We’re Desperate For Potency

How meaning is moving toward the margins.

Welcome! If you found this article, or my most recent pieces on Dreambuilding, and Surviving Your Personal Brand to be useful, I invite you to become a free subscriber to get more of my articles on the intersection of strategy and culture.

Why do millions of people spend hours watching strangers confess into their phones? Why are ayahuasca retreats and psychedelic clinics packed with people who already have therapy and apps for everything? Why do men cry and hold each other in sports stadiums?

Because we’re desperate for potency.

We have plenty of convenience and safe spaces. Nobody is desperate for more comfort. What we’re starving for is intensity, and that’s hard to admit because it means the ease we’re so precious about has also made us numb.

It’s no coincidence that status has moved from conspicuous consumption to conspicuous commitment as my colleague Zach Lamb astutely points out - from luxury goods to physically and emotionally demanding rituals. An Hermes bag doesn’t mean nearly as much as a scar from the Pacific Trail. Pictures on a yacht don’t score points the way a story about ego death does.

It's a time of great uncertainty, and yet everywhere you look, people are running toward danger and discomfort. We might think comfort is the antidote in uncertain times - and there’s a world of deadening AI slop and bedrotting memes to support that - but human nature doesn’t give up that easily. What we really want is to remember we are alive.

And if you’re a brand, a community, or some sort of leader, you should think twice about the spaces and experiences you create for your people. Popup events, activations, corporate wellness retreats, gatherings and private clubs are usually just spectacle.

What people really want is permission to feel and act in ways that ordinary life doesn't allow, and this is the right time to start pushing your experiences into uncomfortable territory.

The Hunger for Potency

The rise of the gambling economy can be interpreted in many ways. It’s both a market bubble and an emerging mindset. I’d say it’s also a rational response to an irrational world where work has decoupled from reward. When chance and randomness are the dominant energies of our time, it would be stupid not to gamble.

But Polymarket, Kalshi and Wall Street Bets are also special spaces with rules that deviate far from the norms of a typical casino. In a casino, you bet on a sports team, but on Polymarket you bet on the misfortune of LA fire victims or Bryan Johnson’s morning wood. Wall Street Bets has developed its own digital hazing rituals while people ride the high of gaming the game. The money and the risk are there, but more importantly, so is the permission to cheer for collapse.

These are spaces with a measurable deviation from the norm, and that is what makes them so intoxicating.

If you want to build a space that actually matters, you have to engineer an environment with radically different permissions. The greater the permissions, meaning the further they are from the everyday, the more potent the space.

Excerpt from our original Exposure Therapy research drop: “Special Spaces”, 2024.

Spaces like that jolt us. It’s the reason why Burning Man keeps a vice-like grip on our psyche and the already massive $144B immersive entertainment industry is expected to nearly triple in the next 5 years. Potent spaces let us play with different permissions that snap us awake. They trade in unusual currencies - permission to scream, to be excessive, to be anonymous, to be scared, to shrink or take up space, to be intimate with strangers. The greater the delta, the greater the potency.

Everyday life provides plenty of chaos, but it doesn’t provide us the risk we need to feel transformed.

De-Trust

The trust economy has changed us in imperceptible ways, and that matters because trust and potency go hand-in-hand.

Tressie McMillan Cottom and Kyla Scanlon have both talked about the redistribution of friction and how it’s never really removed from our experiences, but instead just hidden in ways that make it easy for us to ignore real-world problems. As Tressie says, when you can buy your way out of having to stand in line at the airport, you live in a different reality than other people, and that warps your perception of what systems need (or don’t need) to be fixed.

When you can pay someone else to deal with the grocery store rush, when you can buy access to a highway lane without traffic, when you can skip urgent care and book a concierge doctor, you’re probably not going to invest in improving our broken systems. You’ve, “found a way to route around collapse. Life still works, but only in zones that are small enough to manage and expensive enough to protect,” as Kyla eloquently puts it.

That explains why we keep tolerating broken systems, but we need to go deeper if we want to understand why potency has drained out of ordinary life. There is a deeper removal of friction that we need to pay attention to.

The language of the “trust economy” was always misleading. What apps like Yelp, Uber, and Airbnb actually did was remove the need for trust. Before these platforms, you had to rely on the word of a stranger, the reputation of a neighbor, or the uncertainty of a handshake deal. Those transactions carried risk, and the vulnerability inside that risk is what created real trust.

The true definition of trust may surprise you:

“The willingness to be vulnerable to the actions of another party based on the expectation that the other will perform a particular action important to the trustor, irrespective of the ability to monitor or control that other party.”

Real trust is never about control. It’s about accepting vulnerability in the hopes that someone else will act in your interest.

But our modern platforms promised to make all of that unnecessary. They replaced human trust with ratings, guarantees, and insurance layers that eliminated the possibility of being let down, and with it, the possibility of being surprised.

Chart from our original Exposure Therapy research drop: “Matters of the Heart”, 2024.

The irony of the trust economy that emerged in the early 2000s is that these apps did not build trust at all. True trust requires a meaningful gesture of vulnerability, and when a new generation of apps removed that risk from the equation, they also removed the hundreds of trust transactions that used to permeate everyday life.

What disappeared along the way was not just trust, but also the micro-doses of potency that came from navigating everyday risk. Choosing a restaurant without a thousand reviews, booking a room in an unfamiliar city - these were small but vital leaps of faith. They required us to extend ourselves beyond certainty, and in doing so they injected everyday life with the charge of vulnerability.

And now people have generally been conditioned to de-risk even the smallest interactions in their lives.

Decentralized trust fooled us into thinking trust was about transparency, when in fact trust is the opposite of transparency. And just as comfort has become an edge case, so too has potency migrated into the margins with extreme experiences, off-grid festivals, drugs, gambling, and new, heightened forms of spirituality. Meaningful life experience has been pushed to the extremes.

Permission Delta

Ordinary life has come to give us a narrow set of permissions, usually limited to work and consumption. But potency lives in the delta between what’s normally allowed and what suddenly becomes possible in a special space.

A permission that is historically absent in the American experience is grief, but it’s really interesting to see how we’re creating new and potent spaces that let us play with death and grief in subversive ways.

Halloween has exploded into a full-blown cultural phenomenon. Sales are booming, Target alone added more than a thousand new products last year, and record numbers of Americans say they’re celebrating.

The market for Halloween decorations alone is seeing exponential growth and expected to exceed $12B by 2033. What used to be candy and costumes for kids has become an immersive adult ritual. It is darker, bigger, and stranger, as I explain here:

@jasmine_binaA hefty load of statistics will tell you America’s Halloween industry is booming. Halloween sales are at a record high, Target added a whopping 1,300 Halloween SKUs this year, and the most Americans ever report they will be celebrating, but there’s a deeper shift happening here that goes beyond consumerism. America is finally ready to deal with the gruesomeness of what we have collectively lost these past few years. A host of signals and factors, from the explosion of shadow work and the booming dark romantasy industry, to the resurgence of gothic fashion and the popularity of immersive horror experiences tells us that perhaps this is how America is choosing to deal with its unprocessed grief. After all, the rise of #witchtok has a longstanding precedent in people turning to the occult after periods of acute change. Meanwhile more and more people are finding ways to find the pageantry in death, whether it’s in living funeral parties, death doulas, or the year-round Home Depot skeleton. When we experience death or loss of any kind (whether it’s loss of a loved one, a sense of security, or even a sense of self), we remember how to appreciate life, and the rapid changes of the past few years didn’t give us the time or space to properly embrace the death we all experienced. It’s only natural that America would choose a holiday to reawaken itself. I wrote an article about this, and if you want to learn more, check out the link in my bio. #halloween #culture #halloweendecor #americanculture

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

In a culture with almost no formal grieving rituals, Halloween has become a rare permission slip to play with loss and the macabre in the United States. The rise of death positivity, shadow work, dark romantasy, and #witchtok are all signals of the same craving. A great deal of life, trust and safety has been lost in the past few years, and people need spaces where the morbid and the mystical can be safely explored in order to grieve all of that loss. Halloween, and all of the pageantry of death that has exploded around it, works because it grants that permission. It has turned into a cultural release valve… or in another word, potent.

That explains why a subversive costume on Halloween feels more electric than another multi-million dollar brand pop-up. The greater the permission shift, the greater the potency. But sometimes you really have to pay attention to the unspoken permissions that underpin a moment to know what’s going on.

Permissions don’t matter unless they involve risk. Taking selfies at a vibey influencer dinner is not risk that can change you. Taking a trust-building hike with your coworkers is not risk that will leave an impression on your heart. An expert panel may be valuable, but it does not demand the vulnerability of your people.

While everything looks lively on the surface of culture, with infinite niches and trends, there is a no-stakes numbness that has taken over the mainstream. When people like Freya India talk about Gen Z’s desire for surrender, what they are pointing at is our reaction to a world that demands no risk or vulnerability, when in fact that is exactly what we need.

Someone at TikTok once told me that if you categorize all of the content on the platform, the largest type of content by far would be the "Offloading of Cognitive Burden", or essentially memes that do the labor of capturing and expressing an obscure idea/ thought/ emotion you can't put your finger on, but when you do, it provides a deep emotional release:

@jasmine_binaSomeone at TikTok told me once that if you categorize all of the content on the platform, the largest type of content by far would be the "Offloading of Cognitive Burden", or essentially memes that do the labor of capturing and expressing an obscure idea/ thought/ emotion you can't put your finger on. If you’re a creator, a brand strategist, a marketer, a social media manager, a creative director or just someone with a personal brand, this is for you. I'd say people respond to that type of content overwhelmingly because emotional release is such an addictive feeling right now, and has been for a while. People want their feelings named and they want to know other people feel the same things, too. They want to know their feelings are shared - especially the in-between feelings that don't fit neatly into their lives or don't make sense. Emotion is the dominant language of our time, and every product, every brand, every interaction with your audience is an exchange of feeling. People should be feeling your brand before they even fully know it.

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

TikTok’s emotional content is potency at scale, naming feelings that interrupt the everyday numbness.

A Rupture

What looks like chaos on the surface of culture is really a search for rupture. People are chasing memes and rituals and drugs looking for the rare places that demand vulnerability. Potency only happens when the everyday script is suspended and a new set of permissions takes over.

That’s why the permission delta is so important to track. It’s in that gap that cultural innovation happens. It’s where people connect more deeply, where movements gain loyalty, where emotions spill into action. The mainstream has drained itself of risk, so people are finding potency in the margins.

For anyone building brands, communities, or cultural movements, this is both the challenge and the opportunity. You can keep chasing width in activations, collabs, and photo walls, or you can engineer depth by creating spaces that allow rupture from the norm. True rituals, not hollow ones. Risk that transforms. Potency is the only real measure of whether an experience will matter tomorrow.

And this need will only intensify. As uncertainty deepens, people will hunger for spaces that make them feel alive.

---

Speaker Deck

I love speaking on stage. It’s where I can bring my energy and enthusiasm to life with people who are deeply curious about culture and brands. If you’d like to have me come speak at your event, you can check out my speaker deck here.

In the meantime, I’ve got some upcoming keynotes I’m excited to share (and hope to see you at!):

• I’ll be speaking at the Society of Digital Agencies’ Annual Global Summit in New Orleans on September 17th on Building In Our Existential Moment

• I’m delivering a keynote at Stocksy’s ‘Proof of Life’ event in NYC on September 18th on my report on Psychotechnology

• Then I’m jetting back to host a very special Exposure Therapy dinner on a dreamy ranch in Topanga

I don’t do fluffy talks. I don’t do boring delivery. I go very deep with a lot of passion.

Let’s collaborate!

---

The Deep End

Here's what we've been consuming.

Why does “bad” cosmetic work make people so angry? (Vox): ““Judgment of beauty is often entangled with judgment of naturalness,” says DeFino. “For example, studies show that we judge people who’ve undergone obvious cosmetic work as morally inferior — it’s associated with lying.” She continues, “The underlying message is that a ‘good woman’ with ‘good work’ conceals the labor they perform to make the entangled constructs of beauty and womanhood seem natural. A ‘bad woman’ with ‘bad work’ exposes the entangled constructs of beauty and womanhood as unnatural.””

A Hollywood Start-Up Targets the Micro Drama Craze (New York Times): “Chinese micro drama apps have lately been gaining traction in the United States; millions of Americans have downloaded them, according to Sensor Tower, an analytics firm. Analysts estimate that the genre will be a $10 billion business outside China by 2027. “This is a rare white space in entertainment: an emerging global format with no clear leader here in the U.S.,” Mr. Braun said in an interview, gesticulating wildly as is his custom.”

AI & Our Unconscious: Using Dream Data To Decode Culture (ZINE by Matt Klein): “There’s a fascinating observation before we even get into the contents of the dreams themselves. It's as if the more AI became part of our conscious reality, the less our unconscious needed to process it symbolically. A declining frequency suggests dreams may serve as an unconscious early warning system, most active when processing emergent threats or changes, which we haven't yet addressed consciously.”

From Cheating Exposés to Dating Background Checks, TikTok Detectives Are Thriving (Wired): “Once relegated to hidden-camera reality shows like Cheaters, dozens of prominent social media PIs have sprung up over the past few years, focusing on topics like insurance fraud, missing persons, and even high-stakes heists. But by far the most viral videos center on infidelity, with the most popular internet PIs carrying out surveillance and even background checks on men their clients have deemed suspicious.”

[BONUS] I was recently on the How To Do The Pot podcast talking about how brands in shame-based or fear-based categories can change perceptions of themselves and their users. It was a fantastic discussion on identity branding and the very real tactics that brands can use to create a new story when their category overshadows their offering.

[BONUS + ASK] I have two sessions up for SXSW 2026 Panel Picker voting right now, and I’d be grateful if you could take a moment to vote: 1) A solo talk on “Holding Contradictions: Branding for Modern Creators” and 2) a panel on “Microspaces and Macro Narratives: The Future of B2B Communities”. Voting closes August 24th.

---

Alex Horomozi made a stupid amount of money selling his book this weekend. He broke records. But chances are you never heard of his book. Neither had I until a coupe weeks ago.

Alex has said before that despite how much you think you’ve promoted something, you can probably still promote it more. Every time a superfan would stop him in the street over the past year, he’d ask them if they’d heard his book was coming. Nearly all of them said no, even though he talked about it all the time.

It’s a good reminder that promotion and awareness have a long runway. Even a guy like him, whose followers stalk his every move, finds that saying things once, twice or ten times is still not enough.

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 I share my best original research that you won’t find in any of my public posts. We have dinners, provocative conversations, and lots of fun. I hand pick every person here for curiosity, humility and generosity.

• 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, or follow me on TikTok and Instagram where I post my thoughts in video form.