Five Ideas For Rethinking The World

A collection of cultural signals that clarify lots of other things.

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This is a collection of ideas that have been captivating me lately. I’ve been thinking a lot about intelligence, grief, and what we consider sacred. I’ve also been thinking about how malleable the human experience is, and I think you’ll see that as a meta theme below. It’s the holiday season and I’m getting sentimental.

If you’re looking to stir up some intellectual trouble at the Thanksgiving table this week, I hope this selection of bubbling thoughts and patterns serves you well.

1. Naked bodies are disappearing.

No more naked locker rooms. No more nudity on prestige TV shows. No more nudity in art. The naked body is disappearing from the average American’s lived experience.

You may have seen this TikTok about girls who grew up with a naked mom (i.e. a mom that was in her underwear around the house) and how it positively shaped their perceptions of the body:

@regandanielle_Raise your hand if you had one!

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Our move away from the naked body has definitely solved some problems, but there’s no doubt that censorship of the naked form will have some unintended consequences, especially when it comes to sexual expression and desire.

Less nudity means more “otherness”, and otherness is sometimes a straight line to alienation, fear and dehumanization. It’s also a shortcut to fetishization.

The body has fallen into a binary trap. It is either non-sexual or pornographic, safe or threatening, protected or exploited.

What’s strange is that we’re seeing this erasure of the body at the same time as a very real Return To The Body, which I’ve written about before:

We are gripping and swallowing and banging ourselves into a new experience of the body […]

We can’t decide whether to worship the body or control it, and that’s probably because we are just starting to ask ourselves what it means to live in a body without being punished by it.

The body is the epicenter of worthiness, and worthiness is the domain of morality. As people begin to reclaim their bodies through science, medicine, and mindset, they collide with a culture still morally unequipped to handle what that freedom means. The chaotic debates about weight-loss drugs, wellness cults, medical conspiracies, menopause… OnlyFans, baby formula, vegan diets, literally any extension or use of the body, is moral static.

We are effectively closing our eyes to the body, but opening up all of our other senses to it. We refuse to see it, but we demand to feel it.

To me, that looks like a naive culture that thinks it can worship the body without accepting its humanity.

2. Children’s movies have changed.

If you want to know the anxieties of a generation, look at their horror films.

But if you want to know their values, look at their children’s films.

Have you noticed how in some recent kids movies, the evil guy is clearly a Silicon Valley tech founder? In The Mitchells vs. The Machines the villain is literally a smartphone AI founder. In Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs 2 the bad guy is a tech titan whose headquarters are in a place called ‘San Franjose’.

The much anticipated Toy Story 5 has been popping up in the news every few months, and it made some noise again this past week when Tim Allen wrapped his work for the movie with an emotional tweet.

This installment of the franchise is a unique one because the plot is toys versus tech, or as director Andrew Stanton puts it, “How nobody plays with toys anymore”.

Bonnie has become an iPad kid and the Toy Story crew is struggling to be there for her. In one promo shot you see her under her blanket in the dark, the light of her iPad illuminating her silhouette, and Woody and the rest of the gang looking at her from the foot of the bed with sorrow in their eyes.

The greatest futurists have always said that it’s not tech that changes culture, it’s ideas, and we’re starting to get some clarity on what the big ideas of our time are now, especially in the face of big tech, VC, and AI.

If our kids films are teaching our youngest generations to be suspect of technology and its leaders, that’s going to shape how they allow it to be in the world. As my friend Reid Litman says, “The evil scientists from my childhood have become big tech bros.”

This is literally how tech lore is evolving and being canonized for our children.

The ideas that are being seeded now will be the container in which technology has to live within in the future.

3. All intelligence is a prediction.

A 2009 study in Emotion found that strangers could correctly perceive emotions like fear, sympathy, and gratitude from a single five-second touch with up to 78% accuracy. With almost no other sensory information available, the only way this works is if the body is predicting the meaning of the touch from learned patterns.

The human body has so many cheat codes like this, and it’s easy to forget that beneath all of our language and belief systems, we are in most ways simple animals.

And simple animals are prediction machines.

Neuroscientist and philosopher Mark Miller came to speak with us at Exposure Therapy earlier this year and talked to us about how the brain actually works, which is very different than what I learned in school growing up. The way I learned it was light hits an object, which is then refracted into my eyes, then my brain takes the information from those light signals and tells me what I am seeing… but that theory doesn’t really work when you consider the immense amount of processing our brains would have to do with that much information.

The new scientific consensus is that the brain actually “sees” very little. Instead it constructs much of our reality through prediction. The vast majority of what we see and perceive is actually a predictive model. That’s why our brains are always triggered by anomalies (like when you step off a curb you thought was flat or mishear your name in a crowd). Anomalies are very important because they help us update our model, and make our predictions of reality better so we don’t die.

Our brains build reality by predicting one brick on top of another.

As Mark Miller put it to us, the brain is not a passive receiver of sensory information. It’s constantly generating predictions about what the world should be, and using sensory input only to correct the errors in those predictions. You are not perceiving the world, you are perceiving your brain’s best guess.

And the funny thing is that’s a pretty good way to describe AI, too.

Our current AI models construct language and ideas by predicting what word is most likely, or best suited, to come after the last. Our bodies are prediction machines, our brains are prediction machines, and our technologies are prediction machines. Prediction machines that construct reality in real time.

I’m not an especially woo person, although I appreciate and embrace parts of it. Woo-curious might be the best term for me. But I can stretch my mind to the idea of some sort of collective or universal intelligence. If there is a greater collective “brain”, I think it would have to be predictive, too.

Intelligence sits somewhere between channeling the future and creating it.

4. The art of savoring our grief.

I was at the End Well conference last week, learning about innovations in end-of-life care. At check in they handed out small branded packs of tissues, which felt almost absurd for a $300 ticket… until the program began. The entire day was a mix of insight and raw stories of loss, and I cried from 9am to 4pm. I went through those packs pretty quickly.

One of the keynote speakers on stage said that of all people who go on bereavement leave after a loved one dies, half of them will quit their jobs within one year.

That’s a startling number, and you can read it two ways. Maybe people leave because they don’t get enough time off and the stress accumulates. I think that’s fair and true. But I think it’s also very likely many leave because death makes them rethink their priorities in life.

Death and grief are great forcing functions that collapse all of your false narratives. It’s a vacuum cleaner for a messy mind, especially in a culture where we let nothing die, which means nothing can be reborn. It is a gift for the living in that way.

From our October research drop on Death & Grief in Exposure Therapy.

Grief is so metabolizing, but we shouldn’t wait for death to access it. We should actively build grief rituals for ourselves like we would any other mental health practice.

We can enjoy the benefits of grief without death right now. It may look like watching the same sad movies every year, reading the same sad books, crying for strangers in documentaries, visiting cemeteries (people are going to funerals less and less, after all).

Or, dare I say, going to something like the End Well conference where I cried for a whole day and experienced incredible catharsis. I came home and kissed my kids, rethought what I want in the coming year, and let go of a hundred little worries and meaningless stories that had been plaguing me these past few months.

I will be going again next year for this reason, and you should join me.

5. IRL for hopeless people.

This brings up so many feelings for me, both professionally and personally.

As someone who lives in the remarkable state of California, which routinely gets dragged by people who have never stepped foot here, I can feel the truth of the statement.

As someone who honestly finds herself sometimes judging other places by what I read in the news or on social, I can also feel the truth of the statement.

And as someone who studies culture for a living, I can feel the violence of so easily dismissing people and places. The way it denies their humanity and creates false binaries. I know there is a lot of really important stuff to be vigilant against right now, but the best activists and leaders and researchers I know see issues as good and bad, but rarely people.

I’ve found that those who obsessively travel will tell you people are overwhelmingly good, while those who obsessively scroll will tell you people are overwhelmingly bad.

When I feel hopeless and helpless, I make a point of getting out into the real world and holding space with others. People have layers, almost never fit into neat boxes (despite what the algo tells us), and they are always changing.

If you ever forget that, do yourself a favor and go feel people in the real world. It will give you both the resolve and the clarity you need to get back to work and make a difference.

(If you liked this installment of 5 Ideas, check out my last collection on Five Ideas That Won’t Leave Me Alone.)

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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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