The Big Decoupling

Work is untethering from reward, and that changes everything we know about branding.

There is an incredible decoupling happening at the very heart of our culture, and it will affect brands and people more than anything else over the next decade:

Work is untethering from reward.

And for a country founded on the Protestant mythology where the virtue of hard work means you are rewarded with greater economic, social and political value, it means there is no gravity holding things together anymore.

You can see this decoupling being encoded in our most important systems right now:

• AI means anyone can be a master, so your hard work doesn’t win you more accolades. The marketplace of achievements is suddenly becoming way more unpredictable, and disruptive forces like AI are opening back doors, short-circuiting traditional paths to success, and normalizing a sense of randomness in work.

• GLP-1s mean anyone can be skinny, so your hard work (or maybe just genes?) doesn’t get you more social favor. The ‘morality’ and economics of thinness start to fall apart, and it’s hard to know how we should celebrate work as it relates to the body (which is perhaps the most profitable moral highground, as evidenced by the nearly $7T wellness industry).

• Crypto means anyone can strike gold, so your hard earned investing acumen doesn’t win you special fortunes. A single timely decision could outpace years of smart portfolio-building. Tokens and sh*tcoins proved fortunes could materialize far faster than the usual hard-earned, rags-to-riches story we see in the stock market or the movies we grew up with.

• The TikTok-ification of everything means anyone can have viral content overnight in the slot machine that is social media, and the followers that you’ve spent years cultivating don’t win you extra views or extra reach. And yet brands and influencers alike still cling to follower count because the truth of the matter - the increasing randomness of reach - is just too hard to accept.

When you see work untether from reward in foundational systems like labor, finance, and media, you have to reorient your understanding of the market and the consumer. The future of business and culture is not merely about the value these systems unlock—it’s about the behaviors and beliefs they lock in.

We're locking into a very different system that dissolves the old moorings of effort and reward, leaving us in a restless current of chance.

Chance and randomness are the dominant energies of our time.

It’s hard to make a narrative story out of that. There is no mythology available to us that will help make meaning out of the decoupling, although we’re seeing different factions of people try. Silicon Valley, faced with the imminent consequences of their own creation, is quickly revamping Christianity to be an absolving version of the prosperity gospel. The victimhood narrative that has characterized the far (over)reaches of politics, most recently America’s vengeful tariffs, may give people some small sense of purpose and understanding in a strange new world, but it will be insufficient.

What makes the decoupling so pervasive is the massive infrastructures that enforce it by default. Influencer culture, self-enhancement medicine, cheatware, min/maxing... the signs were coming for a while, but now we have legit, permanent systems at the heart of everyday life that force the decoupling on all of us.

The void will touch everything. How do we value an employee, a member of the community, a partner, a leader, a teacher, a political movement, an education, a lifestyle, a brand, a product, or an idea when we can no longer point to work and dedication as a reliable measure of shared value?

Where can we extract meaning when the singular measure a life well-lived no longer holds?

Some early signals suggest “we’re cooked” as my principal strategist Zach Lamb likes to jokingly say. We see darker versions of Christianity, politics, dating, tribalism and identity taking hold. Not because people are necessarily cruel, but because these versions are simply better adapted for this new world where beating (or cheating) the system is the only rational strategy.

But we’d be poor brand strategists and futurists if we accepted the next bad thing as our ultimate fate. The long trajectory of history has always pointed toward progress, social innovation, and most importantly, surprises in foresight that look like common sense in hindsight.

So what might those common sense surprises look like?

What we’re seeing now are early, clumsy attempts of a culture trying to reform itself, but there are also lighter versions of things coming into focus: people finding meaning outside of work, radical new forms of community building, psychedelic therapy, enlightened spirituality, and a redefinition of success.

When we can no longer value ourselves or each other by the "work" or the effort, we have to find other ways to decide who and what is valuable. In the short-term, there will be two concurrent tracks we see culture taking: worshipping chance or playing with meaning.

Worshipping chance is a natural extension of a system that has burned through its illusions of fairness. When hard work no longer guarantees reward, our default response is to elevate randomness itself, investing it with a near-spiritual authority. The hustle once revolved around effort, but now it’s about catching lightning in a bottle. The algorithm’s next wave or a stray viral moment can bestow wealth or influence more swiftly than years of honest grind, so chance becomes something to venerate. A chaotic deity in an otherwise disenchanted world.

In practice, this devotion to luck reveals itself everywhere from retail trading frenzies to viral overnight success stories. Instead of following predictable career ladders or carefully planned investments, people chase sudden gains, hoping to decode the next market upswing or social media glitch.

Brands, influencers, and even entire platforms amplify these tales of instant fortune, further fueling the belief that chance might be our last reliable path to success. When we glamorize this volatility, we risk normalizing the idea that pursuing (or even engineering) random breaks is the most rational option.

But worshipping chance also sets the stage for playing with meaning.

Once we recognize just how mercurial success can be, we can move beyond passive acceptance of the system’s randomness and begin actively reshaping our notions of value. There will be people who throw themselves headfirst into the glitch in the system and turn it into an art form. If everyone can cheat their way to mastery, wealth, or beauty, they will see it as a giant permission slip to create new ways of finding meaning.

When effort is no longer the golden path, we’re finally free to invent purpose that isn’t measured by sweat and grind. We can build cosmic parties, societies, religions where creativity is currency. We can remix our social rituals with absurd new rules. We can pursue weirdness like it’s sacred.

And some of that could really happen. Some of it is already happening in our homes, gathering places, and centers of worship.

If the old myth is gone, we are just as likely as not to write new ones so brilliant and so joyful, that they actually thrive in a system that precludes us from making work the pathway to meaning. When chance so often triumphs over sweat, the real opportunity lies in writing narratives that thrive precisely because they reject old rules, and in doing so, create surprising, life-affirming possibilities that might just become the new mythologies we live by.

For brands and their leaders, this decoupling has profound implications. If success can strike at random, then the old playbooks, where you simply celebrate hard work or exclusivity, might no longer resonate with consumers who feel the ground shifting under their feet.

When anyone can go viral, re-sculpt their body, or amass sudden wealth, it becomes harder to sell the myth that effort alone is what makes a product, lifestyle, or status truly valuable (which is how most products and aspirations are branded today).

Instead, you have to help people navigate this unpredictable landscape in a meaningful way. And the good news is that both worshipping chance and playing with meaning open the door for brands to build new kinds of trust and loyalty.

The obvious way is to acknowledge the randomness and empower consumers to experiment, take creative risks, and find joy in the unexpected. Lots of brands will lean into this chance-heavy side of the equation. It’s easier to feed into game mechanics, gambling experiences, and the overall sense of worshipping chance when it ensnares audiences into deeper usage. It can be as simple as a loot box or as sophisticated as an all-knowing slot machine algorithm.

But I think the far more exciting and lucrative path is for brands to play with meaning alongside their consumers.

There are the obvious ways, such as facilitating deeper forms of meaning-making through genuine community, playful engagement, or creative self expression. I haven’t seen any of these formats reliably solved so there’s plenty of room for brands to grow here alone.

But what if brands went further? What if we curate moments of shared wonder and purpose? What if we created joyful new norms around connection, family and belonging? Can you imagine a brand that makes people feel human again? Or makes them feel even more than human? The most exciting thing about all of this is that brands can finally, thankfully, build long term connections that go beyond the next viral spike because people are ready and waiting for it.

I firmly believe brands can help consumers rewrite the script, and transform a disorienting decoupling into an opportunity for collective reinvention.

There is an invisible but open need for a story that makes sense of this all. The decoupling may look like threads coming apart today, but culture always weaves itself back together. We can redefine what value looks like.

We can create new measures of experience and value that go well beyond the idea of work and reward, and help us measure our lives in more accurate ways.

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Don’t Tax My Flex

Here's what we've been consuming.

Will Tariffs Blow Up Wellness & Longevity "Culture?" (The Business of Women): “No doubt, a certain subset of Gen Z and coastals will continue their march to pleasure-free, high-investment status living. But for the rest? Why go through all the pain-staking trouble, deprivation and true budget killing when your feed pummels you that AI will take your job and our way of life is over? Nihilism has never looked so good.”

Don’t Make Small Talk. Think Big Talk. (The Atlantic): “Arguably, the foremost reason that conversations are difficult is because we don’t prepare for them or work to get better at them... People generally spend more time thinking about what they will wear to a dinner party than what they will talk about. Researchers have found that, laziness aside, this insouciance about conversation is because 50 percent believe that thinking about topics in advance will make a conversation feel forced and artificial; only 12 percent of people think such mental preparation will enhance the experience.”

Prototyping Social Forms of Care (Care Culture): “What role do therapists, coaches, healers, guides, clinicians, and other “helping professions” have to play in establishing new social forms—social forms which themselves heal, enliven, and strengthen the social fabric? By researching how different people and communities answer this question, we may begin to understand the pattern languages and even design methodologies for these new institutions of care. Increasingly I see my role as encouraging these kinds of experiments.”

The Rise of the New Romanticism (Political Currents by Ross Barkan): “In the coming years, if AI cannot metastasize as promised, the oligarchs will lash out like wounded beasts. They cannot accept the inevitability of a world without rapid ascent. Despite what the technologists believe, there are laws of gravity as well as valleys to follow peaks. Nothing is promised to us. We will advance, but not always on their terms. And they’ll find the public growing more recalcitrant.”

Is 'bypassing' a better way to battle misinformation? Researchers say new approach has advantages over the standard (Phys.org): “Rather than directly addressing the misinformation, this strategy involves offering accurate information that has an implication opposite to that of the misinformation. For example, faced with the factually incorrect statement "genetically modified foods have health risks," a bypassing approach might highlight the fact that genetically modified foods help the bee population. This counters the negative implication of the misinformation with positive implications, without taking the difficult path of confrontation..”

America Is Done Pretending About Meat (The Atlantic): "A wide swath of the U.S. seems to be sending a clear message: Nobody should feel bad about eating meat. Many people are relieved to hear it. Despite all of the attention on why people should eat less meat—climate change, health, animal welfare—Americans have kept consuming more and more of it."

Want to Sell More Romance Novels? First, Have a Really Great Hat (Inc.): “When Erica Cerulo and Claire Mazur launched the romantic fiction brand 831 Stories last August, their intention was not only to invest in up-and-coming romance writers, but also to create immersive entertainment universes around their stories for the romance superfans. Think less Simon & Schuster and more Disney, A24, and Bravo—companies that turn shows and movies into expansive worlds through merchandise, events, and theme parks.”

[BONUS 1] Some of my team was interviewed on the amazing podcast That Business of Meaning. My cofounder Jean-Louis talks about levers of attention and value creation, and our principal strategist Zach Lamb talks about how brands can help people find meaning in a disoriented world.

[BONUS 2] I spoke with BBC about what we’re seeing in travel trends for 2025: it’s a year of looking for new anchors. Travel trends like stargazing, holiday romance, nostalgia tourism, sleep tourism, digital detoxes and so on show us that people are searching to be reconnected to something bigger than themselves.

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Something crazy is happening in our everyday language and brands need to pay attention.

A study of our language shows that as rationality words are decreasing, intuition words are increasing.

Meanwhile, another HBR study of job descriptions for CEOs shows that less and less job descriptions are asking for skills around managing financial and materials resources, while more and more are mentioning social skills.

Correlation is not causation, but you have to admit the lines on these charts do look like near-perfect inverse relationships.

We're swapping reason for feeling.

We’re structurally embedding it into leadership, decision-making, and culture... and intuition is becoming our default operating system.

And if you're a brand trying to change beliefs and behaviors in your market, you have to start asking yourself how intuition plays into your UX and customer journey.

Intuition is felt. It's alchemic, but its not impossible to understand. You just have to learn its language.

It isn’t irrational, but it is processed differently. It moves through symbols, signals, and subconscious cues. If you’re a brand trying to shift beliefs and behaviors, you can’t just logic people into change.

You have to design for instinct. Shape the unspoken.

Build experiences that feel right before they make sense.

As intuition becomes our default operating system, brands have to learn to resonate in deeper ways.

(I shared this post on LinkedIn 1 month ago. If you want my most up-to-date insights, connect with me on LinkedIn here.)

Yours,

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

• My private strategist’s club Exposure Therapy is where the best minds and brand builders come to get better at their craft. It’s also where I drop my best original research.

• My brand strategy agency Concept Bureau works with some of the most powerful cultural brands in the world today.

• My LinkedIn where I post my ideas almost every day, before they turn into reports or articles. I invite you to connect with me. I’d love to meet you!