In the coming years, we will see more and more people publicly embody contradictions, and that will make it hard to categorize them in the algorithm of our minds. We will be forced to find beauty in the weirdness we’ve tried to optimize away. Merriam-Webster named authentic Word of the Year in 2023, but on the eve of 2025, it turns out we’ve been... See more

If you pay attention to the right kind of weird, it will tell you where old values are crashing into new ones, and those new values are what you can build the future on top of. The most successful brands tapped into our new values before we even had the words to describe them, and they got an outsized return by betting on them early.