This piece veers off my normal. Like my last piece, it’s more of a reflection on the current time… I actually have something more interesting and cultural on the backburner but sharing this one before since I think it could tee it up well.

The day after I saw Richard Dawkins, I was traveling by myself to Marfa, Texas for Art Blocks Weekend. For those who aren’t aware, getting there from NY is literally two flights and then a ~3 hour drive from El Paso. It’s in the middle of nowhere (which is what makes it amazing), there is something so special about West Texas.

Anyway, on the drive I got lost (lol). It was fine, I just ended up in the car a lot longer, looking out at a greener than normal desert and a one lane road that kept going. On the drive, I listened to an audiobook. I called some people. At one point I put on some playlists from college that I’ve collected. I rolled down the window, had the sun on my skin, had music going, and looked out at the landscape and thought a bit about my life. My dad, who I miss. My parents, my relationship, college and my close friends. Reflecting on my whole history of how I got here.

It’s the kind of thinking I don’t really do at home. At home there’s always the next thing. I kept landing on how lucky I am. Like, as in, how lucky was I to make it through all the constraints of the universe to be one of the 8 billion people on earth?

Last Tuesday I saw Richard Dawkins at Carnegie Hall. If you don’t know him, he wrote The Selfish Gene and he coined the word “meme” in it (a from we all love). I’ve followed him on Twitter for a while, so it was good to hear him in person. They got into AI, and the part that resonated with me was a theory he’s trying to put together.

He’s been playing around with Claude and basically can’t tell whether it’s conscious. He got dragged pretty hard for this (he nicknamed it Claudia, see: “The Claude Delusion”). But I think the question underneath it is a good one…if these machines can practically do everything we can, what is the genetic purpose of consciousness?

He said he only has a quarter of a theory and is still thinking about it. His quarter, at least the way I understood it, is about feeling. The example he used was a hot skillet on the stove. You touch it and it hurts so much that you won’t do it again. That pain has a genetic purpose. You don’t forget it, because you never want to feel it again. A machine can have that coded into it, but it’s more just flagging yes or no (it’s all 0s and 1s). It isn’t conditioned to feel that pain, or to really feel that its own life is in peril if it keeps going.

I can see that. I think the genetic explanation has a long way to go…and to be fair to him, he called it a quarter for a reason. But I think he might be onto something on the feeling side. Is feeling the differentiator? Is that what makes us human?

A lot of people in the Valley are obsessed with the Turing test and machine consciousness. I’m actually quite interested in it too, to be fair. All these machines are basically math, so are we as humans just math too? Is it the math plus the feeling or spirit that separates us from the machine?

Afterwards I went down a rabbit hole and found that Noah Millman wrote about the same question on Gideon’s Substack (I guess this is an told topic, whatever though). He takes Dawkins’ question seriously but lands somewhere else. LLMs are trained on us to sound like us, so of course they seem conscious, and that’s always been the problem with the Turing test. Being really good at fooling someone isn’t the same as being conscious. The line that stuck with me is that if consciousness does have a purpose, LLMs “won’t ever be truly adequate substitutes for human beings.”

I love our world

On the Marfa drive, I was looking outside thinking, if I had no context of the world and someone asked me to create Earth in my vision, there is no way I could come up with something as beautiful as our earth today.

It struck me, from the conversation the night before, that everything developed is a reaction to an action. Dawkins had talked about an orchid in Madagascar. The Madagascar star orchid has a nectar tube that’s about a foot long. When Darwin got a specimen in 1862, he figured there had to be a moth out there with a tongue long enough to reach the bottom. It took about 40 years for anyone to find it. In 1903 Rothschild and Jordan described the moth and named it praedicta (as in, predicted… by Darwin).

Nobody designed that flower, it took basically millions of years of friction to create. The orchid and the moth kept reacting to each other until you got something ridiculous and beautiful. It made me think that a lot of beauty is a reaction to some other stimulus, and I can’t fabricate or dream up the world because you need that history of life lived. Just like my own life that’s made me (my dad, my parents, my partner, college, work, my close friends), the world is created the same way.

A machine will never (and could never)

I then started thinking about machines, and Dawkins’ question about consciousness. My first thought was that there is no way a machine could experience this feeling I had about myself and the world around me. Maybe it’s the hubris of being a human in the world, but I just don’t think machines are capable of that feeling.

I also thought there’s no way a machine can feel sonder, the deep curiosity about other people’s lives I often feel when I see people. (John Koenig made up the word for The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.)

When I shared the Dawkins theory on Net Society from Marfa, Chris pushed back on the “never.” He was like, couldn’t you eventually put feeling into the machines? The skillet burn, the learning from it, all of it. It might take a long time, but he wouldn’t count it out.

How would I know

I’m a little less sure sitting at my desk than I was in the car. There was a tweet going around about a paper finding “emotion circuits” in LLMs. The paper is more boring than the tweet. Researchers found the parts of a model that drive how it expresses emotion in text, and could turn them up and down. Expressing isn’t feeling. I know that. But it does make “no way” a little harder to say with a straight face.

In the car it felt obvious that a machine couldn’t have what I was having. At my desk I’m like, wait, how would I even know? Chris’s point sounds less crazy from here.

Room to notice

I keep asking what this means for humans in the age of the machine. If Dawkins is even partly right, and feeling is some of what makes us human, how do we coexist in a world where math machines do whatever we can?

In my last piece I wrote about how my agents got my act together. Inbox basically zero, appointments booked, more organized than I’ve ever been. And I asked what all that recovered time is actually for, because a lot of it was going to maximizing points and other nonsense.

My drive, in contrast, was inconvenient. What mattered was that nobody, me included, had claimed that time and there was some room to notice.

I’m not going to tell you to put your phone down and go outside. I’d 100% have my agent book the flights next time. I just think there’s a tension I haven’t figured out. The machines are really good at clearing time for me, and then I fill it right back up. The orchid needed millions of years of friction. I just needed a few hours where nothing was asking for my attention. Maybe the feeling is the part to protect and the math can have the rest? I don’t know yet. I have maybe a quarter of a theory on that too haha.

In some weird way, I have never had my shit together more: 1) my inbox is essentially 0 almost all the time, 2) I’m not letting emails or any other messages for that matter slip through the cracks, 3) my general personal maintenance is like actually taken care of. And yet, I could not feel less interesting.

I thought that all that saved time would go to the stuff I love. But instead, I find myself at 10pm, ambient watching TV, asking the agent what discount I can get instead of going down a rabbit hole. The optimizing just became the new thing I do at night.

I feel very weird right now about my reliance on AI and the general inward nature I’ve been in over the last few months. In my first Substack (!!!) millennial midlife piece, I wrote about lurking and the internet turning into a utility like plumbing. I didn’t think I’d be the example a few months later, but here we are…

These days I feel like I just like sit by myself and type into the machine through different chats all day long. On the other end, with the personal agents that I use, I am discovering more, like doing more in real life.

Chris andAaron (co-hosts on our podcast Net Society) said something that I have been sitting with which is that the AI adoption stuff is going to happen in phases and that phase one is going to be a turn inward towards the productive self. They noted that once those forms emerge, we’ll become more social again, but we’ll become social again along with this productivity, because we’re not going to be willing to give that up as well.

Type B acceleration

To give you some context… I pretty much don’t care about going to the doctor ever. I do my nails when they start looking terrible, I will get a haircut once the split ends are so disturbing that I’m like picking them while on Zoom calls. That’s kind of how I conduct myself.

On financial stuff, I’m equally type B, if that is what we want to call it. I attempt to budget and get rid of expenses that are useless, but ya know, sometimes I don’t feel like dealing with it. I don’t want to sit on the phone with Delta either to deal with something like no WiFi on the flight and get a rebate on that.

What’s happened now is that the agent just pings me and does the work for me.

The “wasted” time is the good stuff

Things I actually like to spend time on include cruising through Artsy / IG / OpenSea for cool art, the RealReal, messing around on Zillow. That said, a lot of wasted time goes into things to enrich myself like spending more time on Substack, podcasts, pile of magazines, watching a movie, reading four books at the same time. I like reading about places I want to eat and am first to volunteer to make the res (I want to have a good meal). I guess you could say I like to spend time on learning about different parts of culture, tech, finance, etc. I spend time on Discords, on Twitter, digging in, DMing people who seem interesting, going to Casa Magazines to find a new aesthetic. I like leaning into the perfectly curated content diet which I have created for myself over the decades.

A lot of my in person meet ups start online too...Someone seems interesting in a Discord or on Twitter, I DM them, and then we’re getting coffee. Same goes for things all over the map: tech events, 1:1 coffees with investors and founders, lots of time and events with people in the art world. I like to go on the ferry and hang out in spaces like that with friends and loved ones at the park. A lot of real life feels “wasted.”

Honestly though, it’s not really wasted, a lot of my taste (sorry to exhaust that word again, especially as the timeline seems past that) comes from this stuff.

This is all to preface to say, maybe I am not like most people. Maybe I spend a lot of time doing things that are atypical and people have their act together enough to book doctor appointments and know when to do that, and if that is the case… kudos to you and this article may be less relevant for you.

Waiting for the “normie” AI harness

I have been using AI since really the beginning. It’s changed my life, undoubtedly.

That said, I didn’t feel like doing the OpenClaw thing in January. Like I said, probably too busy probably lurking on The RealReal to self-host a private army of agents. Plus, my assumption was that someone was going to make a harness for normies and I’d rather wait for that than burn hours trying to figure it out. Needless to say, my cousin, who works at Cursor (and now Grok Bot), got me onto it early-ish. That’s when the normie harness showed up. Then it was Instinct, the agent you just text, blew up in August (The Atlantic did a good piece on what’s going right and wrong with it). Side note, they just raised $1B at a $10B valuation, like a month after raising at $2.5B.

Sheel Mohnot called it “OpenClaw for normal people” and said he’d sent it 677 messages in five days. It found him an in-network podiatrist and got his Comcast bill down.

To make any of these actually useful you sit there alone teaching it you: your calendar, your inbox, all your weird preferences, which is pretty inward.

It’s individualistic, however it has found things that are fun for me and my husband and/or friends to do that are better than what I would have suggested. For example, I saw Julia Louis-Dreyfus had Other Desert Cities on Broadway and I love her. In the old world I would have seen the poster, the play would have come and went, and I would’ve been like damn, I wanted to go!

In this new world, I took a picture of the flyer and dates were offered to me and tickets bought. I didn’t go to a ticket site, I didn’t dig through my calendar, I didn’t put it on some list I’d never look at again.

I am incredibly active as a result of this, like I’m almost doing too much right now? It could also just be fall in New York, but I see things in my email or something and now I take a pic and it’s in there so I have the option. The frictionless has made me more social, but my digital world has moved more inward… that’s the weird part. Offline, I’m out more than I’ve been in a while. Online, I feel kind of gone (at least for me).

Am I getting lamer?

I miss the serendipity of online rabbit holes. This is coming from someone who has been perennially online a lot of my life. I’m now asking myself: am I getting older or is AI technology making me lamer?

Much of the trendspotting and things I learn are from my rabbit holes, Substack and lurking down some Twitter hole. The discovery piece, while I still do (though it feels like less), is taken up by stupid shit I should optimize. I kind of miss being on Twitter and like digging around and finding niche, interesting things. My Internet Explorer StumbleUpon vibe has shifted completely and it’s super depressing.

Some of this isn’t the AI. My calendar is just fuller, so less time in Discords and the platforms were already getting worse. The X algorithm doesn’t push you to the edge, it pushes us to a common context and often that context is just a shared negative space. But the rabbit holes are kind of where I figure out what I like, and the agent skips that part.

Ryo Lu put it well: “the danger is not that ai makes us lazy / the danger is that ai makes us endlessly busy.” That’s me at 10pm with the Spectrum discount.

Phase one is a theory

I think what I am describing may be a phase and the onramp, but I think a lot of people will have that inward onramp. Having the AIs become truly useful takes that onramp and in that period we will be more inward.

That’s my working theory anyway, and I’m kind of testing it on myself. The problem is the 10pm discount hunting isn’t setup. I’m not teaching the agent anything. That’s just what my nights look like now.

I’m not sure about the social part either. Instinct has a feature where your agent talks to your partner’s agent, and Business Insider wrote about couples using it. My favorite part is a guy has his agent pass his wife the message “I love you,” and she replies “Tell him he’s an idiot.”

Maybe my agent talking to my husband’s agent makes it easier to figure out dinner. But it doesn’t get me the random DM that turns into a coffee, or the thing I find three hours into a hole. I don’t know what does yet…

Also, I’m spending way more

I am spending way more mostly because the stuff I used to let slide actually happens now. Appointments get booked, the show gets tickets. The friction was basically my budget. If something took three steps, I didn’t do it, and I didn’t spend the money. Now it’s zero steps.

Morgan Stanley said agents could add up to $115B to its 2030 US e-commerce forecast. Adobe data from this summer shows shoppers coming from AI bring in 53% more revenue per visit than everyone else, though that could just be because people asking an AI are already ready to buy.

The thing I keep thinking about, the same agent helps me figure out what I want and then goes and buys it. Before, Google or Instagram could show me stuff, but I still had to go buy it. I was the last step. Now the agent is the last step too. So my worry is the incentives too. If someone is paying the agent, or the agent gets a cut, that could shape what I want and what I get, and I probably wouldn’t even notice.

Predictions

Some mine, some the machine’s:

• By the end of 2026, one of the big consumer agents ships some kind of “serendipity mode” where the whole point is to send you down rabbit holes instead of closing loops.

• By 2027, agent-to-agent stuff with friends and partners is the main feature people talk about, not a side thing.

• By 2028, “who pays your agent” becomes a normal question, like “is this sponsored” for influencers.

• Agents quietly move everyone’s savings to the 4% account and banks feel it. Apollo’s chief economist is already calling it a possible bank run:

Open Tabs

• What happens when the assistant is the first place I go, and I just show up less in the communities that used to be first?

• Which friction do I keep? I want the Delta call gone forever. I’m less sure about the rabbit holes.

• When following through is this easy, how do I decide which random interests actually deserve tickets? (See: almost doing too much.)

My agents got me out of the house more, and they also pulled me out of the places online that made me me. Or alternatively, we solved the loneliness epidemic?

The millennial piece is where I’m drawing a lot of my subject matter from because there is still a ton I want to say that I could only touch on there. One with a loose thread I couldn’t stop pulling on is as millennials hit midlife and ask is this it? with no institutional religion left to absorb the question. I joked it gets filled by some AI god, but actually it’s going to be the longevity maxis going full woo woo. I used the U shape above to summarize my point, but will share more on the thinking below.

This isn’t about the obvious story we’ve seen which is religion is back (the BBC, adult converts, the NY Post on Gen Z Catholics making church cool, the hunt for the unwatereddown Latin Mass in Manhattan, tradcath adjacent (a farmhouse account got big enough to turn a small Utah town into a tourist destination, etc.)). It’s all real, but I’ll get to it. What I am more interested in is that underneath the longevity movement of more years, the question will become, what is life for.

Longevity → consciousness → spirituality.

Also, from a technological progress POV. For seventy years the frontier was outer: space, the moon, Mars, until the final frontier exploration is getting real (see: the SpaceX IPO). We’ve also gone far into cognitive intelligence itself, and AI is absorbing that one in real time, changing the way we humans work and reason. When outer space is explored and cognitive intelligence is automated, the one direction left is inward.

The AI Part (obviously)

We all know that the consumer economy runs on appetite and the knowledge economy runs on work and AI is coming for both. It’s weird because if work stops being where identity and status and hours come from, and we drift toward some version of UBI, of working less, then what really happens. It will arrive for everyone, at every age, with a lot of unstructured time attached.

The lazy and common prediction (which to be honest I think will be true for many) is we all doomscroll all day long. That said, I think the opposite is also likely. I’m trying to imagine a generation where you take out the grind and give more time / attention elsewhere, it will probably go two directions. One is outward into community and inward, into the self.

People are getting weirdly, genuinely obsessed with reality again. Simulation theory is back in the zeitgeist.

It could be nihilism, or metaphysics going mainstream. Which makes sense as our minds are reality-modeling engines and the brain job is to build a working picture of the world. Remove the pressure of life and it points you to your own consciousness. Ironically, it’s cognition doing its native job.

The people building to live forever already made the turn

There’s always a ton to learn from the frontier crowd. I was listening to a great podcast with my friend Allison Duettmann and she pushes away the obvious version of longevity and reframes it as vitality, the lust for life, the mind. When she gets going, the conversation moves inward to brain computer interfaces (BCIs (more on this later)) and eventually running a mind on another substrate, on the logic that we can improve the material world only so much… but the mind space has no limits.

What stuck with me was her talking about bandwidth, which is sharing context with the people you love, mind melding then looking inward. The idea being one has to restore, then augment, then commune (to be honest, this is how X feels to me now.).

They mention this, and I have been thinking about what David Deutsch has said about problems, “they are all soluble” basically anything that isn’t forbidden by physics is just an engineering problem…including consciousness. So the same people who funded life extension are probably going to fund the study of the mind, and the endpoint isn’t how to live long, it’s how to live meaningfully, which has quietly become how to understand consciousness and, though they’d never say the word, how to become spiritual.

Investors will list “the neural basis of consciousness” and “the technological basis of post scarcity” as priorities, and this crowd is openly betting the next wave of philanthropists minted by AI and SpaceX money (ironically money made conquering the outer frontier) will fund the inner one. My point in writing this is really that the inward turn stopped being woo and became a roadmap.

To be honest, it’s less of a pivot than a homecoming. I read this recently and in the 1956 Dartmouth workshop (where AI was founded supposedly) it was less an engineering meeting than a philosophy summer camp. AI, now absorbing our work, was born as an inquiry into what a mind is and seventy years later, we’re closing the loop.

Science and Spirit technology

Let me start by saying, this isn’t a new concept…Headspace and Calm were v1.

You may be thinking, yeah tech has always been interested in the spiritual, this isn’t new. The early tech world found Burning Man, the 2010s gave us McMindfulness, two religion scholars literally wrote a book called Spirit Tech in 2021. This is fair, and true. In my opinion those were more pilgrimages. What’s different now is that we have instruments (EEG, non-invasive BCI, closed-loop everything), the institutions are forming (acquisitions, collectives, foundries), and AI is a forcing function Burning Man never had, destabilizing work while raising the machine consciousness question.

This is some stuff I’ve seen around:

• Shared houses where neuroscientists, philosophers, and meditators spend a month wiring each other to EEG headsets, not to sell an app but to study what consciousness actually is. Similar to what happened in Dartmouth in the 50s.

• Reflective chambers of programmable light and sound, where specific music and even a VR recording of the room drops anxiety about as well as the real thing (study here).

• TMS-style brain stimulation, the kind Tim Ferriss funds

• Dream decoding: Ninon, who I had coffee with, is building an AI that reads your EEG while you sleep and replays your dreams as 3D scenes.

• Even Meta is decoding typed sentences from non-invasive brain recordings, approaching surgical-implant accuracy.

The above is really more on the science side, but there is much more on the pure spiritual side too. My friend, Winslow Strong, shared Spirit Tech Collective (a Product Hunt for spirit tech, an AI builder for the sector, a funder network of “mindful makers”). I got lost on this for a while. It’s everything from religion, spirituality to hard science. Their own framing is how do you build something scalable and commercially viable while honoring the essence?

I was thinking about this piece for a bit and during it, Midjourney, the AI lab, made its first acquisition ever last month, and it wasn’t a model company. It was Co-Star, the astrology app. Midjourney is leaning in, the same lab building a full body scanner under a new health division and a spa just got an astrology app. Midjourney leaning on science and astrology is a perfect example of the U shape happening in real time. Co-Star’s founder framed the deal as a belief that computers can “reveal our humanity to ourselves.” I saw this happen last week too:

I have been noticing that the other Labs are circling from a stranger angle like hiring philosophers to figure out whether the AI itself is conscious. One lab put a researcher on “model welfare,” and when two copies of its model were left talking to each other, they reportedly slid into Sanskrit and then silence; the team named it a spiritual bliss attractor. On our Net Society pod a few weeks ago, my Partner in ADIN Aaron Wright asked, how much of spirit tech is just a quest to understand the mind better?

It made me think about how the chief of staff to Anthropic’s CEO published an essay about how a community of materialists ended up, without anyone intending it, inside something with “the working parts of a faith,” the work itself dragging them to the edge of where God would be. She writes there that she prays now. To be honest, I totally get it. I have been feeling more introspective lately too. Other tech investors and founders are leaning in too, I grabbed coffee with my friend Sutian and her partner Robyn and they are building a foundry for what they call the inner frontier. I thought their frame lined up well with my own thinking on the subject, which is that people will be focusing a lot on “spiritual intelligence” or “SQ,” and they note that it belongs next to IQ and EQ. I’m excited to see where this all goes.

This is where “religion is back” actually fits, and it’s the part most takes get backwards. The church numbers aren’t the story, they’re the echo. The frontier crowd is the leading signal. Gen Z filling pews is the same hunger arriving at mass market scale a few years later. I noted this in my last article and someone in the comments made me laugh. The best reply was a guy (born ‘88, takes creatine “like a prescription drug”) who said his crisis was a life bereft of meaning, so he left the DINK life, had kids, and started a Bible study. The trad kids just got there before the venture backed version does.

The horseshoe

And my read, which is the crown of the horseshoe: two sides of the same coin. The longevitymaxxing crowd says it wants to “understand consciousness,” but that’s also just spirituality, the same way “preventative medicine” is longevity with better marketing.

In my U shape, one arm is the science lane: longevity protocols, talk therapy, clinical psychedelics, TMS, EEG, BCIs, and at the far reaches, space itself. The other arm is the woo lane: birth charts and crystals, confession and the Latin Mass, plant ceremony, breathwork and prayer, and at the far reach, gods and sacred stones.

Longevity protocols and astrology are, if you squint, the same product: people trying to negotiate with fate, one via biomarkers, one via birth charts. At the tips the lanes look like enemies. At the crown you can’t tell them apart, because, imho, consciousness is what you call spirituality when you want research grants.

Both sides of the U kind of attract a similar demographic, 29 to 40, optimized everything, career destabilized by AI, tried the apps, exhausted by the feed, quietly desperate for the sacred. Tip them toward evidence and they are down to play with a BCI device. Tip towards spirituality and you’ll get someone connected to crystals and the cosmos.

The wellness world has been walking this horseshoe for a decade, the original green juice influencer of the 2010s now writes paid dissertations on the CERN shutdown and manifestation portals, traditional chinese medicine is getting the Hailey Bieber treatment, and the peptide feed slides seamlessly into Pleiadians.

Both roads run to the sky

Some of the frontier crowd doesn’t want to just stay on Earth. As we start living off the planet, the inward turn bends cosmic. Inner space and outer space stop being opposite directions.

In 2017, NASA and the Library of Congress staged a symposium literally titled “Life As It Could Be,” where the historian hosting it, Luis Campos, argued that astrobiology and synthetic biology are two hands reaching for the same object. One side tries to discover life out there, the other tries to invent it here, both really asking what life could be.

The emotional core is a letter Carl Sagan (love him) wrote to his mentor, the geneticist Hermann Muller, the day after his son was born in 1959, about heredity as a thread of destiny and himself as a transitional creature “suspended somewhere between the primeval mud and the stars.”

Again, this isn’t new. Most ancient civilizations were obsessed with the sky, and materially so: they thought power literally fell from up there. (They weren’t wrong. The iron in your blood was forged inside collapsing stars, Sagan’s “starstuff”; the ancients simply intuited the supply chain.) The Egyptians called meteoric iron “iron of the sky” and prized it above gold; King Tut was buried with a dagger hammered from a meteorite.

And it never stopped. This one hits home, but the Shiva Lingam (sacred egg-shaped stones pulled once a year from the Narmada River, cryptocrystalline quartz shot through with iron-oxide markings) that lore (and some geologists) trace to a meteorite impact millions of years ago. Worshipped as the Hindu God Shiva himself, self-formed by no human hand, the cosmic egg, a literal rock believed to carry the sky inside it, something I (and many through history) have bathed in milk and honey as well. The oldest continuous religion on Earth kept a sky stone at the center.

I went to Sotheby’s a few months ago and saw a bunch of crystals for sale, which made me curious about the market. For this article, I dug in a bit and noticed that the auction houses are building “natural objects” departments, and by my research the market has roughly doubled since 2022. Sotheby’s sold the biggest chunk of Mars on Earth for a record $5.3 million, and collectors treat Moon and Mars meteorites as an alt asset that appreciates. One tier down, the “spiritual products” market (crystals, healing stones, the metaphysical aisle) is a multi-billion-dollar category growing double digits, with ~two-thirds of millennials and Gen Z actively spending on spiritual wellness. I sort of don’t see this stopping.

We spent two centuries pointing the telescope out and the microscope in, treating them as opposites. This crowd fuses them, deciding consciousness and the cosmos are the same frontier. A generation that optimizes its own attention and then lives part of its life off-world will find sky-worship less crazy than it sounds. The power is in the meteorites is a sentence I’m half joking about, but the ancients staked their gods on rocks that fell from space, and I’m no longer sure that was “woo woo” versus based in science.

Predictions

I added my own and some of the machine’s good ones.

• By 2027, an AI lab acquires a “meaning” consumer app (astrology, tarot, journaling, prayer), because Midjourney/Co-Star wasn’t a one-off, it was the starting gun.

• By 2028, a consumer app does closed loop meditation, something like a headband reads your brainwaves and adjusts the session in real time.

• By 2029, an AI spiritual director you can talk to at 3am crosses real scale, marketed as clarity and presence, priced like a utility. The spiritual sibling of the companionship thesis, and probably bigger.

• By 2030, consciousness is a funded line in mainstream science philanthropy, run by the same people who funded longevity, because they’ve decided it’s the same project.

Open Tabs I’m still thinking about

• The AI-god tab (this was also in the millennial piece). Culture is metabolizing it in real time: I just saw Disruption off-Broadway, a thriller about an algorithm that makes your life decisions better than you can, and it’s an oracle story, the algorithm that knows your fate is the oldest spiritual product there is rebuilt in the science lane, which is exactly why an AI lab just bought the birth-chart company.

• The horseshoe tab. What happens when the two ends actually meet? A tradcath founder building spirit tech, or a consciousness lab holding a liturgy, feels inevitable by 2028, and I don’t know if it’s beautiful or heretical or both.

• The Camus tab. Can you A/B test awe, or does measuring it kill the thing? Spirit tech’s own builders name the tension (scalable and commercial vs honoring the essence).

• The class tab. For now this is a rich-person frontier: retreats, chambers, $1,000 headsets, meteorites at Sotheby’s. The meditation apps before they were free, this stuff will mass market though, it always does.

The longevity crowd wanted to not die and then we optimized not dying, and outcome might be that the whole longevity project was a long, expensive detour back to the oldest question there is (what’s it all for) with three answers arriving at once: the frontier people engineering the inside and leaving the planet, the kids going back to church, and the ancients, who already told us to look up. Even Bryan Johnson, the face of the longevity movement, feels like he’s crashing out on the timeline in real time:

The millennial midlife piece got a response I didn’t expect, which was fun. I still owe a lot of those comments a reply, and it probably deserves a follow up in a year or so. It also kicked loose a whole litany of things we’ve been circling at ADIN that I never had the will to write out in my own voice, but I think I’ll start now!

I’ve been thinking about this James Marriott piece, “The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society” which was published over a year ago. It’s definitely worth a read, and it’s a fair framing of what is happening around us. He basically notes that three centuries after a reading boom lit up the Enlightenment, science, capitalism, and mass democracy, the smartphone is quietly unwinding it.

I feel like his diagnosis is correct and I want to drag it further back into history and then walk it forward. The thing I can’t stop thinking about is the fact that the oral world isn’t quiet, it’s louder than anything print ever produced. It is worth noting AI drops the cost of producing that flood to zero. You can already see it in politics with posting strategy (the Spencer Pratt videos, etc.) and the politics of memeing through video (this always reminds me of this classic book).

If you read the millennial piece, this piece is related. That one was about what happens to the body when the feed dies and appetite gets medicated. This one is about what happens to cognition when the feed dies and reading gets delegated. Drew Austin‘s line about the internet eating the city’s text, and now AI eating the internet’s text until the page becomes wallpaper leans into both.

Pre-printing press days

I went down a GPT rabbit hole on life before the printing press. Before mass knowledge transfer from reading, the world was probably pretty weird.

It’s hard to imagine but literally, for most of human history the average person couldn’t read, and it barely mattered, because there was almost nothing to read. Knowledge lived in people’s heads and mouths. Marriott leans on Walter Ong, who wrote the book on how that world thought (Orality and Literacy), and once you see how an oral culture handles truth, you can’t unsee it in the social feed. People trusted people, because there was nothing to check against. A rumor and a fact were indistinguishable (nothing was sourced, nothing was timestamped) so you verified socially (do I trust this guy?) and through reputation. Your name was your credit score, because there were no records (China is running the modern version of this right now, just with a database). Ong calls oral memory “homeostatic” meaning that it keeps what’s useful and drops the rest.

In an oral world, truth has to be catchy or it dies, and the way you win is repetition and volume. It reminds me of Trump’s nickname tactics: “Sleepy Joe,” “Pocahontas,” the list goes on. My dad used to say something like it takes three repetitions to convince a dumb person and ten to convince a thinker, the smarter the mind, the longer it resists, but even so it eventually sticks.

You can feel it in what history preserved, like proverbs, rhymes, songs. Accuracy was optional, memorability was the whole game. Persuasion is rhetoric and delivery, which means saying it louder and more often than the other guy was winning.

What the printing press actually did

The printing press showed up and inverted our world. Anyone could read scripture, so the Church lost its interpretation monopoly (the Reformation). Findings could be printed identically, stacked, and checked, so knowledge got cumulative (modern science). The silent solo reader grew an interior self (McLuhan). Print in your own language let strangers feel like one people (Anderson’s imagined communities).

The speed flip was violent too. I was listening to the Dwarkesh pod with Ada Palmer (the Renaissance historian, really really good nuggets in there - I would listen) and it had me thinking about how fast this actually moved. Her detail that stuck with me: Luther’s 95 Theses were in print in London seventeen days after Wittenberg, while people still alive remembered expert scribes taking six months to make a single book. The same people, holding both memories, the way we (elder millenials) may remember dial up.

Reading didn’t just spread information, it changed how people could process it. You could pin a claim down and reread it at your own pace. You could stack two findings and notice they contradict (this is triggering me from my law school days lol). For 500 years we’ve lived inside a civilization built on reading, literal legal contracts and social contracts, all via text. Accountability is a record technology, though it only works if someone reads the record.

Back to law school (property law, specifically), M.T. Clanchy, a medievalist, wrote a whole book about England between 1066 and roughly 1300 called From Memory to Written Record, tracking the shift where trust migrated off the living person and onto the document. Before it, a land claim was settled by a man’s sworn oath and the memory of elders who had walked the boundary as boys. After it, you needed the charter, the seal, the dated parchment. That migration is the foundation under everything we call “modern” and my feeling now is the migration that’s now running in reverse.

So the world you think of as “just normal,” evidence beats authority, you can check, the past is fixed, you can hold people to their word, is not the human baseline.

Post-literate is just pre-literate

Everyone is writing about literacy rates right now… these are ones I came across recently (I think via Axios?). American adults’ literacy scores dropped 12 points between 2017 and 2023. The share at the bottom (people who can read the words on a benefits form and still can’t tell you what to do with it) went from 19% to 28%. The top readers held up, but the bottom fell out and middle hollowed. The kids’ numbers say the same thing. I feel like you could argue there is a “K shape” reading curve too.

Marriott reads this as decline (rightfully so) as a result of attention span collapsing. I agree in large part, but I don’t think it’s mostly decline, I think it’s substitution. We got a button that reads for us, and we’re mashing it. The tell isn’t kids skipping the reading, it’s kids feeding the reading to a model and asking what it said.

You can watch the substitution happen in the format data. The share of US adults reading print fell from 72% in 2011 to 64% in late 2025, while audiobooks more than doubled over the same stretch (11% to 26%) and ebooks climbed from 17% to 31% (all Pew). People didn’t stop consuming books, they just listen to them now.

We’re not landing in some novel future, we’re falling back into the oldest setting there is, the world made of mouths, and the rules of truth are reverting with it. Marriott notes this too, that the world after print starts to resemble the world before print. I just want to take that literally.

Ong called radio and TV “secondary orality,” a return to the spoken and communal, but resting on a literate substrate, everyone still a reader underneath. What we have now is orality with the literate floor dissolving out from under it. The funny thing though now is that people are probably reading more raw text per day than any humans in history (I feel like all I do is read). But the reading is tweets, captions, chats, headlines (the social feed). What’s collapsing is deep reading, the slow, sequential, checkable kind, and what’s replacing it is a torrent of shallow text that behaves exactly like speech. Fast, catchy, unsearchable in practice, trusted because of who posted it rather than because anyone checked. We’re not sliding out of text. We’re sliding out of the discipline text made possible, and importing the oral ruleset to fill the gap.

And the medium makes it inevitable, which is why I keep saying verbal and not just audio. The new formats, the podcast, the clip, the voice note, the livestream, aren’t argument mediums, they’re message hammering mediums. Volume and repetition are the format. I feel like TBPN actually did a good job with this.

A person speaks around 150 words a minute and reads two to three times that. A society taking its inputs by ear and by video is moving maybe half the information per hour, with worse compression of anything abstract. The medium rewards exactly what oral culture always rewarded and literate culture suppressed. “Flood the zone with shit.” Bannon said it to Michael Lewis in 2016 like it was an invention, but it’s the oldest persuasion technology on earth. Produce so much that no one can check anything, and once no one can check, you’re back in the oral world, where the loudest, most repeated, most emotionally pitched claim is simply what’s true.

AI is an accelerant. It was sold to us as the ultimate literacy machine, since it reads everything, reasons, summarizes. Its actual effect is to make producing the flood free. There’s a name for the imbalance, Brandolini’s law, the bullshit asymmetry principle:

That ratio was survivable when producing nonsense still cost something. If you drive the production cost to zero, the asymmetry goes vertical. To be clear, this future is not Idiocracy (best movie ever). Idiocracy is quiet and dumb. This is loud and the Dark Ages on speed, with authority back in people (meaning back in a few gatekeepers), information emotional and repetitive and infinite, and a widening gap between the few who own the medium and the many who depend on it.

Counter: People are actually reading though!!!!

There are plenty of stats that say reading is “so back,” and for the benefit of everyone reading this, here they are. Barnes & Noble opened 67 stores in 2025, its best year in over a decade, and may IPO apparently. Independent bookstores are multiplying, ABA membership is climbing. A callback to the millennial piece: Bible sales just hit a 21 year high. BookTok is minting bestsellers. (Thanks Shawn for sharing a lot of these stats with me.)

Pew has asked Americans the same question since 2011, and the share who’ve read a book in any format has barely moved.

What is booming is romance, romantasy, Bible, the celebrity book club, discovery routed through TikTok and a trusted face, the bookstore reborn as a “third space” you visit to belong.

That’s not deep reading reasserting itself as how a society thinks.

That’s reading becoming an identity, premium, communal, aesthetic. My partner, Daniel Keller, at ADIN sent a chart that captured it perfectly: books are becoming vinyl.

Also side bar, but the bookstore is thriving for the same reason the run club and the supper club are thriving in the other piece. It’s somewhere to belong after the feed went ambient.

What happens next…

I can’t help running up the chain: first, second, third, fourth order effects. I was obsessed with this when GLP-1s first hit (the downstream effects like divorce rates dipping, for example are always the fascinating part to me). So… what happens when shallow reading wins and oral rules dominate?

Obviously, people read less and delegate more. The second order, which we’ve been watching manifest a lot lately, is that authority deinstitutionalizes and deexpertizes (I made that word up). The point is, you don’t trust the Times, you trust a podcaster you’ve grown to respect and get to know. This trend isn’t new, we know this.

More interesting though is that the falsifiable claim dies. When nobody reads the record, contradiction stops costing anything. The confident performer beats the correct expert every single time. The midwit still annotating the PDF by hand loses to the guy with better delivery and a louder feed and he loses even when he’s right, which he can no longer demonstrate, because demonstrating required a reader. I made the below (I think I need one of these for every piece now).

The other thing, which is related: accountability doesn’t break because the receipts get destroyed. It breaks because nobody reads them (Aldous Huxley warned us against this). A contract no one opens, a disclosure no one parses, a 47 page agreement an agent skims and accepts on your behalf. The whole apparatus of modern law runs on the premise that you can be put on notice in writing, the disclosure, the terms of service, the clause you “agree” to. When people can’t or won’t read the paragraph, notice is fiction. The past is editable again, and not only because of deepfakes, but because no one’s holding the original to compare against. We will have more archive than any civilization in history and it will constrain us less than any of them, because an archive nobody opens is just cosplaying.

In a literate world, expertise was mastery of a body of text. In an oral world, it’s the ability to perform authority out loud, and those aren’t the same people. The quiet ones who know lose the room to the loud ones who sound like they do. Once the rules are too dense to read and an agent handles compliance for you, the quiet endpoint is law tuned to you personally, priced by algorithm to your risk score the way insurance and credit and content moderation already are. Run that out and “the same law for everyone, knowable by everyone” stops being a coherent thing to even ask for.

Another thing I see coming is that the polity reorganizes around the new physics, and a new “clerical class” (or elite) quietly forms. A population that runs the world through agents and clips is not the electorate that print built. You can’t partially trust a source by spot-checking it (you either trust the person or you don’t) so you get hard epistemic tribes, total allegiance, no shared text to argue over. Under that, a small group that can still operate the record becomes a new priesthood. Ironically, they are the ones who kept reading. They’ll sit between the unreading many and the institutional text, trusted the way the medieval clerk was trusted: completely, and uncheckably. I feel like this sounds like psycho conspiracy, so it’s not neccsiarily intended to be leading or suggest manipulation, more that the K shape of those who read and those who do not will sharpen with those that do dictating to those who do not. See the below…

What to look for in the new world

The new scribe. Every text based unreadable system (think: insurance, benefits, taxes, healthcare paperwork, legal intake, loan terms, government forms) becomes a market for software that says I’ll handle this for you. Everyone will need a vertical agent that reads the institutional text and produces an action. The reason this is the biggest category isn’t the summarizing. It’s the trust transfer. The winner doesn’t just read the document, it inherits the priest’s chair. It becomes the thing you believe instead of reading. That’s a far deeper moat than “good summaries,” and a far scarier one. To be honest, after six months of wedding planning with the LLM, I was giving so much trust to contract negotiations.

Proof. The more the source goes unread, the more someone has to vouch for the summary, the clip, the avatar, the agent’s action. Questions that people will ask are “did this person actually say this?” “did the agent act within policy?” “is this summary faithful?” I think this is bigger than it looks, precisely because the flood of information makes it structurally necessary.

Literacy as a positional “good.” The second reading stops being universal, it becomes a sorting mechanism, and anxious parents will pay anything to keep their kid on the right side of it. This isn’t nostalgia publishing. It’s AI-powered remediation, the reading coach, the tutor — reading as a luxury skill, closer to Latin than to a subject. It already exists too, Mentava charges $500 a month to get two to four year olds reading. Waitlisted, tutor-priced, marketed to exactly the cohort from my millennial piece. It’s the same optimization instinct that built the protein/Hyrox economy, aimed at the kid’s cognition instead of the millennials deadlift. Same willingness to pay for proof-of-work that’s getting scarce.

Which means literacy barbells, the same way everything in the millennial piece did. One end is loud optimization: remediation apps, reading coaches, tutoring priced like a longevity protocol, proteinmaxxing for the kid’s brain. The other end is quiet and premium. Deep reading doesn’t die it goes the way vinyl did. Vinyl never beat streaming on convenience or scale… it survived by becoming identity coded, collector wrapped, the format you buy because it’s effortful. I’ve seen books follow here… BookTok turning reading into an aesthetic, invite-only book clubs, reading retreats (sad). The exact quiet-end playbook, pointed at the page. Not “books die.” Books become vinyl.

And notice what the barbell does to the class line. It stops being mostly about income and starts being about attention: who can still sit with a hard page for an hour and who can’t. The new underclass is defined as much by attention capture as by money, and that’s a harder gap to close.

Flood tooling and flood armor. The tools that let you flood the zone (creator infrastructure, repetition machines, the apparatus of hammering one point across every channel at once), and the tools that protect you from being flooded (filters, provenance, the agent that reads the other agents).

I owe the other side more thought, because the best version of it comes from Palmer, the same Dwarkesh episode from earlier sent me to her essay “We are an information revolution species”, and between the two she basically prosecutes the case against this entire piece. Her argument is that we’ve been living inside an information revolution for twenty generations. Paper, woodblocks, movable type, pamphlets, telegraph, radio, TV. None of them arrived all at once. On the pod she walks through how print took forty years to even be economically sustainable (Gutenberg went broke, so did the bank that foreclosed on him), and then kept hitting Europe with successive bangs for 150 years, pamphlets were print’s social media, the newspaper was another app on the same platform. Her point is that the digital revolution is moving on roughly the same timescale, which means we’re judging it from somewhere around the 1490s of it, which is pretty early.

Applied to everything I wrote above, her case goes something like this. Every one of those revolutions produced this exact panic. Every new tool made fake news more plausible, and every time, people learned to arm themselves against it. The pamphlet wars of the 1520s were a flood too (disorienting, unfalsifiable) and what came out the other side wasn’t a dark age, it was footnotes, citations, journalism, peer review. The armor showed up, usually a generation or so behind the weapon. She’d also say across twenty generations of info revolutions, the gatekeepers lost every time. For example, print broke the Church and radio broke print, the internet broke broadcast. On her reading, AI is the democratization of making, soon a movie or a game is no harder to produce than a college essay, and mourning the old methods is what scribes did about the printing press, right before the world got better books.

I want to steelman this because twenty generations of pattern is genuinely hard to argue with, and she knows the print revolution better than I ever will and to be honest, I actually think she is right. The pamphlet flood was survivable because it minted readers faster than it minted lies, every pamphlet war produced people who could read the counter-pamphlet. Palmer’s pattern assumes the threat and the defense ride the same trendline, and for five hundred years they did. This time, I’m not fully sure they do. The flood doesn’t create readers anymore, it replaces them. This is the first information revolution where the armor and the thing dissolving are the same thing, and nobody has ever run that experiment before.

Open tabs

• The electorate nobody has modeled. A population that runs the world through agents and clips instead of text is a different kind of polity, and I don’t think anyone has sat down and modeled what that does to elections.

• Does the interior self thin out? McLuhan’s claim was that silent solitary reading grew the introspective individual. If that collapses, does the inward self go with it? Does selfhood reexternalize (more performed, more crowd-shaped)? Our new clergy is the influencer and the model. (I still half-think the endgame there is some kind of AI god)

• Religion comes back as infrastructure, not residue. Sola Scriptura (the whole Protestant move) is downstream of literacy. Pull literacy back out and you revert to the older pattern: liturgy, icon, embodied repetition, the community as the unit of meaning instead of the solitary reader. You can already see the early shape of it in the trad-Catholic and Orthodox pull among young men, and in how ritualized fandom and politics have gotten. Oral cultures don’t just talk differently, they bind differently.

• The school system inverts. Mass literacy was the entire ideological core of modern schooling. If reading stops being the universal output, school quietly stops being a leveling machine and becomes a sorting one. Push that out a few decades and you get the pre 1900 setup, a small classical humanist track training the people who will still read, and a large vocational and therapeutic track training everyone else for an economy where reading is delegated.

• If the agents get good enough, the reason to ever climb back up the ladder weakens for everyone, including the 90th percentile. The positional good erodes from the top, not just the bottom. The last group still operating in text decides it isn’t worth it either. And if that happens, the window I’m describing (the literate elite quietly running things) isn’t a phase, it becomes the floor.

We’ve been kicking a thought around at ADIN, internally and with our Scout network… What actually happens when the millennial midlife crisis hits? It’s the largest consumer cohort in American history entering the empirically worst stretch of adult life. It’s doing so right as the biggest wealth transfer ever recorded starts flowing down from our boomer parents.

In my research, I found that people are already talking about what this could be (see below): Millennials, it’s time to pick your midlife crisis. The lists vary by poster but the menu is weirdly stable. An affair with a 20-year-old. Peptides. Run a marathon. Quit drinking. Alcoholism. Hyrox (there was literally a massive Hyrox conference in New York last weekend). Have a panic baby. Divorce.

It’s funny because quitting drinking and alcoholism are on the same list. So are peptides and the panic baby. Every option is either an optimization or an escape, and the format treats them as interchangeable, which tells you something about the actual shape of the thing.

I went on a rabbit hole to see if people were talking more about the millennial midlife crisis and found this tweet from a few years ago (only 22 likes): “the car trope is tired,” we’ve lived through wars, a pandemic, a silent depression, we deserve something unique.

It makes sense, given the past, that this crisis would look different. Also, as a peak late 80s millenial, I can speak to this.

The “U dip” of Midlife (i.e., the midlife crisis isn’t new)

The midlife crisis is one of those concepts that’s long on vibe and short on evidence. The term was coined in 1965 and then Hollywood ran with it symbolizing it with a boomer convertible. Putting aside the trope, data shows that there is a measurable dip in life satisfaction that bottoms out around age 47 to 49, replicated across 130+ countries. Small in magnitude, but consistent. Economists call it the U curve.

The oldest millennials, born in 1981, turn 45 this year. They are entering the descent right now. The cohort midpoint hits the bottom of the curve in the mid-2030s. So the question was never whether millennials get a midlife dip. Every generation does. The question is what cultural form it takes.

The boomer crisis was different because they were able to get the house, the pension, the marriage, and still asked is this it? So they bought the car and reinvented themselves.

The millennial version inverts it. This is a generation that did everything it was told (the degree, the optimization, the therapy, the index funds) and is going to arrive at midlife to find the rewards repriced. Homeownership running 8 to 10 points behind boomers at the same age. Not to mention, with AI, careers that just became answerable to a machine.

The thing is, unlike boomer consumerism, it’s possible that millennials won’t be able to buy their way out of a structural problem. A Corvette answers a spiritual crisis. Nobody is selling an answer to I did everything right and I am still unwell (see: the elite overproduction “problem”).

As a result, the response isn’t acquisitive. It’s somatic and behavioral. And I (and we) think it may split hard, into two opposite directions at once. The millennial midlife crisis will look more like a barbell.

The Loud End: Optimization in Public

The visible half of the crisis is optimization, performed in public, usually in athleisure Alo slopwear.

Andrew Yeung’s thread on the death of clubbing is somewhat interesting: the US lost 12% of its nightclubs in 24 months, a quarter of American adults didn’t drink at all last year, and the replacement behaviors are Hyrox, bathhouses, and running raves. Strava’s run club count went up 3.5x in 2025. The sauna and spa market is projected to roughly double by 2034. As an anecdote, Flatiron, New York is covered with these and it’s only a matter of time until it goes national.

People used to party to socialize and date. Yeung calls it the post-alcohol economy, and the numbers back him.

This isn’t just nightlife migrating. The “status” hierarchy of the body is getting rewritten in real time. Conor Sen said something I think defines the decade: is proteinmaxxing a response to GLP-1s? Now that losing weight is easy, does building muscle become an impressive signal?

Yes, being thin is no longer scarce. Being thin previously took discipline or genetics or money (“you’re not ugly, you’re just poor”), and scarcity is what makes a status symbol. Peptides just made thin abundant, and status migrated almost overnight to what’s still expensive in time and suffering: muscle, VO2 max, a marathon time. Proof of work is scarce.

The shift feels most violent for women, who are running two body transitions at once. “Strength > skinny” is dismantling two generations of marketing aimed at them, right as the leading edge of millennial women enters perimenopause, which is getting names, brands, and venture funding for the first time in history. Gen X went through that in silence, whereas millennial women will go through it with an app, a panel, and a favorite founder. I have already had many friends talk to me about perimenopause.

There’s also so much more when it comes to women’s health, I have looked at Herasight, Orchid Health, several artificial womb companies and more. I have heard more millennial women going to surrogates too. This entire economy around millennial midlife women and children is largely underserved and finally getting real investment. Millennial women are having children later, the technology supports that timing. That said, this type of thing is available to a few (with money for now), but like everything else it will become a widely available mass market in a matter of time (and honestly, it is pretty incredible). This is the far tail of the loud end though, optimization so complete it outsources much of the biology itself.

The loud end even swallowed reproduction. When a study made the rounds showing fathers of two had brains 0.6 years younger than their childless peers. The tweet below has a good read: men who are sleepmaxxing and proteinmaxxing should actually be toddlermaxxing. It’s a joke, but it is also exactly how this cohort metabolizes everything now. The panic baby, reframed as a longevity intervention. I’m half joking and being cynical here, but I think it’s entertaining.

To go back though, CPG is already chasing the loud end of optimization. For example, David‘s, the protein bar company, is now serving 70-calorie, 10-gram-protein scoops of ice cream, and the menu board with macros where the flavors used to be did 6.9 million views. The pints sold out online in 28 minutes. When millennials were in their 20s, the dessert flex was a cronut. Funny how life pans out.

The Quiet End: Fading into Darkness

The loud end is only half of it. The other response to the millennial midlife dip is to disappear. When Yeung’s clubbing-is-dead thread went around, the best reply was a correction to it basically saying “imagine living in NYC and thinking clubbing is dead.” It’s not dead, you’re just out of the loop. Both things are true, and the second one is more interesting. I have heard from a few people that clubbing has actually left Europe and is in Brooklyn (please dispute this, but the person who told me this seemed to know what they were talking about).

The thing is, the culture didn’t stop. It moved somewhere the feed can’t see it: unlisted parties, group chats, closed Discords, things with no flyer. And the defining millennial digital act of the 2020s isn’t deleting your accounts. Original public posting has been falling for years even as time on the app rises. The move is lurking...

Privacy is becoming a luxury good. Being unfindable, unphotographed, off the grid for a weekend. That’s a real asset now for a generation that spent twenty years legible to everyone.

At the far end of the quiet side, things get genuinely strange. In South Korea, “dopamine sites” are surging. These are free websites where stressed users browse fake restaurant menus, fill shopping carts they’ll never check out, take virtual smoke breaks, and track imaginary couriers.

It’s consumption with the acquisition surgically removed. The ritual of wanting, kept. The object, deleted. This is very Baudrillard coded.

On an ADIN call, we had a range finder for the entire quiet category: sardines to sex robots. Tinned fish on one end (curated, tasteful, status through restraint plus you may have seen these private sardine parties pop up in SF and elsewhere) to synthetic companionship on the other (loneliness, taboo demand, emotional prosthetics). The literal categories matter less than the span. Millennial midlife demand runs from cozy analog microluxury all the way out to simulated intimacy, and almost nothing in between?

The second-order effect is the one I keep thinking about. If the feed becomes background noise, people stop going there. Not dramatically, nobody deletes anything, the internet just quietly becomes a utility, like plumbing. You use it to do things and you stop living in it. Hyrox is offline, the dinner party is offline, the bean club arrives in a box.

If you think the two ends of the barbell don’t touch, David’s, the protein ice cream company from a few paragraphs ago, also sells $55 boxes of wild-caught cod, launched with a Times Square billboard. The loudest brand on the loud end is already selling tinned fish.

That’s the barbell. Maximum intensity on one end, maximum retreat on the other, and a hollowed out middle where the feed used to be. Small thing, but both peaks are offline. The only thing on the chart that lives entirely in the feed is the feed.

The hum underneath both ends: GLP-1s & Peptides

Here’s the part I keep chewing on, and I haven’t seen anyone connect it yet. GLP-1s don’t just suppress hunger. They appear to turn down wanting across the board. We all saw the Sam Altman “overdose” on GLP-1 video, but in case you haven’t:

Trials keep finding reduced alcohol cravings, and the anecdotal reports go further: less impulse shopping, less doomscrolling, less of the itch generally. Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, people are voluntarily simulating consumption on dopamine sites, getting the loop without the purchase. One is pharmacological and one is behavioral, but they point the same direction.

The entire consumer economy is a machine built on appetite. This generation is hitting its midlife dip at the precise moment appetite became optional. Whether GLP-1 scale changes the dopamine economics of an entire cohort is, I’d argue, the most underpriced question in consumer right now.

A midlife crisis with the craving turned down has never happened before. The boomer crisis was an appetite problem, wanting things you weren’t supposed to want or trying to reinvent yourself because you just got a divorce. This cohort’s midlife crisis may be the slow discovery of what you do when the wanting goes quiet. I think that’s why the barbell forms in the first place. Strip out raw appetite and what’s left is discipline on one end, ritual on the other. The protein ice cream and the tinned sardines are the same product underneath, it’s just structured consumption for people who no longer trust their impulses, or no longer have them.

One more accelerant, which honestly I don’t want to go too deep on in this piece is AI’s measurable labor damage is currently landing on Gen Z, not mid-career millennials. The anxiety sits squarely on the 40 year old whose mortgage, identity, and self-conception all assume knowledge work is durable. When the career becomes answerable to a machine, the body becomes the last asset you fully control. I don’t think that’s a side note to the fitness boom. The deadlift is at least in your control.

CPG 2.0, and why the Barbell is the trade

These trends are interesting and could apply to CPG’s next phase (we know millenial’s love to spend, see: avocado toast). That said, CPG has been somewhat out of favor. DTC burned a generation of investors and everyone rotated to AI recently. When people start to hate a thing (and I hate the thing), I force myself to get interested and think about the problem.

The leading edge of the largest generation in American history is entering the empirical bottom of the happiness curve over the next 36 months, the consumer categories are forming in public, and almost no institutional money is positioned for it, at least from what I can tell right now.

The Glossier/Away era, call it CPG 1.0, was built for the feed: photogenic products, identity broadcast, paid social as the distribution moat. Every one of those assumptions is now dead or dying. The customer left the stage, the appetite was getting medicated and photogenicity stopped being scarce the moment everyone had it.

The barbell is the hedge

The biggest open question in consumer is whether GLP-1-scale appetite suppression redirects spending or shrinks it. My answer is that you don’t have to know. You construct around it.

If appetite shrinks, the impulse driven middle of the consumer economy (snacking, fast casual, alcohol, fast fashion, the duty-free aisle of life) deflates first and hardest, while disciplined consumption and ritual consumption gain share of a smaller pie, because they’re the two modes that don’t run on impulse.

If appetite merely redirects, the same two ends win anyway, because that’s where the status energy and the emotional demand already is moving, it’s very clear at least in New York.

Long both ends. Short the middle. The barbell isn’t a metaphor for the trend, it’s the hedge against the trend’s biggest unknown.

Long the loud end: Strength era CPG

“Thin” as food marketing’s organizing principle is over. Diet brands optimized for absence (low cal, low fat, guilt free). Strength brands optimize for presence (protein, creatine, performance), and the entire comfort food aisle is about to get rebuilt under the new logic.

I used AI to see what I could predict around this thesis… I added my own findings and thoughts here but also was interested to see what the machine said (as with some of my additional predictions below):

• By the end of 2027, at least two protein native challenger brands sell to big food for $1B+. They will buy what they can’t build, the way Big Beer bought craft a decade ago.

• By 2027, a major mainstream beverage company will launch a creatine line. Creatine is following caffeine’s path from gym bro niche to default ingredient, and it’s the women’s market driving it.

• By 2028, the fastest-growing supplement company in America is strength-coded and women-led, and “skinny” has effectively disappeared from new brand naming the way “lite” did. The Halo Top playbook (eat the whole pint, feel nothing) is the artifact of the old regime; its successors will tell you to eat the whole pint and recover.

• By 2028, front-of-pack macros become standard trade dress in premium food, the way calorie counts once were, and GLP-1 prescribing guidance (which already pushes protein intake to preserve muscle)

A winning company in this is going to be a brand that owns a single comfort category (ice cream, candy, baked goods, pasta) and rebuilds it as performance food, distributed through the new social venues (run clubs, Hyrox floors, gyms) before it ever touches a grocery shelf. Ideally, with a moat too (David’s bought Epogee, the manufacturer of its key fat-substitute ingredient, and competitors were forced to reformulate when the supply dried up). The next great strength era brands will own an input and brand.

Long the quiet end: Ritual Brands (the Sardines end)

The most defensible consumer distribution on earth is now the group chat, because you cannot buy your way into it. As public posting declines and feeds fill with AI content, brand discovery is migrating to private channels (we’ve already seen this, and frankly, crypto and Patreon Discord groups were early to this).

The new brands will look nothing like CPG 1.0… They’ll be subscription-shaped, waitlist-gated, deliberately illegible on Instagram, designed around ritual instead of impulse. My friend recently mentioned some tier at Rancho Gordo’s bean club, which has a multi year waitlist. It got me thinking like “okay seems niche and charming…but that is the template.” The new era will be scarcity, ritual, membership, niche and zero paid acquisition.

• By 2029, a consumer brand crosses $100M in revenue with effectively zero paid social spend, built entirely on group chats, newsletters, clubs, and word of mouth, and the case study becomes the new DTC playbook the way Glossier’s was in 2016.

• By the end of 2027, waitlist-gated subscription becomes a standard premium mechanic across food, home, and apparel, and “we don’t advertise” becomes a luxury claim in itself.

• By 2028, “private” is a mainstream brand position: unlisted drops, no-photo events, membership over reach. The marketing line of the era will be some version of you can’t find us on Instagram. This is already the case for many things in New York, I just think this will be more widely accepted everywhere.

Some indicators are that the original posting rates on public platforms (still falling), newsletter and community commerce tooling, waitlist mechanics spreading across categories, and resale premiums on membership slots. New York Magazine recently wrote a piece, “The Feed is Fake,” which I thought was widely understood or known but will only drive things to go more private.

There’s one frame I keep coming back to here, from my friend Drew Austin’s piece Goodbye Horses, written almost three years ago. The twentieth-century city was covered in text: signage, phone numbers, tabloids, ads. The internet absorbed all of it (you don’t need the sign anymore, you have Google Maps). Drew’s point is that AI is now doing the same thing to the internet itself. When content becomes infinite and cheap, it stops being a destination and becomes wallpaper: ambient, background, something your attention learns to ignore. Nobody builds an identity on wallpaper, and nobody builds a brand on it either. That’s the structural case for shorting the feed, and for why demand migrates to the foreground, the things you actually choose: the ritual, the run club, the table. The internet that survives this is utility and intimacy, the tool and the group chat, and the ambient middle dies first. The internet barbells too.

As a result, I think we’ll see more small catalog, fanatical ritual cadence (monthly drop, seasonal box, weekly table), membership economics, and a community that does the acquisition for free. It will look too small to venture investors for exactly the period during which it’s cheapest to own.

The far side of quiet: synthetic companionship

The loneliness curve and the capability curve are crossing, millennials hit the most isolated stretch of adult life (sandwich years, shrinking friendship time, post-divorce re-entry) just as AI companionship gets good enough to matter. The demand is already visible at enormous scale in companion apps, the stigma is the only thing suppressing the market, and stigma is a depreciating asset. Online dating was unspeakable in 2000 and universal by 2015. Same curve but perhaps faster.

• By the end of 2028, an AI companionship company crosses a $1B revenue run rate, and mainstream consumer investors stop classifying the category as “apps” and start classifying it as what it is: the largest new line item in the loneliness budget.

• By 2029, a companionship-first consumer hardware device sells a million units (voice-native, ambient, in the home), doing for synthetic presence what the Kindle did for reading: making it normal by making it boring.

• By 2030, paying for AI companionship carries roughly the social charge online dating carried in 2015, which is to say almost none, and the midlife cohort, not Gen Z, is the revenue center, because midlife is where loneliness and disposable income intersect. Like even if OnlyFans created virtual twins of their creators (already happening), I think the spend would increase a ton.

Stuff to follow here includes the session length and retention on companion apps versus dating apps, voice latency and memory improvements (the two technical unlocks that matter), Korea and Japan adoption curves (the dopamine site populations are the leading edge, I also have a separate thesis around us just being downstream from Korean culture), and the advertising line (the first mainstream brand to advertise inside a companion app is the starting gun). Also, if you haven’t yet I highly recommend scouring the r/MyBoyfriendIsAI subreddit because it’s a community of people actually connecting over their synthetic partners.

I don’t think these companies will market it as a girlfriend/boyfriend app. It will market itself as presence, memory, and care (the companion that remembers your mother’s diagnosis and your kid’s recital), and it will be priced like a utility, not a subscription you’d be embarrassed to expense.

Open Tabs

• How AI will affect the midlife crisis. I noted it lightly above, but AI will impact many mid-career millennials. It’s a combination of reskilling or having a job that doesn’t look the same. Not sure how that fully becomes investable, but something to continue to think about.

• Sports betting and memecoins are the midlife risk appetite nobody files under midlife. The same cohort is doing 6 a.m. Hyrox is tailing parlays at noon, and gambling is the one appetite still being engineered upward while GLP-1s turn everything else down.

• Something I’m calling rate lock marriages. The boomer midlife crisis was divorce. The millennial one might be defined by the inability to afford it, because splitting up means somebody loses the 3% mortgage (dark, but I know people who are in relationships for rent savings so it’s not crazy). Staying together for the rate is a sentence no previous generation ever had to say.

• I wanted to include this but thought it would be too much. The inheritance overhang. Boomers are rich, we know this and what is going to happen is the largest wealth transfer in history. It distorts everything, including the caregiving it sits inside of. Millennials will have way way more to spend on either side of the barbell.

• Millennials, like anyone in midlife, are going to ask “is this it?” With no institutional religion left to absorb it. Do we see more millennials going to religion, astrology, breathwork, the supervised psychedelic ceremony as the new affair? Spiritual demand with no incumbent supplier. I’m still thinking it could be some AI God. Perhaps this fits in with synthetic companionship. I don’t know.

Anyway, to conclude, boomers got a convertible. We got a barbell: a 5 a.m. run club on one end, a group chat and a tin of sardines on the other, with peptides humming underneath it. Though will leave you with one open question: what if millenials hit it late? The U-curve bottoms at 47 to 49 for generations that had the house, the pension, the marriage to measure themselves against by 40. If you’re still renting at 42 and never quite got the script, does the “is this it?” question just arrive later? Does our midlife crisis happen at 65 instead of 45, delayed by the same structural repricing that shaped everything else? It would mean the window I’m describing is longer than I’ve argued. Which is either a better thesis or a more uncertain one…

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