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Nobody hired me to do this work before I was already doing it.
Last week I was invited to speak at Parsons about my career as a cultural futurist - how I map deep cultural shifts and use them to build brand strategy. But more than the frameworks, what I ended up sharing was about what it actually takes to develop the kind of perception this work depends on.
There is no playbook. You are the tool. Your ability to see clearly without bias, without ego, without defaulting to easy narratives, is what determines whether you find something real or just repeat what already exists.
Which means this work is less about what you know, and more about how you shape yourself. The information you consume and how you consume it. The people you let into your orbit. The ways you choose to participate in culture instead of just analyzing it from the outside.
And more than anything else, your willingness to think in public.
Everything I’ve ever been hired to do, I wrote about before anyone paid me for it. I was hired for my ideas and perspectives, and I learned early on not to wait for a client or job to start developing my sense of the future. My team and I built our own mental models, took real risks on unproven ideas, and figured out together what it means to explore the edges of culture.
It takes multiple attempts, with real stakes, to move from early instinct to a point of view that reveals something valuable.
The folks at Parsons were generous enough to let me share the full talk with you today. If you’re building a career, a company, or trying to develop your perspective, this is for you.
Strange Desires
Here’s what we’ve been consuming.
American Diner Gothic (The New Atlantis): “These aren’t random weirdos and they aren’t teenagers in a phase. Walk through any office park and you’ll find the same aesthetic bleeding through the cubicles: anime stickers on laptops, Discord running on second monitors. They’re a new American type, young but trans-generational, as distinctive as the organization man or the valley girl once were. I call them dinergoths: what you get when economic mobility dies, suburbs become psychic deserts, and Discord becomes more real than your cul-de-sac.”
There Is No Religious Revival (ARC): “A national religious revival would suit both the religious, worried about decline and its consequences, and the secular, worried about theological mission creep into politics. And in a tale as old as time, a religious revival also suits grifters and opportunists. But unlike the recent Asbury revival, people can’t even agree that one is happening, at least all that much. It’s Schrodinger’s religious revival, at once happening and not.”
‘A new world is being born’: author Rebecca Solnit on the ‘slow revolution’ (The Guardian): “Class consciousness, environmental awareness – some things can’t just be extinguished once they’ve been enlivened. “Fossil fuel lobbyists cannot undo it. Putin and Trump and that idiot in Argentina [Javier Milei] cannot undo it. They’re trying to push rewind on the VCR, which feels like the right technological moment in history for them.””
[BONUS] I gave an interview to NPR on the the rise of romantasy literature and discussed how sex is the booby prize. What readers really want is justice, because we always seek in our entertainment what we feel we are missing in real life. Literature is where our desires go to hibernate until we can possess them once again.
We are in a loose culture, and people are seeking tightness. In this video I explore it in the culture of food but it exists in many categories, from parenting to education.
Yours,
Hi, I’m Jasmine Bina. I’m a brand strategist and cultural futurist.
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