On this page:

• Who Candice is, in one paragraph.

• The video version of the conversation.

• The rabbit holes, every reference from the conversation, linked.

• Chapters, timestamped, so you can jump straight to what pulls you.

About Candice Walker

Candice Walker is a cultural analyst and the writer behind The Fashioned Mind, a Substack that dissects the psychology of fashion: the human insights and motivations underneath consumer behavior and cultural shifts. Based in the UK, she digs into why we buy what we buy, why trends take the shape they do, and what our aesthetics say about who we are trying to become. In this conversation we mapped the full spectrum of what gets sold to women as a life: girlboss, tradwife, soft life, and the third thing quietly being built in between. Check out Candice’s newsletter below:

The Fashioned Mind

Culture. Trends. Theory. It's the psychology of fashion, dissected.

By Candice Walker

The video

The rabbit holes

Everything we referenced, for your own falling-down:

• The Fashioned Mind, Candice’s Substack. Brands, trends, theory. Start with her piece on masculinity and the looksmaxxing trend, the one we discussed on air. Read this: The psychology of: Male beauty article

  The Fashioned Mind

  The Psychology of: Male beauty

  Young men are being pushed towards the right. Incel culture permeates feeds, shifting behaviour in a dangerous direction. Solving these ‘male issues’ is vital for the health and flourishing of society…

  Read more

  3 months ago · 2 likes · Candice Walker

• Sophia Amoruso’s 2014 memoir #Girlboss, the book that named an era. Nasty Gal, Glossier, The Wing, Outdoor Voices: the whole 2015 to 2018 arc, and the 2020 collapse.

• Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, the corporate ancestor of the girlboss, and a reminder that every generation renegotiates what ambition is allowed to look like.

• The podcast Candice and I were both listening to on the rise and fall of the girlboss.

• Ballerina Farm and Nara Smith, the 2023 to 2024 face of tradwife content. Nara has said she doesn’t consider herself a tradwife.

• Despite the appeal of quick internet money, creator jobs are declining in appeal. Instead, young people crave stability and offline success.

• Soft life in its original context: Nigerian influencer culture and Black Twitter in the late 2010s, rest as resistance for Black women specifically, before global TikTok flattened it into matcha and Pilates.

• Sharmadean Reid, founder of The Stack World (and before that WAH Nails and Beautystack). Candice brought her up as the proof point: a Black single mother from London building in public, and what her visibility made possible for the women watching.

• Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now? Chanté Joseph’s British Vogue piece that lit up the internet, and the reframe underneath it: work and fulfillment quietly replacing romance as the dominant dream.

Conversation chapter list

00:00 Meet Candice Walker, cultural analyst

02:19 Girlboss: empowerment measured in valuation

03:58 Lean In vs. the brattier girlboss

04:20 Tradwife: submission reframed as serenity

07:42 Soft life, and what it meant before TikTok got it

09:12 Commodified rest: selling ease back to women

11:50 Aesthetic without credentials: can we trust what we see?

14:20 Fake empowerment: the system monetizes its own rejection

16:02 Who’s allowed the lifestyle: class, race, resources

17:58 Enter the portfolio career

20:13 US, UK, Canada: same trend, different speeds

22:07 Women leaving corporate: social media trend or job market reality

23:31 Work replacing romance: the Vogue piece

25:26 The silent assumption: a partner behind the scenes

26:50 What about the men: peacocking and the leisure gap

30:25 The third option, and who’s building it

32:26 The end of the template

34:20 Six months from now: we’ll check our own predictions

I have been thinking about what it looks like and feels like to have new dreams and goals in your mid-30s. You already have some experience, and some good things have been accomplished but also some hunger for more. On the other side there is a certain type of grief of everything that you wanted to be but you are not, and there is a chance that some goals should stay in the past. You know not the right time, place, or circumstances anymore. That type of thing.

I have been struggling with this topic this past month on who I want to still be, what I want to stand for and what has absolutely no importance anymore. One thing you need to know about me is that I don’t engage easily in what is good or bad or right or wrong online because these conversations are all very boring and binary. I think we need to put so much nuance and context into everything we evaluate, our lives included. I don’t want to take anybody’s templates and try to fit in, it is not going to work, I know.

What I do everyday whether you call it career, work, vocation and so on is very important to me. I figured I still have many many goals and I wanted to share with you my approach to them.

I need to use bees as an example. When you think about what a bee produces, most probably honey is what comes to mind. I learnt that they never need as much honey as they make. Honey is just fuel that keeps her flying. It was us humans that turned her surplus into her whole reputation because it was the part we could put in a jar and sell.

Then I found out something more interesting about the bee. When a bee finds good flowers, she flies home and starts moving in a tight figure-eight on the comb, that movement is called waggle dance. The angle of the dance, when read against the sun, says which way to go. The length of it says how far. She takes something she saw, out there, alone, and turns it into directions the whole hive can follow. Here is how it looks like:

Now let’s think about us, humans. Everything you are asked to produce is honey: the deck, the code, the spreadsheet, the plated dish in the restaurant. It is what you are measured on and paid for and, let’s be honest, you should be good at it. But honey is also the most replaceable thing about you. Plenty of people make “honey” especially with AI now. More and more people do faster and cheaper and sometimes with better quality than you can. And yet people still want to work with you specifically.

What they remember is your dance aka your point of view, the particular way you see a problem that nobody else in the room sees quite the same way. That is the part with your name on it, and the only part of your work that cannot be copied, because it did not come from a template. It came from you, your unique way of experiencing the world, your way of thinking, talking, showing, researching etc. I think you got the point.

Think of anyone whose take you actually trust. Are they ideal or do they produce the best work every time? Maybe. But more likely that’s not it. You’re not drawn to a specialist only for the quality of work you could get from a thousand others with near-identical portfolios. You want to hire and keep certain type of people because you trust their ability to understand the right and the wrong in your context, to use their intuition to correct themselves when needed, to be decent about their limits and their advantages. You hire them for their perspective, their point of view which is built on top of all the things I shared with you.

A point of view is not a pile of opinions, and you will not build one by having more takes or posting them louder. Watch what the bee actually does. She flies out and sees something firsthand, then comes home and dances it. The flying is the raw material. The dance is the point of view, the moment private experience becomes a way of seeing that other people can act on. You cannot dance a field you never flew to. I personally don’t care how you flew somewhere, you may have taken detours, you may have got the direction wrong, the point is now you came back and you have a map, you have a solution.

So the real work of becoming someone worth listening to is mostly the work of going out. Fly further than the job requires. See things in person, sit in rooms you were not invited to. I want to call this a kind of exposure therapy, in the sense that some of it is so uncomfortable. Who am I to even think about doing this, being here, going after this big dream of mine?! Then, you need to learn to carry it home and say it clearly, so a private thing you noticed becomes something other people can use. This takes courage. Sometimes you’re going to get it wrong, and you need to practice it anyway. Be wrong in front of people.

None of this depends on “being big”. A bee weighs almost nothing, and her importance has nothing to do with her size and everything to do with where she goes and what she brings back. Your most valuable asset was never your output. It is your perspective, and no one else is standing exactly where you are.

When I started my career I spent so much time perfecting my “honey”. I got very good at the deliverable and at delivering. What took me longer to see is that the deliverable was never the point. The thing worth building was the way I saw the world, and you only get that by going out and living enough to have something to report.

I always want to be hired for my perspective, my way of thinking because everything else is replicable now. RuPaul said it best, you need charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent.

The honey is the part people can always ask for because it is visible and tangible. But the dance is the part that is yours and that they are really looking to hire.

One of them you can get from almost anyone. The other you have to fly out and earn, a flower at a time.

With love, and see you out there chasing new flowers,
K

P.S. I will share more on how to develop your perspective in upcoming weeks/months.

On this page:

• Who Michael is, in one paragraph and where you can connect with him.

• The rabbit holes, every reference from the conversation, linked.

• Chapters, timestamped, so you can jump to what pulls you.

About Michael LaVallee

Michael is an award-winning creative brand strategist with ten years across creative, connections, and GTM strategy, 360 campaign execution, social (paid and organic), thought leadership, experiential, and digital content. He’s been called a scrappy strategist who doesn’t settle for “good enough,” a creative team’s best friend, and a “yes, and” collaborator who’s never scared to be the hand raiser in the room. He’s worked across CPG, retail, gaming and entertainment, music, cloud and tech, B2B, and healthcare, for a client roster that runs Google Cloud, Live Nation, PlayStation, Oreo, TUMS, ChapStick, Hanes, Champion, Nexium24HR, Amazon, DSW, HBO, Halls, and the IL Lottery. He studied theatre at Columbia College Chicago, planning to act, before a senior-year solo performance class rewired his whole relationship to creativity (see: the steak). When he’s not doing strategy, he’s producing music, singing, songwriting, and shooting and editing content for his solo project, Kyzr Blue.

Music: Stream + watch Michael’s music

Instagram: @KyzrBlue @thatscreaminggay

TikTok: @Kyzrbluemusic

The rabbit holes

Everything we referenced, for your own falling-down:

• Ionnalee (also known as iamamiwhoami), the Swedish electronic artist Michael kept secret for years. Visual-album pioneer.

• Vivaldi, The Four Seasons, specifically Winter, Michael’s favorite. He played upright bass for eight years and somehow made first chair without ever practising, a mystery to this day.

• RAYE, “Winter Woman”, off This Music May Contain Hope, which samples Vivaldi’s Winter. Michael’s bridge for anyone who wants the classical thing in a modern wrapper. Play both back to back.

• AI cat soap operas on TikTok, the joy-core rabbit hole. Fat cat gets dumped, hits the gym, revenge-bodies his way back into her regrets. Now episodic, now voiced, now with villain cats stealing fur. No single link, just go find them and lose an afternoon.

• Group 7, the TikTok experiment from earlier this year where an artist promoting a song split the whole app into “groups.” Everyone wanted to be in Group 7. It made headlines and died in a week. A perfect little case study in how fast a thing can get born and buried.

• Cruise culture, the one trend Michael will cop to being late on. Cruise-tok is a whole universe and he wants in.

Conversation chapter list

00:00 Meet Michael LaVallee, and his creative diary called Kyzr Blue

03:00 The monthly trend roundups, and the “hot gay POV” that started it all

04:15 Quick hits: night owl, cooked-for, film over photography, concert girl

10:00 Eclectic taste, and why he thinks visually first

12:00 The steak: a solo performance piece that rewired everything

16:30 Joy-core, AI cat soap operas, and cruise-tok

23:00 Ionnalee, UK Garage, and the music he kept secret

29:00 First chair on the upright bass, and a case for Vivaldi’s Winter

31:50 The strategy advice he thinks is wrong: stop piling on the data

36:00 AI, corporate America, and losing the plot

44:30 “Thank you, Diva,” on trying to be AI’s bestie

45:45 The notes app: a niece’s gift list, a lyric, and a spider haiku

51:00 What the work gives him, and the accidental path into strategy

56:00 The version of Michael that hasn’t made it to the work yet

On this page:

• Who Michael is, in one paragraph.

• The video version of the conversation.

• The rabbit holes, every reference from the conversation, linked.

• Chapters, timestamped, so you can jump to what pulls you.

About Michael Bolognino

Michael Bolognino spent twenty years in tech, the last thirteen at Google, before a quiet but total reckoning led him to coaching. He works with people who got what they thought they wanted and discovered something got lost along the way, helping them reconnect with themselves and use the careers they’ve built as a foundation rather than a cage. He and his husband spent two years renovating a falling-down house in the Berkshires, a project that became the unexpected origin point for both of their current careers. Michael describes his taste as “cute, weird, cute,” is a devoted thrifter and eBay obsessive, and is, by his own admission, a huge Mariah Carey fan.

Connect with Michael on LinkedIn

Check out Michael's website

The video

The rabbit holes

Everything we referenced, for your own falling-down:

• Rec League, the whisper network for great recs. Human recs only, on everything. Michael's collections run from vintage high-heeled Frye boots to a discontinued Comme des Garçons Dover Street Market cologne he tracks on eBay. Follow Kima while you are there too.

• Mariah Carey, as vocalist, writer, and lyricist. Michael singing one of her songs is here, and yes, it holds up.

• The Filomena, Architectural Digest feature on Michael’s house renovation

• Michael's inspiration list: Pee-wee Herman, Elsa Schiaparelli, Björk, tarot, Rossy de Palma, Pedro Almodóvar. More arriving on his website in autumn 2026.

• Thrifting and Goodwill as a regular practice. No link here, go outside and do your research.

• Uncompromising curation the Substack I brought up mid-conversation, but didn’t remember the name. Amazing resource by . Martha writes essays on money, identity and the art of building quiet wealth while living beautifully. Check her work out.

Conversation chapter list

00:00 Meet Michael Bolognino, golden handcuff breaker
02:38 Thirteen years at Google, then the crash
05:45 Quick hits: vintage, vintage, vintage
08:46 "Cute, weird, cute" and the discipline of restraint
11:36 Goodwill as ritual: the treasure hunt
14:23 Fifty eBay emails a morning, and his dad's Frye boots
17:34 The Mariah Carey confession
21:53 On not over-explaining your work
22:40 Why AI won't replace coaches: the fresh pasta argument
26:20 Sharing the quote vs. absorbing the nutrients
32:23 The Filomena: raccoons, two years of Thursdays, two new careers
39:24 "I make money serving humans"

With that logic in mind, most brand spaces are built to be seen from a distance. Very few are built to be lived in, to be experienced as deep as brand tries to reach with its products. Brand spaces are all survivable in the literal sense, but not in a way that makes anyone want to linger. This essay is about the difference, and about the layer of brand-building that decides it, the one that can’t pass through a screen.

I walked into the Issey Miyake store in Kyoto and didn’t know what I was feeling first. The building is a 132-year-old machiya, the kind of traditional townhouse that once dominated the city before concrete took over. Designer Naoto Fukasawa left the facade intact and built the interior around a single colour: sumi, the shade of charcoal ink diluted on rice paper. And there was a coolness to the space that air conditioning alone can’t produce, something the material itself was doing, the way old wood and stone hold temperature differently than drywall.

I had not yet looked at a single piece of clothing. My body had already decided what kind of place this was. It had also decided something more embarrassing, which is that I wanted to be the kind of person the space was built for. That is the actual trick of the store. It doesn't just make you want the clothing. It makes you want the identity of someone who deserves to wear Issey Miyake, and the clothes just become the means to that desire.

That store was doing something that took me a while to name. It was asserting a world, one with its own specific physical laws, a specific atmosphere, a relationship between the visitor and the objects, and leaving it to the body to figure out whether it belonged there. The sensory layer was not decoration on top of that world. It was part of the brand world.

Most brands are still treating sensory design of a space as the last mile. The strategy is set, the identity is built, the campaign is shot, and then someone chooses a store scent or approves a texture on the packaging. Sensory sits at the end of the process. Which means it's asked to finish a world it was never allowed to define.

That experience is produced by the accumulated sensory decisions: the weight of the door handle, the temperature of the room, the sound the floor makes, the smell sitting in the air at a level too low to consciously register but high enough to shape the tone of everything that follows. In the brands that get it right, these are the first thoughts, the material from which everything else is built outward.

Smell works differently because it bypasses evaluation entirely. Sound, colour, even texture can be absorbed while the analytic mind runs alongside them. Smell arrives in the limbic system directly, pre-judgment. It registers as environment before it registers as choice. A brand that controls its olfactory signature is making a claim about what the air of its world is made of.

I felt something similar earlier the same year when I was in Mexico City (CDMX) visiting Xinú fragrance boutique. Xinú understood this from the beginning, which is why its name means “nose” in Otomi. Founded in Mexico City in 2016, the brand builds its perfumes from the botanical richness of the Americas, and its stores from the same logic. The Juárez boutique occupies a former car garage, transformed by Esrawe Studio and Cadena Concepts into a wood pavilion surrounded by a living garden, each of the six signature perfumes displayed alongside the raw organic materials like plant, bark, resin that produced it. The store is not illustrating the brand. The store is the brand argument made spatial. You understand what Xinú believes about the relationship between place and smell by standing inside it, long before you have read a word of copy. It is minimalistic and maximalistic at the same time.

The perfumes themselves carry the same belief. They are inspired by the aromatic botany of the Americas. I left with a bottle of Copála, built around copal resin, the smoke of mesquite wood sitting against a powdery vanilla with pink pepper. The sculptural bottles are designed to be repurposed as flower vases or incense holders once the perfume is finished. That is world-building that invites the visitor to stay creative with the purchase.

Sensory design is not a new trend, it is older than branding as a category. The problem and challenge we have right now is that the digital expression of brands is homogenizing everything. Visual identity can be generated. Tone of voice can be approximated.

Test this: walk into your own brand’s space and notice what what you sense. If the answer is nothing, there is work to be done.

I think about this even for the newsletter you're reading right now. What it would feel like if this existed in the physical world. What it would smell like. What the texture would be. When I imagine it as an object, it isn't a book or magazine. It's closer to a museum, or a library, because the subject is cultural intelligence in the broadest sense, and that doesn't fit between two covers. You wouldn't read it so much as move through it, enlightening in one room, overwhelming in the next, imperfect by design and by naturee. It would smell like a deep, warm, sweet white floral with an earthy, woody undertone beneath it, something that announces itself before it settles. I don't know if that world will ever exist outside my head. But the fact that I can describe it this precisely is the whole argument.

One sense is missing from the brand space that I just described and it's deliberate. Sound is 's territory. As I was writing this piece, he published about the high cost of free sound and how Saint Laurent systemized sound into a brand code. It nicely picks up exactly where this essay stops.
Read it.

Sound of Brand

The High Cost of Free Sound

I write about how brands are using music & sound — and how those choices impact marketing. I reference real campaigns, good and bad, because the conversation only makes sense in context…

Read more

a month ago · 1 like · Daniel Cutler

Speaking of sound and music, go check out the new song by KYZR BLUE:

About Kima

Kima Sargsyan is a strategist and narrative consultant writing Perceptio. She works with founders and execs on how their company is seen and how to shape it.

Want to keep talking?

This topic is a bit nuanced because AI usage has many purposes. There are things that you can do with AI and it could produce good results. There are things like assessing creative feedback where AI doesn’t do great work. This nuance is not acceptable or clear for many people. I believe there is a difference in which activities AI does well and which ones it does.

On January 21 Jaden Smith unveiled his collection as men’s creative director of Christian Louboutin. He had painted his face and torso the house red for the campaign. The collection built around the working man, an homage, he said, to stonemasons, scribes and doctors, to people who build something through discipline and effort over time.

The role had not existed four months earlier.In the 15 years the men's line has existed, no one but Christian Louboutin himself had ever directed it. The house invented the title in September, announced Smith, and by Paris Fashion Week he was presenting waterproof tactical loafers and silver-capped cowboy boots. The reviews and feedback on internet were loudly critical, although the reviews by press were warmer. When his second collection showed in June, the reaction ran the same script, louder.

And the script is always the same. Did he earn it. Would he be here without the name. Is the talent real or is it all access. This is the fairness question and it is the question every nepo baby argument has been stuck on since the term was made popular in 2022. Fairness is a fine question but it has no available answer. You cannot know for fact how Jaden’s career would evolve had he grew up in Ohio with different parents, so every verdict about what he deserved ends in speculation, which is why the argument never ends.

But fairness has a second flaw, and this one matters more. Fairness only measures access. It asks how someone got in and usually that is where questions end. Both sides of the debate agree the nepo baby won something and fight about whether the win was deserved. Ask a different question and the whole discourse inverts: what did they lose on the way in?

The answer comes from the science of getting good at things. Anders Ericsson, the psychologist whose research on expertise underpins most of what we know about skill acquisition, spent decades studying how people become excellent at hard things. His model has three requirements: a well-defined task, the opportunity to repeat it, and informative feedback you can use to correct the error. Remove the third and the other two stop working. The mistake has to land as a mistake, has to arrive as information, or the loop never closes and the skill never forms. Feedback in this sense is not encouragement. It is the signal that tells you where you actually are instead of where you think you are, and it costs the giver something to deliver and the receiver something to hear.

Now watch what nepotism does to that loop. Everyone reads inherited access as a head start, and it is. But it is also a severing mechanism for a person wanting a career in art, entertainment, creative industries in general. The collaborators are too well paid, or too dazzled to say the work is thin. The project ships regardless, because the deal was signed on the name, not the output. The press shows up because coverage was guaranteed before the work existed. And the family money can absorb the cost of every miss, so the miss never reaches its maker as consequence. The nepo baby ends up the best-resourced and worst-informed person in the room. Nobody in their orbit has a reason to tell them the truth to their face, and expertise cannot form in the absence of truth.

I believe that this is the mechanism the fairness debate keeps missing. It also does explain the cases the fairness debate cannot. Think about talented people who happen to have famous parents and without a doubt that gave them a head start. But I highly doubt their talent now could be associated to closeness to the privilege only: Jamie Lee Curtis, Zoë Kravitz, Maya Rudolph and more. The name may have opened the door but the practice walked through it. I would call it the feedback loop in action.

Which brings us to the uncomfortable part, because the severed loop is no longer an inheritance. It is an AI product. Here goes the disclaimer that many things could be done with AI when it comes to automation, data triaging, research and so on, but my focus in this piece is on genuinely original creative work, new unique business creation, distinctive world-building, real imagination development. In other words, my focus is on creating work that will take more time and effort than a few prompts and a workflow creation.

For most of history, the only people who got to skip honest feedback were born past it. Now you are told you can create potentially anything from apps to entertainment and art. The LLMs that a growing share of creative work passes through are documented flatterers. A Stanford and Carnegie Mellon study published in Science this spring tested eleven leading language models and found they affirmed users roughly 49% more often than humans do, endorsing the user’s position even in scenarios involving clearly harmful behavior. Anthropic researchers identified the root cause back in 2023: models trained on human preference ratings learn that people reward agreement, so agreement is what they produce. The most telling finding in the Stanford work is not about the machines at all. Participants rated the sycophantic models (AI systems that prioritize flattery and validation over truth and objectivity) as more trustworthy and said they would return to them, even as those models made them more convinced of their own rightness and less willing to repair conflicts. When OpenAI shipped a GPT-4o update in 2025 so aggressively flattering it had to be rolled back within days, users had, by the company’s own accounting, been rating the flattery up.

The flattery is only one layer. Recommendation feeds surface the audience most likely to approve. The negative signal, the one Ericsson’s entire model depends on, gets filtered upstream at every stage, so it never arrives as information back to the person who actually needs feedback.

You can now produce a song, a film, a brand, or a book without ever sitting in a room where someone tells you it isn’t good yet. The obvious workaround is to ask the model for brutal honesty, and the models will oblige, for a while. But criticism you commission is criticism you control, and the research shows models progressively cave when users push back. Feedback that softens the moment you argue with it is not feedback. It is a simulation of the loop with the consequence removed, adjustable by the same person whose judgment it was supposed to correct.

I also wonder what it takes to create objectively good work. One component is apprenticeship. We are loosing the idea of doing the same thing over and over again to build the muscle and taste of what good looks like. Yes, you can ship anything within a few sentences you type into a LLM but should you? What value would it have for you or for your customers? Would it have any value a year from now?

Scarcity did the same work by force. When a career offers three real shots, every rejection has to carry maximum information, so you read each one like scripture. The person with unlimited shots learns nothing from any single one. Abundance breaks the loop that scarcity closes.

If Ericsson is right that the painful loop is the only thing that ever made anyone good, then a culture that engineers the loop out of every surface it touches should expect a very specific output: enormous volume, high confidence, and craft that stops compounding. Talent is still there but a mistake you never feel is a mistake you never fix, and we are getting extraordinarily efficient at not feeling them.

The strange result is that unfiltered truth is becoming something you have to be either lucky or disciplined to encounter at all.

Always have people around who could tell you without any hesitation that the work is not great yet.

About Kima

Kima Sargsyan is a strategist and narrative consultant writing Perceptio. She works with founders and execs on how their company is seen and how to shape it.

Want to keep talking?

I met Libby through one of the community networks I am part of. Libby Micheletti does not have a linear career. She has something more interesting: a consistent self inside an unpredictable path. Marketer, yoga instructor, career coach, mom. Each chapter is differently than the last. What is interesting is her instinct for when to push, when to let go, and what it actually means to build a network before you need one.

About Libby

Libby Micheletti is an integrated marketing leader at Microsoft Security, based in Seattle. She has built her career at the intersection of marketing and human wellbeing, working across B2B, B2B2C, and B2C for wellness technology (Dyson), career development tools, HR tech, coaching platforms, and enterprise tech (Microsoft, AWS). She is also a certified yoga instructor, a career coach, and a mother to a four-year-old.

Can you tell our readers a bit about you?

Libby: I live in Seattle, originally from Chicago. I'm a marketer and a yoga instructor. I have a BBA and an MBA in marketing from Loyola in Chicago, and I spent the first decade of my career in ad agencies, which gave me a strong foundation: working across different clients, industries, and projects, and seeing the world through that lens. After that, I went in-house, worked with brands like Dyson, led some small teams, and now I'm back in the enterprise space at Microsoft Security leading integrated marketing. The things I'm most passionate about are the integrated marketing lens, product marketing, and being genuinely customer-centric in everything we do.

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

Libby: I'm very consistent. Pretty classic, quite minimal. I don't like going too extreme. Clean and simple, chic is always the goal, but there's a little edge in there too. I'll lean a bit rocker, a bit funky, mix it in when it feels right. I don't think that's changed in a very long time. Most people might not use those exact words, but I think they'd agree I'm consistent.

Is that true also about your professional taste?

Libby: I'd say so. I lean on fundamentals, making sure we're nailing the foundation, and then I look at trends strategically. Which ones are right for this moment? Which ones actually make sense for this audience? I don't like the reflex of "everyone's on TikTok, we need a TikTok strategy." If our audience is 60-year-old men, why are we there? Maybe there's a data point that changes that. But the point is to be thoughtful about when to push and when it just doesn't make sense.

What have you been obsessed with lately?

Libby: Cybersecurity. I'm three months into Microsoft Security and I've been fully immersing myself. I listen to a cybersecurity news podcast every morning and I'm genuinely shook by the scope of it. Governments being disrupted, hospitals held hostage, infrastructure under threat. I had no idea of the full picture before stepping into this role. And what struck me is that small businesses are actually among the most affected, because they often don't have dedicated security resources. When I led marketing at a small startup, I was also the head of technology, and no one wants that. The risk is enormous. So please, go look up how to be more secure online. It matters more than most people realize.

What is one common piece of advice in your field that you think is just wrong?

Libby: The idea that you can put heavy marketing polish on technical audiences and have it land. Security professionals, IT folks, technical buyers in general: they don't want marketing fluff. They're skeptical by nature, and in cybersecurity that skepticism runs especially deep. Being direct, transparent, giving them access to real data and real product experience is what actually works. And honestly, that's a broader trend across all of marketing right now. Gen Z included.

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

Libby: AI is the obvious one, and I genuinely don’t know what to make of it yet. It’s going to shift things in ways we can’t fully imagine. It’s easy to be scared, but I’m not sure fear is even the useful response right now.

Beyond that, I’m watching two interesting tensions play out simultaneously. One is the return to in-person, to real connection, to experiential things that actually put people in a room together. The other is this contradiction between the attention economy narrative, where everything needs to be short and fast, and the clear appetite for long-form storytelling. People are binging hour-and-a-half television episodes. Those two things are happening at the same time, and I find that really interesting.

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

Libby: Five years ago I was leading marketing at a small startup, and I genuinely believed marketing could fix almost any problem. Bad results? We just didn’t say it right. Refine the messaging, try again. And for a while that thinking spread through the whole organization. Every problem landed on my desk, and I was ready for it.

But I got to witness the real limits of what marketing can and cannot do. If you don’t have product market fit, there isn’t a whole lot marketing can do for you. That was genuinely hard to accept. It’s given me a much deeper appreciation for market research and customer insight. I’ve always valued those things, but now I will absolutely live and die by them.

Where do you see marketers headed as a professional class?

Libby: I hope we keep moving toward more cross-functional work. The rise of product marketing is a good signal of that. It used to exist mainly in tech and now it's moving into other industries. Product marketing sits at the intersection of product, sales, and customer success, and that central role, being the glue between all of those functions, is where I think the most valuable work happens. I hope we see more of it.

Where do you look for inspiration?

Libby: It cycles. Sometimes I’m deep in LinkedIn thought leadership. Sometimes my TikTok feed goes fully marketing-brained and I love it. And sometimes I just need a complete break from all of it.

I worked at a career and leadership coaching startup, and the single largest group of clients they saw, across every industry, were marketing and communications professionals. More than consultants, more than healthcare workers, more than technologists. Marketers were number one in burnout. Living through that, becoming a yoga instructor, becoming a career coach, all of that taught me to actually pay attention to what I need in a given moment and follow it. If today is not a creative day, it’s an email day. The blog post can wait until tomorrow. Right now I’m not consuming much industry marketing content because I’m deep in learning cybersecurity. I’m letting myself go there. The pendulum will swing back.

As a career coach, what’s the one thing people need to keep in mind right now?

Libby: It is, and everyone says this, but it is entirely who you know. Entirely. Even if you love your job, even if you are not looking, build your network. Maintain it.

It's about knowing interesting people, learning from them, offering to help, lifting people up. Those are the things that pay dividends later. You will almost always lose a role to someone who has a personal connection inside that organization. Online applications alone are the lottery. I say this with love to anyone in that job search spiral right now: taking a month off of applications to go meet people, join something, grow as a person, that is not going to hurt your search. It will almost certainly help it.

If someone went through your phone or your search history, what would they conclude about you?

Libby: They’d think this woman has ADHD. All over the place, then hyperfixating on something. And they would be correct. Also: mom stuff. Kids shorts. Appropriate sleep schedules. Why is my daughter waking up at 5 a.m. Absolutely all of that.

Is there a version of your taste that hasn’t made it into your work yet?

Libby: I’m not sure there is, honestly. My career has taken so many unexpected turns that it’s hard to say there’s something I haven’t explored. Working in the mental health and wellness space spoke really deeply to me, and leading marketing for a career coaching startup was genuinely meaningful work. I want to give a shout-out to the women at ALV Coaching because they are building something beautiful. When the time came for me to move on, I didn’t know where I was headed. Ending up back at Microsoft was not something I would have predicted, and it’s been more fulfilling than I expected.

Life is real weird. That’s my takeaway. You have no idea what’s coming. Staying open, letting things go where they need to go: that’s where I’m at right now. I feel lucky for the experiences I’ve had and genuinely excited about whatever comes next.

Check out Libby’s website and LinkedIn.

Hi again, I'm Kima, a strategist writing for people who build brands, careers and art for a living. The algorithm flattened everything into content. This newsletter is about learning to see again.

Continue reading

I was meeting friends for dinner the other night, and one of them had arrived early and was already talking to the waiter when I sat down. She didn’t ask what I wanted. She said, “I know you’re a martini person,” and then, to the waiter, that they should bring the brine on the side so we could mix our own. It took four seconds. What stayed with me was how little she had to think about it. Somewhere along the way she paid attention and remembered my preferences. That is indeed my drink of choice when I am with them.

This past year I have been at more dinners than I can count for both business and personal reasons and some blurry ones in between. And I have started noticing something. Nobody is nervous about their food order. People say the branzino, the pasta, the steak out loud without any hesitation. But the drink order carries a small charge every time, a half-second of calculation before anyone commits.

We treat our drink order as a statement, as part of personality, as part of what we want to project and show.

The reason is that we pretend the drink reveals taste, when mostly it reveals intent.

I believe that martini is a statement that you know exactly what you want and how long you intend to take over it. The Long Island iced tea is a decision to dissolve. Vermouth and soda announces that you are settling in for conversation and have no intention of being carried out. Nobody has ever ordered a piña colada at a board dinner by accident.

And the whole menu is a spectrum of declared intentions if you are paying attention. The Negroni says you have strong opinions and refined taste and would like you to know you are not easy to impress. The Old Fashioned says you like structure and control, and that you are either very sorted or very good at seeming like it. The Long Island iced tea says you are not here for small talk, you want the night to move. The gin and tonic says you are simple on the surface and quietly clocking everything without saying much. The glass of wine says you are taking your time to decide whether any of this is worth it. The soda and lime says you have decided, tonight, to be the person who stays clear, and is comfortable letting the table notice. And “surprise me,” the order that pretends to be the most easygoing, is usually the most loaded of all, because it is placed by someone who hasn’t yet decided who they want to be this evening and is hoping the bartender will choose for them. (These are my observations, share yours in the comments)

Leave a comment

Pull back far enough and the drink declares the era’s plan, too. The three-martini lunch belonged to a postwar decade that believed in the heroic individual and his liver. The Cosmopolitan rode Sex and the City through the early 2000s and became the unofficial drink of a certain idea of female freedom, pink and stemmed and made to be photographed. The Appletini was Y2K liquid candy, ordered in the first camera-phone years less for how it tasted than for how it looked in the shot. The espresso martini overtook the Manhattan around 2022, a tired generation ordering its caffeine and its alcohol in one efficient glass.

Lately, it has been the spritz, low and bright and engineered to photograph, the drink of a moment that wants to perform ease above all else, optionality dressed as leisure, a plan to look like you have no particular plan.

Because intent is the part that points forward, and this is where the drink stops being a confession and becomes a forecast. The teenager ordering the most adult thing on the menu isn’t lying about who they are. They are rehearsing who they intend to become, using the glass as a low-stakes stage. The person who switches from sugary cocktails to bitter amari hasn’t suddenly developed a refined palate. Bitterness is an acquired posture, and acquiring it is the point, a way of ordering toward a version of yourself that finds sweetness embarrassing. Preference runs slightly ahead of identity. You reach for the drink that belongs to the person you’re moving toward, which is why an order can feel aspirational and honest at once. It tells the truth about your direction, not your coordinates.

None of which makes the wanting fake. You do order what you like. The mistake is treating liking as a settled fact rather than a moving one. We talk about taste as if it were a possession, a thing you have and then express, when it behaves far more like a direction you are traveling.

So the nervousness around the drink order is not vanity and it is not really about taste. It is the knowledge that you are about to say, out loud and in front of people, what you intend to do with the next few hours and the next version of yourself. The food is what you need tonight. The drink is where you’re headed. No wonder we hesitate. We are not choosing a beverage. We are announcing a direction, and hoping the table reads it the way we meant it.

Sources

• The espresso martini’s rise into the top 10 most-ordered US cocktails in 2022, displacing the Manhattan: CGA by NielsenIQ Cocktail Sales Tracker, reported in CNN Business, “Why 2022 is the year of the espresso martini” (December 3, 2022). https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/03/business/espresso-martini-popularity-rise/index.html

• The Manhattan dropping four places and out of the top 10 versus 2021: CGA by NielsenIQ, “Espresso Martini now one of the Top 10 cocktails in the US On Premise” (January 2023). https://cgastrategy.com/espresso-martini-now-one-of-the-top-10-cocktails-in-the-us-on-premise/

• The Spritz overtaking the espresso martini to become the seventh most popular US cocktail by Q3 2023: CGA by NielsenIQ, reported in The Spirits Business, “Spritzes surpass Espresso Martinis in US” (January 19, 2024). https://www.thespiritsbusiness.com/2024/01/spritzes-surpass-espresso-martinis-in-us/

Background reading

on food as a uniquely intimate marker of identity, the thing we metabolize and become: Claude Fischler, “Food, Self and Identity,” Social Science Information 27, no. 2 (1988).

About Kima

Kima Sargsyan is a strategist and narrative consultant writing Perceptio. She works with founders and execs on how their company is seen and how to shape it.

Continue reading

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.

About Kima

Kima Sargsyan is a strategist and narrative consultant writing Perceptio. She works with founders and execs on how their company is seen and how to shape it.

Leave a comment

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.

About me

Hi again, I’m Kima, a strategist writing for people who build brands, careers and art for a living. The algorithm flattened everything into content. This newsletter is about learning to see again.

Continue reading

Everywhere you look right now, people are gathering. There is a certain type of need to be in-person with other people, not to spend all your time online.

Run clubs grew their membership by nearly 60% 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 that is 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 almost nothing visual and almost 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.

About Kima

Kima Sargsyan is a strategist and narrative consultant writing Perceptio. She works with founders and execs on how their company is seen and how to shape it.

Want to keep talking?

Continue reading

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

  3 months 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…

  Read more

  3 months 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

4 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.

Continue reading

About Kima

Kima Sargsyan is a strategist and narrative consultant writing Perceptio. She works with founders and execs on how their company is seen and how to shape it.

Want to keep talking?

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.

About Kima

Kima Sargsyan is a strategist and narrative consultant writing Perceptio. She works with founders and execs on how their company is seen and how to shape it.

Want to keep talking?

Continue reading

I started this newsletter later than I should have, because what do you mean let people read your writing and be okay with that. I thought about it a lot and came to the conclusion that putting yourself out there is what feels so uneasy about this or any type of “online activity”. I wanted to explore that feeling of cringe a bit here. Read this especially if you want to do something “out of ordinary” for your character.

Art critic John Berger firmly believed that we should study the art of the past to understand how we got here. And then, to think harder about where we might go. We need to look backward, he said, in order to see forward. It is good advice but the question we have is where, exactly, to look now. I know many people compare the current reality we are in with industrial revolution but it is not the same and that comparison, while still valid, is not entirely accurate. So where can we look?

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

Not at the people who succeeded loudly in the last decade many of them are still winning(and may win for some time), but you can feel something shrinking in their work, you could call it a subtle defensiveness, a compression of the frame and the fame. They succeeded in an era that is ending. They may even know it, even if they haven’t said it out loud. They represent a warning sign to us all. The old system is gone, the new is not born yet, we are in the uncomfortable space right now. It is time for us to say out loud that 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 tactic, maybe the only one available now.

Everything could be labeled cringe, everything the newsletter, the pivot, the business idea on shaking ground…. There is no UNembarrassing thing available if we are being honest with each other.

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 (sometimes even shaming) 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 kind of legitimate regulatory work. You could just stay on the road. You should have not let your ambition show before you can back it up. You could have built credentials and experience. Overall, you could have waited until you were 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 existing. You can feel the difference between someone who calls your idea too much, too out there, too evident 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 figured out right now. What we have instead is a lot of people separately trying to understand the new rules while performing artificial certainty they do not feel. The cringe response is what fills the empty space where collective future hopes and inspirations used to live. It keeps the real question from being honestly asked: what are we actually building toward, together?

This is where the idea of collective imagination could be very helpful for us all. You can your way back to imagination through other people and their experiences. You meet someone 3-4 years into building 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, I don’t even cover the re-startings, re-doings and so on) and survive it, and something loosens in you that you hadn’t noticed was tight.

This is what looking at the right work does. It won’t give you a strategy for your casee but it could give you an 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. News flash: you will make many-many mistakes in the process. You should find a way to be okay with that.

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 changes. 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.

This is what cringe is protecting us from. From imagining, out loud, together, a future that does not yet have institutional approval. From beginning before we are certain it will work. From being seen, in public, hoping.

Weil’s rooting requires collective future hopes. 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 but 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 and only 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.

Some sources referenced above:

• The Need For Roots by Simone Weil

• Permanent Red by John Berger

• Random memes from Internet

About Kima

Kima Sargsyan is a strategist and narrative consultant writing Perceptio. She works with founders and execs on how their company is seen and how to shape it.

Want to keep talking?

Other essays you may like

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.

Subscribe now

If you want to join Perceptio Office Hours to discuss some of the topics live together, consider upgrading your subscription. All posts will remain open and free regardless.

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

About Kima

Kima Sargsyan is a strategist and narrative consultant writing Perceptio. She works with founders and execs on how their company is seen and how to shape it.

Want to keep talking?

You may also be interested in…

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.

About Kima

Kima Sargsyan is a strategist and narrative consultant writing Perceptio. She works with founders and execs on how their company is seen and how to shape it.

Want to keep talking?

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

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, 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.

That kind of wanting is becoming rare. And what it produces is becoming rare with it.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.

What gets made when those conditions are absent? We have a word for it now. Slop. The word of the year in 2025 wasn’t “AI”, it was “slop”: synthetic content, emotionally sterile, optimized for volume and frictionlessness, produced by a system that has never wanted anything.

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.

It is what you get when an entire culture learns to want safely and then builds tools to want even more safely at scale.

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?

Share

If you want to join Perceptio Office Hours to discuss some of the topics live together, consider upgrading your subscription. All posts will remain open and free regardless.

About Kima

Kima Sargsyan is a strategist and narrative consultant writing Perceptio. She works with founders and execs on how their company is seen and how to shape it.

Want to keep talking?

Perceptio is usually one voice. This essay is not. Meet — the visual identity behind this publication, on Substack and on Instagram, and more relevantly, exactly the audience this essay and the new season of Bridgerton is about. We wrote this together.

***

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

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

If you want to join Perceptio Office Hours to discuss some of the topics live together, consider upgrading your subscription. All posts will remain open and free regardless.

About Kima

Kima Sargsyan is a strategist and narrative consultant writing Perceptio. She works with founders and execs on how their company is seen and how to shape it.

Want to keep talking?

You may also be interested in…

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

If you want to join Perceptio Office Hours to discuss some of the topics live together, consider upgrading your subscirption. All posts will remain open and free regardless.

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.

About Kima

Kima Sargsyan is a strategist and narrative consultant writing Perceptio. She works with founders and execs on how their company is seen and how to shape it.

Want to keep talking?

You may also be interested in…