Five Ideas That Won't Leave Me Alone
A collection of cultural signals that are trying to tell us something.
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I’m currently working on my next big report, “Age of Potency”, which I’ll be sharing with you soon, so today’s post is going to be short and sweet. But it’s a piece I’ve been wanting to write nonetheless. It’s inspired by Derek Thompson’s great read The 25 Most Interesting Ideas I’ve Found in 2025, because like him, I carry around the ghosts of fascinating ideas that don’t have a home yet… and so they float around me, demanding to be processed. Let’s process them together.
1. America effectively speaks two different languages now.
If you stop to think about how so much of culture is trapped in memes today, it’s a little arresting.
There are people who can speak in the ‘language games’ of memes (to borrow Wittgenstein’s term), and people who can only speak in plain words. We have two different modes of communication existing in two different realities, yet both forced to express themselves in the same world. But unlike traditional language, memes can’t be learned, they must be earned. To communicate in memes, you need to carry layers of cultural context, irony, subtext, and shared experience. Unlike the words that freely come out of our mouths, memes require you to belong first before you can speak.
That’s wild. Even if you think you know memes, you probably don’t really know memes. Follow memeologist Aidan Walker and you’ll get humbled really fast. It’s Babel out here.
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This divide has become one of America’s most invisible but powerful fractures. We are living inside two linguistic systems that do not translate to one another. And that fracture extends everywhere, from how people interpret the news to how they form belief systems and communities. And I don’t think it’s crazy to say this linguistic divide underpins our political divide, too.
This is why Mamdani is such a well-matched opponent for Trump. Trump has such a fine-tuned understanding of pop culture that he has made himself the meme, and that’s why he’s seemingly indestructible from any rational platform.
Except Mamdani is just as attuned and plugged in. He understands the infinitesimally fine line between humor and earnestness. He understands where performance becomes culture and vice versa. If you haven’t seen the “resurfaced” Mamdani video yet, here it is:
He knew how to make a rap video 6 years ago that still works (at least for millennials) and burrows right into that impossibly small space between satire and sincerity. He operates on the same abstract, instinctive, meme-level playing field where our true beliefs and desires are now playing out… and no other political figures besides these two have managed to get there.
The language of memes is highly efficient. It skips logic and goes straight to primal emotion. And somehow, despite how powerful this emerging language is, there are only two leaders in this country who know how to speak it.
2. Everyone thinks they’re a free agent.
Your doctor thinks he’s a free agent the same way your Uber driver does. Both of them think they’re entrepreneurs on the rags to riches pathway, and that changes how they identify, how they find meaning, and how they vote.
Free agents have only proliferated. How many agency people have gone independent? How many white collar workers are contractors now? How many blue collar workers are now subcontractors? Even if you have a full-time job today, you know there are no promises. Deep down, you know you’re a free agent, too.
Free agents don’t relate to a story of collective working class because the collective working class is disappearing. They relate to a story of individualism and the gospel of prosperity. “We are all free agents now” as the brilliant economist Jean-Paul Faguet says.
I have returned to Jean-Paul Faguet’s essay over and over again because it is a fundamental truth that explains so much more than politics. It explains the stories in our media, the narratives that rise to the top of culture, our heroes and villains, our values and even our consumerism.
Every group, no matter where they fall on the spectrum, is sustained by their own chosen mythologies. There are many truths/ mythologies existing at the same time. And when you understand the context of today, these mythologies make perfect sense in our current market.
This is not just an American phenomenon. This is global. It is one of the few fundamental truths that has been organizing, and will continue to organize, the world. And if you’re in the business of changing the world, it’s something you should pay attention to.
3. Women are born with pain. Men have to go find it.
I hesitate to draw binary lines in gender, not only because they’re often engineered when you get down to the bottom of it, but because lines tend to diminish the experiences of one group over another. However, there was a quote from a recent Human Design podcast where host Emma Dunwoody said:
“We grow through pain. For girls and women, pain comes with the territory—menstrual pain, childbirth. Men have to go searching for pain through which to grow.”
I’m going to be honest with you and say that I have not listened to this podcast yet, but I believe the quote stands on its own. Pain is formative for women. Pain is how we come to know, fear, love, hate and hold our bodies from a very young age. The extremes of pain and joy shape us in ways that prepare us for the world.
From our periods to childbirth to menopause, the energies of life and death are always swirling around within our bodies, and it is why many of the feminine deities throughout history have been both nurturing and destructive.
I find it impossible to imagine a human experience without this pain woven throughout. But men don’t have the same rhythms of pain constantly forcing them to pass through mental, physical and emotional thresholds, and that might explain why we’re suddenly realizing a lot of the rituals we used to have around coming of age for men (think initiation, battle or brotherhood) need to be reimagined for the modern world.
I don’t want to overlook any of the very real pains boys and men experience throughout their lives today, because they do, but there may be something worth pausing on in Dunwoody’s words. Pain is a tool whose value we may have forgotten in the current age. It has been optimized out of our lives in ways both mundane and profound, and now we are seeing the downstream effects of that. That’s not a new idea, but the way it has perhaps effected men and women differently is an important idea that is new to me.
I think this is a time when people, especially men, are creating new mythologies for themselves. Maybe we should start thinking about putting positive, generative pain at the center of those mythologies.
I actually see this happening on the other side in the booming peri/menopause industry. Women are taking this historically invisible period of time and giving it new meaning and gravity. And they are doing it by exalting the pain as a rite of passage. (More on this in my report next week).
4. Porn is the best way to describe most things.
I think the most famous quote to have ever been recorded about porn must have been by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart when he said he couldn’t easily define porn, but “I know it when I see it”.
I think what he was really saying was, “I know it when I feel it.” Sex becomes porn when it starts to feel a certain way, and earlier this year, I read a great essay by Abram Shaffer that finally captured that feeling:
“Porn is what you get when the act matters more than the intimacy.
And now everything’s porn.”
He’s so right and I can’t stop thinking about how true this is. The majority of our shared culture has become a performance that far exceeds the intimacy it’s meant to inspire. Those captured TikToks of someone rage crying into their phone cameras, the documented influencer dinners where strong wealthy women toast other strong wealthy women, reality TV shows (blind, island, or otherwise) — they’re all deceiving. We feel a sense of intimacy in the comments, but it’s all a thinly veiled production. We are playing our parts in the performance.
And I think it’s profound to describe this as porn. We’ve had other terms in the zeitgeist that have tried to capture this sentiment: parasocial relationships, virtue signaling, performative authenticity. But they all have holes in their definitions and they are all intellectual. Porn is the opposite of that. Porn is felt, and all of this cultural scaffolding is better captured as a feeling than as an idea.
I think if we reallllly stretch this metaphor, it poses an interesting question. Do you want to feel porn or do you want to feel something else? Do you want to feel the act or do you want to feel the intimacy? It’s totally ok, and even human in my opinion, to want the show sometimes. But when we call it porn, we make it a lot easier to sense the line between what is real and what is just mimicking reality.
5. A hard bifurcation.
Remember that K-shaped recovery economists warned us about during Covid, where one group would grow in prosperity while another would fall? The charts have finally filled out. There has been a rash of recent statistics that show the economy has split into two.
Tech is splitting in two. According to Harvard economist Jason Furman, nearly all of America’s GDP growth in the first half of 2025 came from demand for data centers. Without them, growth would have been just 0.1%, or essentially flat. That means AI is booming while the rest of the economy may already be in a recession. (Putting aside reasons to believe the AI industry is but a mirage itself.)
Air travel is splitting in two. Delta and United are making loads of money on first class and premium travelers while every other airline is struggling to fill in economy seats.
Finance is splitting in two. “Credit card companies are competing to offer ever-more-expensive cards to high earners who are happy to pay the annual fees in return for exclusive perks — while lower-income households are struggling to make minimum payments on their debts.”
My OBGYN recently moved to a $4k/ year concierge model while my endocrinologist just started offering BNPL.
It has become easier to sell luxury goods to the wealthy than to sell discounted goods to the rest. Some would say an economic event is coming, but that’s not the only signal here.
These dynamics are forcing the erasure of a lot of lines that used to keep identities in place. When the hierarchy of lower class, working class, middle class, upper middle class and upper class collapses into merely wealthy and non-wealthy, tastes and values and ideals also start to shift. It’s a hard reckoning for people who identify by the consuming power, which is all of us.
If we aren’t what we wear, where we eat, how we live, or who we have access to, then a lot of our social signals start to fall apart. And without the distraction of those signals, we may find we have more space of mind to question what is happening around us.
Most of the time, writing is the shortest path between you and what you want. New perspective, new job, new friends, new passion - you can reach most things faster when you are willing to put your thoughts into words, and then put those words out into the world.
If you ever feel too empty to write, remember what many have said before: you don’t need to think to write. You write to think.
Writing is a generative force. Just start and the ideas will come through your keystrokes.
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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Hi Jasmine, thank you, as always, for your insights into our cultural signals and what they tell us about ourselves. They are always thought-provoking and often challenging!
The idea that everything is ‘porn’ these days particularly resonated and has ties, I think, to another article of yours that has stayed with me, about temporal dissonance.
If we live in a world where we are increasingly disconnected from the stories and beliefs that have always anchored us, then searching for, and leaning into, real intimacy is not only difficult, it feels almost reckless.
What we are left with is performance, because what else is there in a world where truth is malleable, and nothing stands still? With little else to fall back on, we pretend intimacy, so that we can shine a light on ourselves and maybe give our lives (at least in our own eyes) some kind of meaning, even if it is without the deep connection and reassurance that intimacy offers in its truest form.
Worse, for some of us, porn is addictive, leading to escalation, desensitisation, and - ultimately - dysfunction. In other words, the act becomes the prevailing narrative, at the cost of feeling, and to the detriment of our relationships and any prospect of intimacy.
So, is it okay to want the show sometimes? Of course it is. As you point out, it’s human. But when we stop identifying the act as the show? When we start thinking that the show is all there is? That’s when we have a problem.
And I’m concerned that that is where we’ve landed. Maybe, through language, we can pull things back a little. After all, if we find the words to describe something (and ‘porn’ is a wonderfully effective word for separating act from feeling), then we are better placed to identify it, and, hopefully, to treat with it.
But, deep down, I think more is needed. If we are to reacquaint ourselves with intimacy, then we need to explore it and understand how feeling differs from act.
For me, the only possible starting place for this is education. But for that to work, we need to flip the system, giving a back seat (at least until upper-secondary and tertiary level) to the acquiring of subject-specific knowledge, which, in the age of AI, is no longer the commodity it once was.
Instead we should be teaching our kids how to talk to each other, how to visit all sides of a conversation, and how to examine their thoughts and beliefs (their biases) critically, so that they can understand why their stories have become so fragmented and how (for want of a better word) they can 'unjumble' act from feeling, performance from truth, porn from intimacy.
It’s something I’ve started to write on, and I do want to thank you again for the insights you constantly provide about our culture and society. The articles you and your co-creators at the Concept Bureau provide always help to remind me of the lasting importance of ideas, and - even more - the absolute need to share them, and to talk about them.
I literally blocked time in my calendar today to make sure I went back and read this - always love your writing, makes me think in new ways. Thank you for putting out this work!