Work

And strangely, people are open to it. There’s a growing appetite for radical reinvention of spirituality, identity, belonging, health, work and community. We want novelty, but we also want roots. We want control, but we’re exhausted by optimization. We want to feel something, and the brands that learn to hold this tension will feel like portals.

When a brand can hold two opposing ideas without collapsing, like sex and idealism in American Apparel’s case, they reflect peoples’ inner conflict back to them, and that’s a magnetic energy to project.

For all the talk of coherence in the world of branding, it is tension that is the real engine of meaning.

I think social media resources tend to over-index on the “best practices” that hook viewers, instead of the underlying tensions that make viewers stick around. Understand the way your brand or industry is perceived, and find ways to twist expectations.

At heart, this is a manifestation of a general undervaluing of our own work: we still navigate the workplace as if getting paid to produce knowledge means we’re getting away with something, and have to do everything possible to make sure no one realizes they’ve made a massive mistake.

The compulsion to LARP is for those who have to feel accountable to some larger salary god, one who takes earthly shape in the form of our manager, our manager’s manager, and/or our coworkers, all of whom are constantly deciding whether or not we deserve the salaried, privileged position in which we’ve found ourselves. This is largely bullshit, of ... See more

Our attachment to suffering as a proxy for value has been undermining our work, well-being, and creativity for centuries.

When so much of our working life is spent proving we’re working, it’s no wonder we’re uneasy with tools that make effort disappear.

Knowledge work rarely follows linear patterns. Our most valuable contributions often come from reflection, seemingly "unproductive" conversations, exploration of dead ends, and invisible mental processing.