Missing Words
10 words we're desperately missing in culture, and what they tell us about the future.
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This week’s post comes from my cofounder Jean-Louis who explores the fact that there are some really big words missing from our language right now. New needs, desires and behaviors that have yet to be named. And until we name them, we cannot fully inhabit the future we are moving into.
Names have power.
Many ancient cultures like the Egyptians believed that names held literal, not just symbolic, power. To know the secret name of a god was to hold power over them. To erase a name was to erase their entire existence.
If we don’t have words for something, we can’t understand it, value it, or pay attention to it properly. Perhaps then, one of the reasons culture feels so incomprehensible to us is, in part, because we lack the language to describe a lot of the experiences, feelings and phenomena that are emerging today.
Working in culture and strategy, I know that unlocking feeling all too well. The feeling when someone finally puts a name to that “unknown known”. As if the words organized a shelf in your mind and allowed you to see what was already there.
Think of words and phrases like Burnout, Virtue Signaling, Gaslighting, Doomscrolling, Toxic Positivity, and Polycrisis. It’s only after it was named that we began to notice it everywhere. It’s only after it was named that we realized why it matters and how it affects us.
The challenge is that looking backwards, these words feel obvious, as if they should have always existed. But peering into the future, we’re naming things we don’t fully understand, things that are new and amorphous, phenomena that are foreign to us and nebulous.
So what are the words we’re missing today? What new language do we need to navigate the cultural and technological realities we’re stumbling through as a society?
1. Deep, Intentional Friendships
One word that consistently fails us is ‘friend’. We use the same word to describe someone we’ve met for coffee a few times and someone who we’ve shared decades of our life with.
There’s increasing attention online around the importance of deep, intentional friendships. Esther Perel talks about how romantic relationships ask of one person what used to take an entire village to provide.
Alain De Botton had a similar thought provoking take about polyamory:
“Some of the problems we’ve gotten into with polyamory in our society is because people don’t understand how to have deep friendships. My private hunch is that polyamory gets some of its energy from the thought that people know more how to do relationships than they know how to do friendships. And so they’re craving lots of people in their lives, which is very natural, very natural. And they think, “Well, the only way in which to get the right sort of people at the right depth is to also sleep with them.”
We’re yearning for more intentional, deep friendships, but we lack the cultural distinction to label what it is we’re yearning for. ‘Friend’ just isn’t a sufficient enough label for that. And without the right language, we can’t fully identify what it is we’re missing. We can’t discuss it, we can’t act on it.
Most of all however, these words create permissions. If I said you’re my colleague or my friend, there’s a subtle difference in the permissions it affords; likewise, if I had a different word for a friend I meet up with once in awhile and a friend I’ve spent decades with, it would allow me to celebrate that deep connection and give the other person the permission to be more intimate with me.
2. Using AI To Rizz On Your Behalf
If friendships suffer from lack of nuance, dating suffers from the opposite problem: artificial polish. Increasingly, people are using ChatGPT to become a more interesting version of themselves on dating apps. It’s more funny, more engaging, more thoughtful, but it isn’t really them.
Today, 45% of young men have never asked someone out on a date in person. I can imagine a future in which there’s a similar stat for how many haven’t even asked someone on a date over text without the use of AI.
We need a name for this interaction that’s rapidly becoming a fixture of modern dating.
What happens when they turn out to be far less interesting to talk to in person? You’ll feel as if you were catfished.
In mid-2023, when we were seeing the earliest signs that this might be becoming a norm, I suggested the phrase ‘Chatfishing’ to describe this.
3. AI Romantic Relationships
Speaking of AI and relationships, much has been said and shared about the unbelievably fast rise of AI romantic relationships.
Conversational AI interfaces are gradually going to take over many of the things we currently use our phones or the internet for. As it becomes one of the primary ways we interact with the digital world, the distinction between platonic / utilitarian relationships with AI agents and romantic ones becomes more important.
What should we call these relationships, and perhaps more importantly, how should we view and moralize them? There strikes me two possible paths here: one is to view them as equivalent to a human relationship, ie. AI Girlfriend = cheating. On the other hand, perhaps it could be seen as something closer to adult entertainment, where it becomes normative for most people to have an AI romance on the side.
The language and connotations we use here could very well skew us towards one or the other. As AI advances at an ever increasing rate, these will be the unintended consequences that society will need to find ways to digest and respond to.
4. The Belief That AI Is Conscious
There’s a dangerous belief that’s likely to be at the heart of a lot of the AI debate in the coming years. The belief that AI is conscious. As Mustafa Suleyman recently pointed out in a really poignant essay about the risks of this belief, AI will become better than fellow humans at convincing us that it is conscious even when it absolutely is not.
If you don’t believe me, ChatGPT is already forming religions around it.
The risk is that if the public and lawmakers come to this belief, then it leads us down a path of protections and laws that would force us to keep data centers on, and all other kinds of significant ripple effects based on a false assumption that the performance of consciousness = the presence of consciousness.
This is already a very heated discussion, and there’s no doubt it’s going to get a lot more noisy in the years to come. This is the endgame boss of the Turing Test. We just didn’t realize we’re already up against it.
Perhaps a term like ‘flat-earther’ or ‘climate-denier’ might be invented here, to try and stigmatize and dispel the illusion. Either way, the divide between those who believe and those who don’t is likely to become a major cultural fault line in the years to come.
5. The Intentional Choice To Cosplay A Different Reality
On the flip-side of the illusion of consciousness, are the illusions that we willfully choose to participate in, like being a witch, prepper, or modern cowboy. This is the line where aesthetics graduate into full on lifestyles.
In an age of peak nihilism, where we’re past the point of being able to collectively agree on what’s real, we’re seeking new ways to enchant our disenchanted world.
It’s intentionally participating in a playful fantasy to make life richer. Frankly, it sounds like a lot of fun. The world is supposed to be normal and people are supposed to be weird, yet now it feels like the world is weird and everyone is normal. I think we desperately need more weird people in society, it’s where all the inspiration and creativity usually comes from.
Right now, this just seems like a fringe behavior, but as every brand strategist talks about worldbuilding, we’re entering a much more surreal age that can afford to go hard here.
This lifestyle, this mindset, needs a name.
6. High Fidelity Identity
Something we came across in our cultural research many years ago was the rise of ‘High Fidelity Society’, the notion that our identities are becoming significantly more complex. We’re no longer one thing, or two, or even three. We’re a multitude of identities in different contexts. Identity is no longer a fixed attribute but a fluid variable in our lives.
A big part of this is that the information density of society has gotten so much higher. In the days of black and white TV, culture just didn’t have the surface area to hold nuance. You were a stay-at-home mom or you were a working mom. Culture at the time just couldn’t parse a non-binary, yoga instructor, freelance creative writer, ecowarrior, witch of the sixth coven, Twilight super-fan, community volunteer, who also Doordashes in the evenings and protests on the weekend.
But it’s not necessarily what we are that we need new words for, it’s how we change. We think of identity as a permanent quality about ourselves, but increasingly, it’s not.
This is why Gen Z leans so hard on irony online. It’s the only way to test the waters with certain beliefs or groups without being held liable for any statements you make in the permanent memory of the internet. It’s really the only type of insulation between action and identity available.
What do we call an identity or a belief that we’re just trying on for size, or playing with? We need words for that, because when we have them, it affords us the opportunity to experiment more and move through different bubbles of culture without as much fear of judgement and criticism.
When the algorithms push us away from each other, it’s this language that will let us come together again.
7. The Deep Yearning To Leave Society
One of the deeper insights we uncovered in our community, Exposure Therapy, was the notion of ‘Exit Society’, the collective yearning to get the hell out of society.
At every level of economic status, we see this, from van life, homesteading, and being an influencer, to building a bunker or buying a private island. The singular aspiration that ties us all together is the deep desire to leave society.
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We called this pattern ‘Exit Society’, but it’s built on this shared feeling of no longer feeling welcome in, belonging to, or wanting to participate in society at large.
We need a name for this unlabeled feeling, this sense of disillusionment for what is, coupled with yearning to break free and build something new.
8. Our Collective Disconnection From The Future
Modern society is untethered from time. Up until our parents’ generation, most people’s lives looked almost identical to their parents and grandparents. Your family, childhood, and culture gave you an extremely reliable set of expectations and guidance for how your life would turn out.
Now those expectations no longer apply. The only thing we can be certain of is that our future does not resemble the past. The traditional wisdom about relationships, careers, education, even financial success, no longer feel relevant to the struggles of today. Our core mythology of hard work equals reward no longer matches any of the stories we see in the media.
The future itself is entirely uncertain. We can’t tell if it’s the climate apocalypse, the collapse of democracy, the AI apocalypse or the rapture that’s going to get us.
What do we call this feeling when we can’t look to the past for guidance and we can’t predict the future with any sense of clarity? This sense of being untethered from time and unequipped to navigate it?
9. AI Agents Having A Conversation On Your Behalf
Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder of bumble, is exploring launching a new dating app where AI will date on your behalf and do a lot of the matchmaking work for you.
Today you can already use AI agents to call and book a restaurant or doctor’s appointment for you, it can handle an entire sales conversation on your behalf, people are using it to cancel bills over the phone, go shopping and run errands for them. Having an AI act on your behalf is already easy, in a year or two it’ll become normal for many of us.
So what’s this new proxy interaction called? What if I have a really lovely conversation with an AI version of you? What if I can build a sort of human to AI friendship that the other person isn’t even aware of?
It’s almost as if your AI clone is an ‘innie’ and you’re the ‘outie’.
How would it feel to know your AI clone fell in love with someone else’s? Is it crossing a line to sext with your partner’s AI clone? What happens if your AI clone doesn’t get along with your partners?
Things are about to get messy. And we’re quickly going to find that we need words to navigate that mess.
10. Deep, Intentional Community
Being in the business of community, one personal frustration of mine is the word ‘community’ itself. Just as “friend” fails us, “community” collapses wildly different experiences into one word.
A group of people who meet on a weekly basis, who share transformative experiences and find a meaningful sense of belonging with each other is lumped together with disparate groups of book fans or followers of subreddits. They’re all called ‘communities’, but they couldn’t be more different.
It’s becoming more and more apparent in the age of the loneliness epidemic just how important deep, intentional communities are. The problem is the bar is so low, that when you say you run a community it’s impossible to tell if it’s a ghost town of a discord server or something highly programmed, intimate and IRL.
As more and more people and businesses realize the need for community, we’ll likely see language emerge to distinguish one from the other.
The Lexicon of Tomorrow
If your work or curiosity has you trying to make sense of culture and the future, some of the best signals you can find come from uncovering one of these three things:
Unarticulated complex feelings - When you find a strong emotion that culture hasn’t been able to put into words yet, you’ve found a cultural fault line, the pressure that comes out of this is what fuels larger cultural movements as it matures.
New interactions that change how we relate to things - AI is the poster child of this right now. The way we interact with things unlocks new mindsets and behaviors, and with any fundamental change, there’s a long, long tail of unintended consequences.
Unrecognized complexity - Places in culture where our language doesn’t have enough fidelity to describe what we see or need, these gaps tell us what cultural innovations are in motion, they help us identify what’s changing and what we’re in need of.
Language is powerful, it unlocks our collective awareness and social permissions to act in new ways. Next time something in culture doesn’t make sense, next time you’re in search of a rich cultural insight, look for the language gap to understand it.
This Little Piggy Went To Market
Here's what we've been consuming.
Dashboard Culture vs. Camouflage Culture (Zine): “Camouflage Culture is the dinner party you’re not invited to, Substack paywalls, algo-speak, double meaning emojis, linguistic drift and slang, Chatham House Rules, three hour podcasts, IFYYK, ephemerality, anonymity, vibes, group chats, off-off-broadway, Yondr phone-locking pouches, the One Piece flag, deep-fried memes, Skibidi, niche subreddits, members-only clubs, and printed zines… a social immune response to a panoptic gaze of social judgement, audience capture, thirsty “How do you do, fellow kids?” brands, permanently-recorded life, and attention-seeking algorithmic conditioning.”
AI Is the Market, and the Market Is the Government (Kyla’s Newsletter): “So: the stock market inhabits a different reality where AI speculation is all that really matters. We are in a rate-cutting cycle, with loose fiscal policy - might as well spend a ton of money on everything. The Mag7 will be completely fine either way. And what explains the Trump administration’s economic decisions? Well, as long as the stocks stay up, the administration has room to do things that would be impossible during volatility.”
Inside the Bank Where Almost Every Employee Is a Gig Worker (Wall Street Journal): “Its employees still have job titles and descriptions, but within the firm they are acting more like gig workers, taking on ad-hoc projects that may have little or nothing to do with the job for which they were hired. The more flexible approach—mediated by an in-house ‘talent marketplace’—is critical to redeploying human capital that can be far more productive with AI tools, as well as speeding the pace of new AI deployments, said Tanuj Kapilashrami, the bank’s chief strategy and talent officer.”
I think it’s sad (and telling) that the recent chatGPT and Claude ads relied on a nostalgic or retro aesthetic.
The future doesn’t have its own aesthetic. The very brands that are supposed to be the future of ~everything~ aren’t giving us a visual language to look forward to.
We can’t even imagine a new look or feel. And if they can’t give it to us, who will?
It takes real optimism to imagine the future in detail, and almost every generation had their vision. The steam aesthetic of Victorian futurism, art deco (which was itself a form of futurist aesthetic), cyberpunk, the jet age imagined by the futurists of the 1950s…
Hopefully soon we will get ours, too.
Yours,
I’m Jasmine Bina, and I’m a brand strategist and cultural futurist. If you love this newsletter and need more:
My private community Exposure Therapy is where my team and I share our best original research, have provocative conversations, special dinners, and lots of fun.
My brand strategy agency Concept Bureau that works with some of the most powerful cultural brands in the world today.
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My public speaking, where I bring my energy and enthusiasm to life with people who are deeply curious about culture, strategy, and the future.
As always, this was such a good reading. Great work!
As a big fan of neologisms, this is great.