As more and more of us sit with the question of what sits beyond intelligence as our true human premium, it seems that we’re doubling down on that ineffable quality that, as of yet, lies beyond the grasp of the machine: intuition.

It’s an entrance into a new era — a noetic era — coined and elaborated upon by Concept Bureau’s Zach Lamb, a brand strategist and social theorist who published a deep dive into the topic late this past summer.

As Lamb outlines, we can anticipate ‘feeling our way’ into the next era of culture — reaching toward a plane of ’noetic’ knowing. Which is to say — jumping ship from the rationalist, techno-optimistic narrative steered by Silicon Valley and its elites, and diving deep into the ethereal lagoon of noeticism defined by our internal, subjective, and felt sense of truth.

Quoting journalist, author and scholar of religion, Tara Isabella Burton, Lamb notes that our current culture agita is a sign that we’ve reached something akin to a techno-apocalypticism (and we’d add that AI feels like the final straw). Burton continues: “We’ve run up against the limits — political, cultural, and social alike — of our civilizational progression; and something newer, weirder, maybe even a little more exciting, has to take its place. Some of what we’ve lost — a sense of wonder, say, or the transcendent — must be restored.”

Noetic intuition, like liquid gold in a cultural kintsugi, offers to fill the cracks that the rigid, logical data of machines simply can’t — and we’re already seeing it emerge. Just consider the way ‘vibe’ and ‘energy’ have become everyday lexicon for how we perceive and communicate our perceptions of ourselves, one another, and the world; or how witchy our feeds have turned...from manifestation culture and in-depth astrological readings on low-brow TikTok, to the successful podcast series Witch on high-brow BBC.

As we seek to connect more deeply with our individual intuitions and root ourselves in lived experience, we can expect to see momentum behind many of the tailwinds we explored in our Future In Sync report: things like the continued rise of mainstream engagement with and commercialization of psychedelics, the considered pursuit of rest and pleasure as critical components of care, and a revitalized urge to nurture interhuman, interspecies, and interplanetary connection however we’re able.

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