too many trends, not enought taste

“We started talking about vibes in September 2020,” says Dr Antonia Ward, chief futurist at trends intelligence company Stylus. “We were looking at how social media was reflecting a more chaotic mood. Before that, platforms such as Instagram had been quite buttoned down and filtered, but something shifted. We began sending a more impressionistic co... See more

Taste is about discovery, having interest in things, and making a lot of mistakes. It’s about trying to find the authentic set of choices that both reflect your own background, but also the choices and discoveries that you have made consciously and deliberately. It's always changing and it's also always in reflection of what everyone else is doing ... See more

Being sold to can be socially awkward, for sure, but when it comes to corrosive self-doubt, being the seller is a thousand times worse. The constant curation of a salable self demanded by the new economy can be a special hellspring of anxiety.

Trend brain, as I call it, encourages us to simplify everything online into something either buyable, understandable, or moral (and therefore worthy of consumption). We may tire of trend talk, but there is a devout certainty to the speed at which they’re cycled through. There are more choices than ever today, but seemingly less authority as to what... See more

Social media is designed to cycle through content rather than encouraging people to sit with it, to understand it at a deeper level. New content is the fuel on which these platforms run.