REPORT: Age of Potency

We’ve been treating transformation like an upgrade. In the future, it will be a metamorphosis.

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Navigating uncertainty is the work of every builder.

But strange currents have made that work feel very different lately. Black swan events, grey swan events, unexpected horseshoes and uncomfortable bedfellows everywhere... everything is just weird.

There are a lot of reasons for what feels like disorientation right now, but one of the greatest reasons is that we are living in a time of massive cultural vacuums.

I’ve written a new report called Age of Potency on what those vacuums are, the new consumer behaviors and beliefs they’re generating, and how to design the future people are reaching for.

Right now, there are three major vacuums shaping our world, and they are in the domains of work, trust and time.

These are the pillars every society rests on. When these three start to shake, everything around them wobbles. But that collapse also makes them the most potent and generative spaces we have.

1. Work

   When work stopped correlating with reward, it created one of the biggest cultural vacuums of our time. In the void, new models of fulfillment are emerging: play as work, healing as work, identity as work. People are experimenting with meaning systems in a way we haven’t seen in our lifetimes, and it’s opening up new opportunities for every creator and builder.

2. Trust
   The ‘trust economy’ was never about trust at all, and 15 years later we trust each other less than ever. But trust doesn’t disappear, it just changes form. Today, it’s forming in smaller, riskier spaces: places that require vulnerability, not performance. If you’re building the future, you have to center risk. People want permission to be vulnerable.

3. Time
   The cultural vacuum of time has trapped us in an “Eternal Now,” and the force rushing in to fill it is intensity. Intense experiences, whether they be emotional, physical, spiritual, help us feel time again. They give life punctuation, transformation, and meaning. Intensity helps us feel the passage of time, the before and after. It gives time markers and meaning. It forces a transformation, and increasingly that is what people are looking for.

The best way to locate a vacuum is to look at what it generates - what gets pulled in, improvised, invented, or created to fill the empty space. When you see what’s rushing in, you can see the outlines of the future before anyone else does.

That hunger for meaning itself becomes the force that shapes the future.

Vacuums are terrifying, but they’re also powerful.

They destroy, but they also create.

In these three voids - work, trust, and time - new worlds are already being written.

People, perhaps even you, are worried that ours is becoming a society of empty ease over meaningful friction, that we’re becoming complacent and shallow. But those are not complete signals. People will always find something meaningful to struggle for.

You just might not be prepared for where it shows up.

If you’re building the future in any way, whether it’s as a business, brand, community, government, activist, designer, parent, artist, storyteller, builder or anything else, this report is for you.

Read it here.

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It’s Getting Spooky Out There

Here’s what we’ve been consuming.

The One Percent’s Fear of Death Is Wreaking Havoc on the World (The New Republic): “You see it in less flashy, more banal ways as well, such as in the refusal of the political gerontocracy—on both the right and left—to relinquish power, seemingly content to allow the country to rot with corruption and ineptitude because they simply cannot imagine a world without them in control. At some point, one starts to recognize that so much of today’s political and cultural environment is ruled by those who are visibly, pathologically, afraid of death. And many of these people, rather than face up to this fear and deal with it, are instead wreaking untold havoc on the world around us.”

Horror is hot right now (Quartz): “One paradox of horror’s popularity is that people turn to it for comfort. Yes, really. Research suggests that watching scary movies helps people practice emotional regulation, testing out how they cope with fear and stress in a controlled environment. The terror comes with an off switch: You can leave the theater, close the book, swipe away.”

Wealthy Americans Are Spending. People With Less Are Struggling. (The New York Times): ““For people like me, who are homeowners, who are employed, the economy is great,” she said. “How is the economy? It depends who you’re looking at.” The divide between rich and poor is hardly new, in Chicago or the rest of the country. But it has become more pronounced in recent months. Wealthier Americans, buoyed by a stock market that keeps setting records, have continued to spend freely. Lower-income households — stung by persistent inflation and navigating a labor market that is losing momentum — are pulling back.”

“When you meet enemies it means you’re going in the right direction.”

True for:

Video games
Growing a business
Publishing content
Exploring new ideas
Changing culture
Telling the truth
Becoming yourself

Yours,

I’m Jasmine Bina, and I’m a brand strategist and cultural futurist. If you love this newsletter and need more:

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