The predictable implosion of the Crypto / NFT / Metaverse / Web3 fever dream, and the looming collapse / transformation of social media, gives us an appealing opportunity to talk about what’s next.
I think scarcity-based digital economies and “the metaverse” have been red herrings – distracting cultural blankets hiding a set of revolutions that go much deeper.
I’d like to talk about one of them.
Vince Kadlubek, one of the founders of Meow Wolf, drew my attention to an interesting framework for talking about what’s next in consumer culture. In this talk, he lays out a pretty standard progression that we’re all familiar with, originally popularized by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore:
The COMMODITY ECONOMY is where basic resources get processed. This would be where you’re growing and harvesting coffee beans.
The GOODS ECONOMY processes and packages commodities for use. The equivalent here would be roasted and packaged (and maybe ground) coffee beans.
The SERVICE ECONOMY delivers products in final form. This would be the coffee counters of numerous shops, where coffee is brewed and served.
And finally, we have the EXPERIENCE ECONOMY. This involves the “brand experience” created around the purchase and consumption of the product. This would be Starbucks.
Across my work in branding and events, I’ve participated in countless conversations about how we live in the “experience economy,” how “brand experience” is important, and how we’re supposed to create “experiences” for people. This terrain is doggedly familiar to me, and probably to you.
But Pine and Gilmore added one more hypothetical stage, past the “experience economy.” They called it “THE TRANSFORMATION ECONOMY.” Vince went on to describe a specific interactive moment in The House of Eternal Return, Meow Wolf’s immersive experience in Santa Fe, New Mexico:
“We sell $20 tickets, and people walk inside, and they’re immediately met with…a house. The house is an everyday, normal-looking house. At this point, there’s no guide, there’s no map, there’s nothing telling the customer what to do. They get to choose, free will, where they go.
They’re probably going to walk into the house, explore the house. There’s a fictional family that lives here. The house is in Mendocino, California fictionally, in Santa Fe, New Mexico non-fictionally. And in this house there’s pictures of the family, the dining room…you start to see that there’s some wonky stuff going on in this house.
And then you get to the fridge. That same old fridge, that we used to go get our snacks out of, and you open that fridge. And it’s a portal into a whole other world.
This moment is such a powerful moment for people. Something that looks normal, something that looks predictable, something that looks like how it always has been…and then the moment you open it, you realize: this is unlike anything I ever thought it was.”
“And in that play between reality and fiction, in that play between understanding and understanding anew, there’s a really powerful transformative process that happens for people. Because if the fridge is not as it should be, if the fridge is different than it has been, then there’s a possibility that the world can be different than it has been.
And this all happens in this single moment for people. And if the world can be different than it has been, then I can be different than I’ve been.
And this is the mind blowing moment, this is the transformative moment for people. Being put in a place where they can be something different.”
Vince describes the labyrinthine, fantastical realms people get to explore once they pass through the portal: neon forests and sci fi cyberscapes; interactive fantasias and endless catacombs. One of his most evocative examples of interaction involves musical, playable, glowing shelf-fungus.
But then Vince shifts gears, analyzing the aftereffects of this transformative experience: after you walk through the fridge, and you’re wandering around this environment for a few hours, you get used to paying extremely close attention to everything – you have to be totally present to your environment, because you never know what wonder is going to pop around the next corner.
But the really magical aspect of this only arises once you leave the experience and stroll outside: you’re still carrying the same attitude. You’re still present to the wonder. So you approach a tree – just a regular, actual tree – and are utterly blown away by it. Because trees, if you pay close attention to them, are fucking amazing.
Tyler The Creator was asked what he thought of NFTs during an interview.
He describes taking a mental-health break before his impending tour: “I’m just going to go to SF, and go to Marin. Marin is like 40 minutes outside; it’s beautiful. Ended up at this park, with all these ill redwoods and trees, and ended up on this crazy hike…real life, just living. I’m hugging trees, trying to find animals, climbing shit…it was awesome. What the fuck is a NFT, bro?”
There’s a sort of parallel between the wonder Vince describes and the mindset that Tyler the Creator refers to. And for many of us, moving through the drudgery of our daily lives, this is not an easy mindset to achieve.
We all want access to a mental attitude where the world becomes self-evidently wonderful and amazing. And we’ve all experienced it in glimpses.
But once we’ve fulfilled our basic needs for food, shelter, and sex, if we’re not immediately stressed about anything (a big if), we often lapse into listlessness. We seek out ways to discover meaning, to connect to others, to feel euphoria, to transcend. The world does not just become obviously extraordinary all the time.
In other words, after we’ve conquered the lower tiers of Maslow’s Pyramid, everything doesn’t just explode into wonder. We find we need more. We start itching to work on the capstone – self-actualization.
We discover it’s not easy work.
Hence the explosion of the “transformation economy,” much of which targets the rich. Retreats, books, gurus, experiences, apps, supplements, drugs, coaches, adventures, team-building exercises, immersive games, obstacle runs, fashion brands, and online “cults”, all offer new consumer modalities oriented around transformation.
By no means is this new. We all seek spiritual fulfillment, on some level, when we interact with any brand beyond simple product utility.
But is any brand ever in a position to deliver spiritual fulfillment? Is it possible this transformation could be, not just promised via advertising (buy the sneaker and you will become better) but actually made real?
When we talked about the Metaverse, or NFTs, or Web3, we were talking, functionally, about a series of financial and content platforms. These were not actual cultural movements, in the sense of having inborn values that were significantly different from the cultural mainstream. They were, instead, ideas about ways to build growth-oriented, scarcity-driven economies (the status quo) into digital ecosystems.
At best (when talking about, say, VR) they reference new mediums for creating art and experiences. But very little has been solidified about what KIND of art or experiences these will be, or how they will shift culture in any significant way.
The most compelling and fun VR examples we've seen so far are simple games, like Beat Saber (the fact that you get real exercise while playing is also a bonus), or experiences that give us access to beautiful landscapes we wouldn’t get to visit otherwise – or educational, learning-driven experiences.
You’ll notice that none of these are dependent on the “metaversal” or “Web 3.0” financial structures implied by blockchain technology. Indeed – we’ve been creating compelling emotional experiences, and even communal experiences, in games for a long time.
Blockchain was not an effort to create a different kind of emotional experience. It was an attempt to financialize, to monetize, the emotional experiences we already have.
Dan Olson’s video about Fortnite explains the difference very clearly. His video systematically dismembering the NFT / crypto market is more famous, of course, but the Fortnite vid is worth watching, because it acts as an excellent warning framework for what happens when financial incentives are allowed to dictate the structure of our play.
Innovative financial structures undergird our play in both NFTs and Fortnite. But this does not, in either case, guarantee positive commensurate innovation in culture or creativity.
I repeat: You did not innovate culturally (let alone in a positive way) just because you innovated a financial system or service platform.
The two aren’t the same, and separating them from one another feels like a breath of fresh air. We all knew this, intuitively – none of us are reaping existential satisfaction or a true feeling of meaningful community from these tantalizing digital platforms. At best, they serve as delivery mechanisms for the culture we create ourselves. But it’s a relief to hear somebody say it out loud.
The metric of “transformativeness,” by contrast, speaks directly to the emotional, personal, and cultural impact of an experience — branded or otherwise. We must ask: what does this innovation actually DO, in terms of creating or transforming culture, community, or experience? Do they change anything, or do they just exist to grow, extract value, and perpetuate capitalism?
What if there are experiences that have real value, outside of the capitalistic growth imperative? Outside the incentive to constantly expand, win value for stockholders, and turn everything into a speculative investment?
I’ve long been skeptical about growth as a pure motive. I’ve seen it in countless organizations: an awesome product, service, or experience is created. Fans and customers get interested, and you start making money.
But then – whether it comes from stockholders, VC, or just the prevailing trends of the market – the impulse arises to “scale.” Everything must grow, quarterly. It all must get bigger, even if the business model, product, or audience doesn’t support it getting bigger. Even if the business is just fine and revenue-positive as it is. L’Oreal and Google are both massively profitable companies – and they both have nearly identical vision statements about the search for their next billion users. And they’re not the only ones.
From cosmetics conglomerates to tech behemoths – it doesn’t matter how big you get. Find new verticals. Find new consumers. Make new products, even if the products suck. People’s retirement investments need to grow. The line must always go up.
We’ve all felt it inside our workplaces, when companies stop focusing on their core mission, and start seeking growth at any cost. The work becomes meaningless. The pressure becomes oppressive.
NFTs, blockchain, and the attention economy thrive via “growth at any cost.” Capital has run out of physical territory to colonize. So we’ve invented new speculative products, new financial instruments, and we’re attempting to colonize people’s time. We’re attempting to create virtual spaces to spread out into, because we can’t spread across the planet anymore – because apparently, we have to keep growing.
I want to be crystal clear: I’m not saying things like blockchain or social media or streaming services are inherently evil. I’m saying they’re devoid of inherent morality: they’re not culture. They’re financial and mechanical systems for the exploitation of culture. To understand their morality, like any tool, we have to understand the use to which they’re put.
Show me the culture they create, the transformative experiences they engender. I’ve seen one or two. In those cases, I’m listening. But don’t sell me a hammer by explaining to me that every problem is a nail.
Once upon a time, the entire point of the internet was to create community, spread useful information, and disrupt the paradigm of scarcity.
When you can make an infinite number of copies of an album at no cost and send them all over the world, everyone can have access to great music. When we can all spread information to each other at lightning speed, and create vetting structures like Wikipedia, everyone can have access to more knowledge.
That dream seems very naive today. Too many obstacles have appeared. A lot of incentives have clouded utopian cyberspace – we’ve lost Doug Rushkoff’s rave-culture dream, where we all give birth to the future together.
Somehow, we moved from sharing culture to artists being broke, and needing to sell digital goods to keep the lights on. Instead of using our technological power to free up leisure time, we used it to invalidate creative labor, institute the gig economy, and concentrate money and power in the hands of the wealthy.
I was never convinced that NFTs, blockchain, or the metaverse would somehow magically reverse this trend. Call me crazy. And it’s mostly because, again, these are new financial and platform architectures – not new cultural paradigms. They were used to exploit, just like the old tools were.
So what does all this have to do with the “transformation economy”? And if the new paradigm won’t come from the metaverse and blockchain, where will it come from?
In order to address transformation economies, we’re going to have to talk about the looming juggernaut that is the psychedelics industry.
I know, I know. I sound like one of “those people.” But it’s time to take this seriously. We’ve seen the multi-million-dollar economies that have sprung up in the wake of cannabis legalization, and there’s no reason to think the corporatization of psychedelics isn’t right behind, hot on the heels of any move toward decriminalization or legalization.
We’ll model the psychedelics movement in the US as three-pronged.
First, there’s the newly resurgent clinical study of psychedelics, pioneered at places like Johns Hopkins and advocated for by public intellectuals like Michael Pollan, who are viewing the coming psychedelic renaissance as a primarily therapeutic phenomenon – a promising, potentially revolutionary new way to free people from chronic issues like depression and PTSD.
Second, a rapidly expanding network of countercultural experimenters, collectives, gurus, and growers view psychedelics primarily as spiritual experiences: they draw on “wisdom traditions” (real or imagined) to frame and process those experiences, and view psychedelics as a gateway to profound spiritual realization and personal healing.
These two groups overlap – therapeutic practitioners have described spiritual dimension to their patients’ experiences, and spiritual leaders advocate that their practices have a therapeutic dimension, too.
But now, a third element has entered the space: the VC money. The microdosing startups. The growers packaging psilocybin mushrooms as precisely dosed chocolates. The platforms and pipelines and branded concerns that are a hallmark of entrepreneurs flooding the space, hungry for profit.
The psychedelics industry is an important experiment in this respect. In so many sectors of the economy, the aggressive drive toward growth seems like a function of our mesocorticolimbic circuit, and our thirst for hits of dopamine – the aggressive pursuit of the brain’s reward / “desirability” response; the mechanism behind our addiction to sugary drinks, social media pings, and the thrill of gambling on things like NFTs.
We can even draw an analogy here to the global economy’s cocaine-like dependence on fossil fuels: anything that releases a disproportionate amount of energy in the direction of our desires, that allows us to feel we’re growing, or acquiring, or achieving at a thrilling rate, can become addictive.
But one of the most promising avenues in psychedelic therapies is addiction treatment. Recovered addicts swear by the transformative experiences they’ve had on psilocybin and ayahuasca. And practitioners and advocates have repeatedly stated that psychedelics aren’t addictive: right after an eight hour / four gram mushroom trip, you have no desire to repeat the experience. You’re pretty much done.
Some of the most popular psychedelics – psilocybin, LSD, ayahuasca – are 5HT (or serotonin) receptor agonists. Serotonin does a lot of complex things in the brain, and interacts with various kinds of receptor sites that trigger or block different neurochemical cascades. But one of the things serotonin does is help regulate contentment; satisfaction. “This is perfect; I don’t need anything more” – like when you’re looking at a beautiful sunset. Many people report that experiences on psychedelics feel “inherently meaningful.” Not a means to an end, but an end in their own right.
Most super addictive drugs – cocaine, for example – act on the mesocorticolimbic circuit in your brain, and they do it via dopamine. When this pathway is stimulated, it engenders a feeling of desire. Instead of feeling “satisfied,” you feel “that was awesome – I’d really love some more.”
This kind of reward system is obviously important for our development and success. It drives habit formation, learning and memory, and pushes us to strive for goals. But a broad swath of current economic growth strategies – from the excitement of scaling a company huge, or making big money on crypto, to the addictiveness of social media, to the loot-crate gambling mechanics of certain kinds of gamification, all the way to the entire sugary drink industry, all exploit our mesocorticolimbic vulnerabilities.
Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist, wrote an entire book on how the private sector’s emphasis on addictive qualities as a growth strategy – and the accompanying neglect of contentment-driven experiences – has shaped contemporary culture and created myriad problems, from the obesity epidemic to social media addiction. It’s worth a read, despite the dramatic title. There’s an entire research field – known as “consumer neuroscience” – where specialists study how to mine our mesocorticolimbic reactions for commercial profit.
This all begs the question: what happens when the psychedelics industry really kicks into high gear?
A puzzling pair of paradigms takes shape. They seem contradictory. On one side, an industry structured around serotonin agonists, aligned toward presence, wonder, enough-ness, and various kinds of healing and inherent meaningfulness. On the other side, the dopamine-happy growth economy, firmly anchored in not-enough-ness and the pursuit of desire. They each offer different narratives about what should motivate us.
Which one will shape our future? And what happens when they collide?
Last Halloween, I stumbled into a pop-up space on Abbot Kinney boulevard (a bleeding-edge frontier for high-end retail experiments). The space felt like a college art party – a psychedelic flophouse driven by creativity, openness, and a desire to transcend the ordinary. They curated and sold relaxed-fit, brightly-colored clothing and proffered gland-opening “light therapy” techniques.
A video installation wall sparkled with classic CRT monitors and collaged electronics, featuring a tapestry of video content ranging from spiritual tableaus to footage of Steve Irwin. Several events were scheduled at the space throughout the week, including Matcha & Meditation Mondays, breathwork workshops, music nights, and partnerships with profferers of various locally produced mind-elevating products.
The space was curated by a conglomeration of interests, including a pastor who had a life-altering psilocybin experience and is friends with Sky Blue of LMFAO, and his kids, who he’s supporting in their musical and creative endeavors. But tellingly, the event also had sponsors – including Empath Ventures, a VC fund focused on “the future of psychedelic medicine,” and MedMen, the cannabis corporate mothership. In fact, the pop-up was right next door to MedMen’s Abbot Kinney store.
The bright young denizens of the pop-up sported loose, 90s-inspired future-delic looks and handed me a zine-like pamphlet outlining a series of “ascension symptoms” – a definite nod to the “transformation” of consciousness. “Ascension Symptoms” is also apparently the title of Azuare’s next album – a psychedelic trap band that includes the aforementioned pastor’s son. There were no actual psychedelics on offer in the space (officially), but during the Halloween-night event I visited, I overheard a girl dressed as Mario intoning “see, it’s because every time I eat mushrooms, I grow!”
I noticed the absence of any customer service framework – it felt like a space to just “be.” It felt like nothing so much as the group pads I frequented in college, suffused with creative experimentation.
I didn’t live through the ‘60s, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it felt like some of those spaces too. It was fascinating to me that it felt different from traditional, more goal-directed retail spaces – and yet, this was incredibly expensive commercial real estate, some of the priciest in the world. The sponsors would not have dumped money into this venture if they didn’t think they were getting something out of it.
It almost seemed like a toe in the water: one glimpse of what modern “psychedelic branding” might look like, outside of the “therapeutic” context: open, freeform, creative, and utopian. At least, in aspiration.
It’s tempting to believe, like the hippies did, that psychedelic drugs will introduce us to a new capitalism-free paradise – a communal love-fest will dawn after we excise all our traumas, and we’ll all live happily ever after. If you’ve ever gotten deep into the psychedelic community, or know anything about how the sixties turned out, you know it’s not that simple.
It also seems possible, at least to me, to get addicted to the “meaningfulness” one experiences when doing psychedelics. Yes, you’re perfectly present to a world that seems flush with inherent significance. And in clinical trials, patients do parse these experiences as some of the most meaningful of their lives. They talk about their trips in spiritual terms – because these substances are basically mashing all the “religious experience” buttons in our brains, flooding our field of perception with inherent meaning.
But after the experience is complete, you either have to find a way of locating that same sense of meaning in your day-to-day life…or you have to just do the substance again. There’s a reason psychedelic experiences, in current medical trials, are paired with guidance and therapy. This is the much-discussed “integration” stage of the experience: if you don’t find a way to bring the treasure back from your quest, you haven’t gotten the proverbial bang for your buck.
It’s also clear that for at least some companies and concerns, getting people into daily psychedelic use is an actual commercial goal, in the form of microdosing.
And yet…if these mind-altering plants and fungi help at all, they’re clearly giving us a glimpse of something. And they do help, it seems. Those that undergo psychedelic experiences with the proper set and setting report life-transforming reconfigurations of their perceptions and personal narratives, and many regard these experiences as significant and positive turning points in their lives. These substances really help people.
So they’re doing something. They’re showing us something. But what?
Evidence overwhelmingly suggests that when we meditate, very good stuff happens to our brains. Both dopamine and serotonin levels are modulated, anxiety and depression are reduced, with enough practice areas of our prefrontal cortex are thickened, which enable us to down-regulate activity in our fight-or-flight amygdala – on and on.
From a subjective perspective, the point of many meditation practices is to be present with, and satisfied with, “what is.” We notice thoughts, but we don’t react to them. We reduce our spastic clasping after our desires, and eventually our thoughts fade. The internal chatter in our skull is quieted via the simple process of us observing it.
In this state, we have full access to the present moment, and the part of us that simply observes desires nothing. Our vision is unclouded by constant worries and internal narratives, and we can look around and see the wonder inherent in the world around us – and even the wonder in our own buzzing thoughts. We can witness, every second, the amazing unfolding spectacle of our own lives. In this state, every moment becomes a minor miracle, shot through with our own incredulity that all this is possible. How do we exist? How did we arrive at this miraculous “now?”
This is very similar to the state of mind Vince Kadlubek describes as the aftereffect of participation in Meow Wolf: open to the moment, open to wonder, and regarding even the smallest leaf with a sense of significance. Post-transformation, everything appears as it is: infinite.
Meditation is rarely as glamorous as pop culture portrays: during meditation, you sit. The entire point is to sit. As practitioners say, if you’re waiting for something to “happen next,” you’re going to be disappointed. You radically accept what is already happening. It’s far less about chasing something you want, and far more about observing and accepting the present moment.
This approach to life is generally considered to lead to greater overall happiness, and improved mental health, versus the approach of aggressively chasing desires. Acquiring, hoarding, jonesing after reward, the hedonic treadmill, are not lasting strategies for mental health and happiness, as any addiction specialist will tell you – and as many rich people discover, right before they enter rehab.
This suggests an entirely different approach to human happiness – one that we haven’t yet integrated into capitalism. We’re not ready for a human population that needs fewer things. These companies are still hellbent on growth, especially digital and content companies, companies that rely heavily on the marketing and media ecosystems to survive. As Bo Burnham said, they’re coming for every second of your life.
This sets up a stark conflict that explains a great deal of contemporary corporate and consumer experiences: these companies are absolutely desperate to find any answer besides pure presence and satisfaction with what is. They’re scrambling for any possible alternative to the idea that you absolutely should just stop paying attention to them (and your screen) and go outside and touch grass.
And what’s more, entire companies are caught in the same spiral as each of us individually. Meta is the perfect example of this: a company striving to find something, anything, over the next hill that will allow it to continue to exist and grow. A company so high on the cocaine of our collective reward circuitry that it hurled itself into the “metaverse” by paying multiples over other tech company salaries in a desperate bid to create a new frontier of consumable content – one we would live our entire lives inside.
Anything but resting in the present moment. Any solution besides what we all already have. But attention to the present moment is the only true source of transformation.
This nexus is the final death of “growth.” And we can acknowledge it – and radically rethink our art, institutions, and technology in response – or we can continue hurling ourselves after the juicy sweet stuff like an addict jonesing for a final hit. But I assure you, if we give up that hit, there’s an entire world waiting for us outside.
There are groups, organizations, and ongoing practices littered across the culture that are prioritizing a different kind of experience. I’ve tried to jot them down in my notes, when I’ve come across them.
There’s Scent Bar, where you can go and smell niche fragrances – something you can’t do over the internet – and learn about them, all their varieties, and how they’re made.
There’s Blue Sky Black Sheep, a unique culture incubator that runs tiny collective writing groups, where everyone writes, listens, is present together, and discovers.
There’s the Halloween party my friends threw, where they projected a haunted-house Buster Keaton silent movie on their garage and played a live score to go along with it on piano, drums, and waterphone.
There are amazing restaurants, and home cooking – nothing creates a feeling of satisfaction and gratitude quite like an artfully prepared meal.
And then there’s the silence when you go for a walk, the silence that’s never silence, the stillness of a thousand beautiful sounds that we never hear because of our headphones. You can probably think of your own, personal examples.
But if you want to “scale” or “grow” any of these experiences in order to “10x your revenue,” you’re going to be disappointed. A lot of these things are expensive, precisely because you cannot possibly “scale” them. Others are free. The economics of presence are different. You can only democratize these things by doing or making them yourself.
Meow Wolf’s installation in Vegas, Omega Mart, is the collision vector of everything I’m talking about in one immersive art project. I thought I was prognosticating the future, and then I walked inside a model of the future at an off-strip warehouse.
The experience takes the shape of a grocery store. This is the same as the refrigerator principle: it’s an exceedingly conventional grocery store in layout and general feel, with fluorescent lighting and rows and rows of brightly colored products – an homage to 20th century consumer choice.
But as you look closer, you start to see stranger and stranger products, with more and more surreal names, ingredients, and supposed effects. Many of these products are purchasable as souvenirs. And as you delve ever-deeper into the store, this grocery mart reveals itself as a gateway into something altogether “other.”
You open the supermarket freezer, ostensibly a repository for bottles of cola – but as you walk inside, the bottles warp and shift around you, sucking you into an eerily lit outdoor canyon, under strange stars – with an enormous, pulsating rift in the floor that casts weird lights up the canyon walls and into the starry “sky.”
As you explore this “outdoor” vista, and the labyrinthine, top-secret depths of the “supermarket” back-rooms and employee areas, you dig up the story hidden inside the experience. The shadowy parent company of “Omega Mart” store is actually harvesting some kind of transcendental cosmic energy from this rift – and imbuing it into their products, so those products will deliver addictive levels of bliss and meaning.
In other words, Meow Wolf already knows. This is the packaging of the transcendent, commenting on itself. And as you sit there, facing the distilled beauty and self-referentiality of this monument to pure experience (at fifty dollars a ticket) in the heart of Las Vegas, a simulation that acknowledges precisely what version of heaven it’s selling, and proceeds to sell it to you anyway – it becomes clear that even the artists at the forefront of culture don’t have “answers” to this question.
They’re confronting it, same as we are.
The only place I’ve been able to find “answers” of any kind is in pure presence – in standing inside something like Omega Mart, and being with it, and being with redwood trees in the same way, and German shepherds, and clouds, and people. And the constant in all of these situations is the same – it’s you. It’s the pure, observing eye. As cliche as it sounds, the secret to happiness lies within.
The guru Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj taught aggressively that the route to enlightenment begins and ends with this “I am” pure-observer feeling, in line with “neti neti” practice. In I Am That, a book of his dialogues, he’s quoted:
“The source of consciousness cannot be an object in consciousness. To know the source is to be the source. When you realize that you are not the person, but the pure and calm witness, and that fearless awareness is your very being, you are the being. It is the source, the Inexhaustible Possibility.”
It’s in this noticing, and the accompanying gratitude, that we find what we’re looking for, every time. Not in the solutions technologists and marketers promise us are right around the next corner. Human beings make beautiful things, but we don’t manufacture happiness. Happiness is not a thing, or an accumulation of things. It’s a lens you look through. You don’t reach for it. You are it. “What the fuck is a NFT, bro?”
“Growth” and real transformation are not the same thing. And that’s a fact, whether it makes you money or not.