it can absolutely make a difference for a serviceable product. Liquid Death is just water, but it tells a very specific audience, I see you. And at the end of the day, that sense of belonging is a product feature whether teams admit it or not.

Kima: The Lady Gaga/Intel GRAMMYs tribute required you to orchestrate 9 partner agencies, translate between Intel engineers and Haus of Gaga creatives, and create a cultural moment that hadn’t existed before. You wrote: “The engineers were lit up in a way I hadn’t previously seen.” What were you seeing that others missed? And is that specific kind of seeing—the ability to recognize creative potential across wildly different disciplines—something you can teach, or is it more like synesthesia?

Jennifer: As a strategist and a writer, I’m deeply interested in people, specifically in what lights them up. I’m always asking: what’s activating someone here, and why? What’s the cultural mythology at work beneath the surface? Why this moment, why now?

I was in the room the first time Intel’s lead engineers and Haus of Gaga’s creative directors met to discuss the project and begin planning. This was one year out from The GRAMMYs. I emphasize that I was in the room. You have to get in that room, whatever that room is for you. I wasn’t the only one there, but I was the only who caught on to what was happening relationally and emotionally between the participants.

What I saw surprised me. The engineers weren’t politely indulging the creative conversation, they were genuinely lit up by discussions of choreography, costumes, and performance. That almost never happens in these collaborations because people already have jobs. We are coming in to layer another deliverable on top of what they are already having to deliver on. But despite this, there was electricity all around that was contagious.

That was the signal. If I felt it, others would too. That’s when I knew the story wasn’t just the performance, it was the act of co-creation. So we built the narrative around the making of the show: the robots, the lighting, the technology, and the partnership with Haus of Gaga unfolding in real time. Intel didn’t sponsor a moment; they co-authored it. And by opening that process up, we invited the audience into something real.

As for whether that kind of seeing is teachable, I don’t think it’s synesthesia, but it is a kind of emotional sight.

I’ve always been able to sense what people are experiencing beneath what they’re saying. For a long time that was a curse. Over time, I’ve learned how to read the signal without being overwhelmed by it. That ability is empathy layered with cultural literacy and pattern recognition. You can teach taste. You can teach craft. You can teach critique.

But you can’t teach someone to care about any of it. Meaning you can’t teach someone to notice when a room shifts, or when something alive is trying to happen if it doesn’t already matter to them. And sometimes it feels a bit like I’m Cassandra, I see it before others do, and I have to convince the room.

In this case, I was able to sell the idea in and it worked.

The cultural reality that product people ignore

Kima: Steve Jobs famously said “customers don’t know what they want until you show it to them,” but he was obsessed with understanding what people were ready for culturally. You’ve worked on Apple, Netflix, Google—brands that succeeded not just through execution but through cultural timing. When you’re building product strategy, how do you distinguish between “the market isn’t ready” versus “we’re not explaining this right” versus “this is genuinely too early”? What are your signals?

Jennifer: I rely heavily on gut but it’s a trained gut.

This is something Rick Rubin talks about: make the thing you want to exist in the world. But that only works if the person doing it has spent years listening, watching, and paying attention. It’s the human element of taste that everyone is talking about so much more now that AI has entered the picture.

I’ve studied culture for a long time. When something feels right to me, it’s not magic, it’s just attunement. It isn’t only about seeing patterns, which I do think AI can do well with large data sets. It’s about pulling in from inputs so disparate over such a long time that the attunement, the taste comes to the fore quite naturally.

To your question, I separate those three scenarios you mentioned by listening for different signals.

If the market isn’t ready, I usually feel curiosity less than urgency. People lean in, they ask questions, but they don’t feel compelled to change their behavior (which is what we want). The idea makes sense intellectually, but it hasn’t landed emotionally. In that case, you wait or seed the market.

If we’re not explaining it right, the signal is frustration. People want it, but they’re tripping over language, framing, or something else we need to uncover. That’s almost always a storytelling problem, not a product problem. When reframing unlocks understanding quickly, you know you’re early-but-viable.

When something is genuinely too early, the response is flat. No pull. No resistance. No heat. That’s the hardest one, because founders and teams are so bought in. It’s difficult if someone can’t see what is so clear to you.

I think my confidence in my decision making comes from breadth. I read across generations, across subcultures. I read high-brow and low-brow. I talk to people with wildly different lives and values. Over time, all of that creates a kind of internal radio tuned to the zeitgeist. When something hits, I know it. There’s no doubt. And when it doesn’t, I don’t pretend otherwise.

I learned this lesson early. My first job out of graduate school, I worked on Fiji Water. The aquifer had just been purchased. I sat in the design meetings for the bottle and label and genuinely thought the branding was too precious, that it was too pretty to work. I really hated that bottle! And I was wrong. I wasn’t a trained strategist yet, I hadn’t developed my own taste fully and so couldn’t really understand what others might want.

So today, I don’t ask, “Is this a good idea?” I ask: Is there emotional readiness? What cultural work is this product going to achieve? And whatever the answers are, do I believe this enough to stand behind it? I keep pushing on all fronts until I feel that lock in, that attunement.

Kima: Most product people treat “understanding the market” as competitive feature analysis and user surveys. But you’ve talked about being a “lifelong learner” who goes deep, who reads obsessively, who studies things that seem unrelated until suddenly they’re not. What cultural shifts are you tracking right now that you think product leaders are completely missing because they’re too busy looking at their category?

Jennifer: I like to say whenever everyone is going left, choose to go right. Right now everything is AI. So I would go towards the most human experiences possible. Live events.

I love AI in a lot of ways. I don’t have an existential dread about it because I use the products. They don’t scare me - they just help me right now. The kind of work I do, I just can’t see them doing all of it. I’m not naive though. I see it is taking certain jobs but I’ve also been around long enough to have seen this happen with a lot of things. Web 2.0 wiped out Flash developers for example. My job has morphed and changed. I used to be a digital producer and then product manager etc. My skills have deepened and there has been a progression but we don’t have digital producers anymore. It’s not a job.

I also tend to be a very optimistic person and I am aware of that but I do think you get what you look for to a degree. If you eat too many apples you will get sick. Phones use is fine unless you doomsroll for hours.

Having said all of that, I think that bespoke experiences are what brands should be building. Large and small. Live events when humans get to be as human as possible. Create things in a way that only humans can.

Draw, paint, skate, sing - whatever it is. Bodies moving, creativity flowing and all in a community environment. We will all be using AI tools in our jobs. No doubt about that. Ultimately though we want people to feel something viscerally and remember that feeling at the moment of choice.

There’s so much research on why live events are important for memory but because it is expensive many brands can’t or won’t invest in it.

The question of legitimacy

Kima: You’ve moved between creative agencies (R/GA, TBWA\Chiat\Day) to tech companies (Mozilla). Every time you cross into a new domain, there’s a moment where you have to establish credibility with people who speak a different language. Engineers don’t automatically trust brand people. Brand people don’t automatically trust product people. How do you earn legitimacy in rooms where your dual fluency initially makes you suspect? And has there ever been a time when you’ve deliberately hidden one side of your expertise to make the other more palatable?

Jennifer: At Mozilla I experienced culture shock as really the only brand leader in the company, in a company where brand is not valued. It was strange because I came on board because Firefox is such an iconic brand. There’s an exciting and timely story there to be told that I really wanted to tell, in the product and in culture.

The irony is that I was told I needed to hide my brand knowledge and experience in order to be taken seriously in the product organization. Ironic because a brand focus and a reasonable marketing spend is what would have solved a lot of Firefox’s problems. People know the name but think Firefox is no longer around, no longer relevant.

They didn’t really understand what I did. They all thought - she comes from marketing. The funny thing is that at that time I had very little actual marketing experience. Marketers were always my clients.

I had to work very hard to sell product ideas in a way that leadership and cross functional teams could understand. My shorthand no longer worked. It was no longer easy. I couldn’t rely on intuition because I didn’t have enough foundation yet. It was a rigor that grew me and that I’m grateful for. Productive but not enjoyable.

I’ve come to learn that when people trust themselves then they know if they can trust you. So I found that most of the distrust I encountered was based on their own fears of being wrong. When I came to the table with 100% confidence that is what would win the room over. If they could smell fear they went for the kill.

That kind of environment to the extreme is ineffective because you want to be able to share ideas and poke holes as a team. No one is 100% sure all the time, you need to be able to brainstorm.

But when a product isn’t doing well and a lot of things have been tried people can lose faith and begin looking to blame. It’s human nature to a degree and I had to remember it wasn’t about me.

Kima: There’s a specific kind of loneliness that comes with being able to see multiple systems simultaneously, you understand why the engineer is frustrated, why the creative is defensive, why the business lead is panicking, but you’re also the only person in the room who seems to see that all three problems are symptoms of the same misalignment. Does holding this dual lens ever make you feel like a translator who can never fully live in either language? Or is that exactly where the power lives?

Jennifer: This is such a poignant question and I have to thank you for asking it. The power is in having as many lenses as possible to address the work at hand. I love Farnam Street’s series on mental models because it is about bringing truth and insights from all the disciplines together psychology, economics, physics, biology, statistics etc The more models you internalize, the more patterns you start to see, and the faster you can cut through noise.

However, when I’m a strategist I don’t get to build, when I’m a product manager I’m kept away from brand and marketing decisions and when I’m a producer I don’t get to make strategic brand or business decisions.

No matter my title I realize the job is to communicate in a way that can be heard. If I do that then I will be successful in translating. I’ve had to go over heads a couple of times at crucial junctures. It didn’t make me popular with the leaders at that time but I’m not going to let a project fail. They knew I was right and adjustments were made, but to me it isn’t about being right. I want the project to succeed. I want the client to win. I want the creative to shine.

Where I am now at R/GA they hire for low ego and they want the ideas from everyone. They want everyone to participate no matter their title. Most places say this but we really are all empowered. There is the understanding that serving the client is a team sport. No single one of us is going to be the hero. We have to work together and that’s how I most love working. It’s fulfilling to all be pulling in the same direction and feeling that momentum.

When the synthesis becomes something else

Kima: You named and shaped an experimental browser as both a philosophical concept (feeling calm and in control online) and a technical product (a forked browser engine with custom UX). That’s not just “brand meets product” that’s building a world where the distinction doesn’t exist anymore. When does the integration of brand and product thinking become so complete that you’re not executing someone else’s vision but authoring something fundamentally new? And if that’s the endgame of the dual lens, why do most organizations never let strategists get there?

Jennifer: I think this question is really about authorship and the reality that most strategists and product managers are not in roles where they’re able to truly author.

In the case of the experimental browser work you’re referencing, the starting point wasn’t a feature set or a market gap. It was a belief about the relationship people should have with technology, specifically, that software can reinforce calm, agency, and cognitive control rather than erode it. Once that belief is established as non-negotiable, everything else follows: naming, in-product sounds, logo, colors, defaults, interaction patterns, technical decisions, what the product explicitly refuses to optimize for. At that point, brand is baked into the product. They’re the same system. You can’t talk about one without invoking the other.

When meaning is structural, every downstream decision either strengthens or violates that logic. In my experience across both product organizations and creative agencies, that level of coherence is rare precisely because it requires trust in long arcs, comfort with ambiguity, and a willingness to let one person or a small group hold the frame before the proof exists.

The experimental browser I worked on had a very small core team. From the branding side, it was the Head of Firefox Product, the UX Desktop Director, and myself. We named it, chose the logo and icon, defined the in-product sounds, colors, and overall system, and I hired and managed the agencies involved and we had 1 user researcher and 10 engineers. Had all decisions been brought to committee, the coherence would have collapsed.

That’s why I’m drawn to working models where a clear, singular vision is allowed to exist, not because teams aren’t essential, but because authorship is. Larger teams are often needed to bring ideas to life, but without someone (or a small group), the visionary (or visionaries), holding the frame end-to-end, you will lose the magic.

Kima: When you look at the strategists and product people coming up now, the ones who are trying to become dangerously smart in the way you’ve become, what do you see them optimizing for that’s actually going to limit them? What are they getting wrong about what this dual lens really requires?

Jennifer: I don’t feel dangerously smart (though I appreciate the compliment!) but I do feel dangerously experienced. To that point, I think optimizing for a title is limiting. It is best if someone is excited about the experience they are going to have at a company or on a project.

I didn’t have much of a plan and while I don’t think that is a formula or something I would recommend to anyone who wants stability - please remember that there is little stability out there anymore to be had.

So I truly believe it is best to optimize for what excites you. Alternatively, you can optimize for what you are good at. Because being good at something is exciting in and of itself.

From the point of view of dual lens, I don’t think it is required to be focused on both product and brand. What I think is more important is to understand that if you are doing one you must consider the other. Respect the need for both.

If you are a product manager, make sure you pull in your marketing and brand team. You don’t have to be the one to do it - you only need to know it is as important as what you are doing. And vice versa - if you are the brand manager or product marketing manager, have respect for your product team. Know that they can pull in the brand in a way that will drive it home in the product. Understand they are up against many constraints and learn how to communicate with them in a language they can understand.

Synthesis question

Kima: If we’re honest, the dual lens isn’t about being “well-rounded” or “T-shaped.” It’s about being willing to live in the discomfort of never quite fitting into anyone’s org chart, never being fully legible to either side, and doing work that most people won’t understand until it’s already shipped (or in the case of the experimental browser, not shipped). So what makes someone actually want this? What makes it worth it to you?

Jennifer: I’ve never really fit cleanly into an org chart, and you’re right, it isn’t about being well-rounded which is an over simplification many make.

As AI lowers the barrier to building products, people are also going to be building products, and by default, also building brands from scratch. Product creation and brand can’t be separated anymore, you have to bake meaning in from the start. You can outsource either, but you can’t pretend one doesn’t matter.

What makes the discomfort worth it is landing here, now, with a skillset that is genuinely distinctive. Most people come in from either the creative side or the product/business side. Having fluency in both is rare, and in my current role it’s not optional, you simply couldn’t do the work without it.

For a long time I couldn’t see where this path was headed, I would take roles because I was excited about them - not certain where they would lead. That uncertainty was the cost. But the path is more clear to me now in this market, and because of that I feel good about the tradeoffs I’ve made in the past that have brought me here.

Kima: Thank you, Jennifer. You've named something most of us feel but can't articulate: the loneliness of seeing multiple systems simultaneously, and the power that comes from refusing to choose between them. For those of us with mixtape careers, paths that look incoherent until suddenly they're not, watching you move between Mozilla and R/GA, between engineers and creatives, between brand philosophy and product architecture, it's permission. You didn't wait for a role that made sense. You made the work matter anyway. Thank you.

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January 2026 started so heavy in so many places across the globe. I was actually debating whether to post this today. Do people need my thoughts right now? What would help? Should I just go inward and only write when everything feels ok? I know “everything will be ok” isn’t something we all arrive at the same time. But February just started, and I wanted to invite us to start again. To show up for ourselves and others. To hope and to create in the most radical and resilient way possible.

So today, the thoughts are different.

On ambition

There’s this pseudo-intellectual way of talking about ambition, vision and intention. Everything sounds figured out. Clean philosophies. Clearly reasoned aesthetic choices. Ambition as something you can strategize.

But that’s not how it works.

Ambition is a dance between two things that seem opposed but aren’t: the seriousness that gets you to show up for your practice consistently and the joy that makes it sustainable. You need both. Without seriousness, you’re just playing. Without joy, you burn out. The real work happens in the tension between them.

But here’s what I’ve realized: you can’t sustain ambition alone. Sometimes you need to see something. Sometimes you need proof that another way of thinking exists, another way of making exists, another way of holding yourself accountable exists. That’s where reference points come in.

Sometimes you need to see something to know you can pursue it. Sometimes you need to watch how someone else holds seriousness and joy at the same time. Sometimes you need proof that there are other ways. They’re breadcrumbs. Ways of thinking that remind me what’s possible when you commit to something deeply enough. When you hold seriousness and joy at the same time. When you refuse to simplify.

Reference points are about inspiration. They don’t have to be from your field at all. Like mines are not. Here are some that are alive for me right now.

1. Paeulini — The intimacy of repetition

Focus as ambition

Chantal’s photographs are often the same people—herself, her partner, friends. Film photography. This intimacy of repetition is often achieved through a consistent, almost diary-like repetition of capturing everyday, intimate moments, such as the human body, domestic scenes, and personal relationships. That consistency, that refusal to constantly find new subjects, teaches you something about patience. About faith in the idea that staying with something, really staying with it, reveals things that moving on never will.

Instagram | Website

2. Career Archetypes — Meaningful vocations

Meaning as ambition

Joel’s work is about “helping the spiritually and creatively inclined pursue meaningful vocations.” That phrase alone—meaningful vocation—lands differently. It’s a reference point that says: work is so much more than salary or title. It’s not even just about visibility. It’s about whether it means something to you. Whether it’s aligned with something real. That reframing changes everything about how you think about ambition.

The Career Archetypes by Joel Uili

Helping the spiritually and creatively inclined pursue meaningful vocations in the 21st century.

3. The Charisse Report — Being both inside and outside

Duality as ambition

Charisse lives in two worlds simultaneously. She’s embedded in beauty industry culture and also critically analyzing it. She’s inside and outside at the same time. That dual position teaches something crucial: you don’t have to choose between commitment to your field and honesty about what your field is doing to culture. You can hold both. It’s harder than picking a side but it’s the only way that actually feels true.

The Charisse Report

The things I don't always discuss but constantly think about, inside and outside of the beauty world.

By Charisse Kenion

4. Jana Sojka — The universe inside one color

Depth as ambition

Jana returns to blue obsessively. Blue—the color, the feeling, the experience of it—is infinite if you look long enough. The repetition is meditative. She’s showing what deep focus actually looks like. Ambition doesn’t always mean expansion. Sometimes it means excavation. Sometimes it means going deeper into what you already love.
Jana’s posts on IG make me stop and reflect every time I see them:

“blue is a letter
that no one sent 
yet everyone recognises 
the handwriting

it is read with the skin
read with silence
read at night
when words are too heavy"

Instagram | Website

5. The School of Critical Design — Design as Ethics

Responsibility as ambition

Critical Design isn’t asking what something looks like. It’s asking what design is for. Their design principles aren’t about aesthetics, they’re also about asking hard questions before you make anything. This is ambition as responsibility. It’s harder to work this way. But it’s the only way that feels honest now. It makes you slow down and think about what you’re actually adding to the world.

Even “small” notes like the one below show intention:

Website

6. Lucy Cotter — Reclaiming Artistic Research

Knowledge as ambition

Lucy wrote a book that’s basically a conversation with 24 artists about what research actually means when artists do it. Not academic research. Not market research. Artistic research. The second edition features a new essay, “Artistic Research in a World on Fire,” that explores how art creates knowledge differently—through material, embodied, spatial ways of knowing. It’s essential for anyone doing any kind of research. It reclaims the term from academia and puts it back where it belongs: in the hands of artists and makers asking their own questions. I’m recommending the expanded second edition from 2024.

Website

What I’m looking forward to

There’s one more thing I wanted to name here. I’ve been thinking about the ecosystems we build around our work. About collaboration. About commissioning illustrations for a Substack that doesn’t exist yet. About the idea that if you keep building something thoughtfully, the people and resources show up. Isn’t this the real ambition?

I want to do that with Perceptio. Commission design work. Create conversations between different kinds of minds. Make it a place where thinking doesn’t happen alone. That’s the ambition I’m holding for this year.

So this is an invitation: What’s in your pocket right now? What is cracking you open? What people or practices are teaching you something about how to move forward?

With love,
K

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Kima Sargsyan is a strategist and futurist writing Perceptio, where she helps people and brands locate the honest contradiction between category expectations and what only they can credibly do.