I took my kids to Disneyland last weekend in 93°F heat. You can plan for the rides and check the weather, but something about that park always manages to surprise you. I know this because I grew up in Anaheim and Disney was my backyard. 

The park has changed almost entirely in my lifetime. My favorite childhood attractions have been rebranded and ride operators crack sarcastic jokes now. The experience is largely mediated through your phone, with crowds are so thick you can hardly see the park itself.  

But at the end of the day when the weather cools down and people take a load off on Main Street’s curbs and benches, you can spend an hour or two just people watching. And the people are one thing that has not changed. 

There will always be teenagers on dates and packs of girls giggling in Minnie ears. There will always be Disney adults and out of state families consuming every ride and food with equanimity. There will always be people offering to take pictures and complementing each other’s niche outfit references.

I study culture for a living and I also know these same people are struggling with jobs and family and meaning. Many of them are anxious and burned out. But in the park, I also get to see how they play and open themselves to wonder. It’s a place where you see people let their guard down and be carried away, despite what headlines and research tell us. 

The consumerism can overshadow it, but what you see at Disney is also just a very human attempt to stay connected to each other and ourselves. 

That energy culminates on Main Street during sunset. If you sit there long enough, you start to see thousands of people move freely. Lighthearted but in sync. You start to feel a quiet pulse. Proof that in the macro, people always find a way to survive and find joy.

That pulse is getting louder in some corners of culture. Beneath the paralyzing shock of global change, we’re also seeing a quiet reanimation of daily life. 

Cool People Who Play

Last March, adults overtook 3-5 year olds as the most important segment for the toy industry, with 43% of people over the age of 18 buying a toy for themselves in 2024. Toys are big business, and this is the first time in history that the business had a customer that could buy its wares without asking their parents. 

Out of the top 10 toys adults bought for themselves, #1, #3, #6 and #9 were all some form of Squishmallow. 

I’ve had a special interest in the rise of Squishmallows since I first wrote about them in 2023. It started when the Washington Post had published an article about a guy they dubbed “Nick” who was obsessed with the stuffed plushy toys, but didn’t want to use his real name for fear of losing his job. 

If tweets about the trend were any indication, Nick was smart not to divulge his identity because people were vicious. In 2022, having an adult toy habit was akin to having a mental illness. 

But my oh my, so much has changed in the last 2.5 years. 

Major categories of adult gameplay, from boardgames to pickleball, have shot up. Suddenly it’s cool that actor Joe Manganiello is playing D&D in his homemade lair and the Critical Role guys have cultural cache, but the fact is they started making their millions a long time ago. Everyone is playing games for real now. Playing the way children would, getting lost in fantasy worlds without shame or apology. 

There’s been a wholesale rejection of cynicism around play that was so apparent just a few years ago. Some stigmas may remain, but they remain the way avocado toast memes linger. Everyone knows the joke is based on a lie.

Adult play is increasing everywhere. Real play. Play that gets you in a flow state, with special rules and special energy. Play that no one thinks of monetizing or turning into a side hustle. We're re-learning what it means to play simply because it fulfills a deep, human need.

This month in Exposure Therapy we’re studying the cultural catalysts of play and how it both builds the nascent norms of society and breaks them down. Play is deceptively powerful.

Play is how new cultures are born. Play is how we test out the new futures we may choose to pursue. 

Ottawa, Canada has named its first-ever Nightlife Commissioner to bring play to the city after dark. In California, Santa Monica's City Council recently approved a motion to convert its Third Street Promenade into an entertainment zone where (gasp!) you can drink alcohol outdoors while kids play lawn games. Multigenerational playgrounds, adult camps, empty lots converted into creative zones - when we play, we break and remake things. 

The play that is emerging will turn into laws and social structures, because play always breaks out into the physical world around it. 

Instagram therapists love to say that people who don’t know how to play as adults never felt safe playing as children. That checks out. Or maybe COVID sucked the spirit out of us. Maybe things feel too serious now. But you and I, dear reader, had better learn how to play again because it will improve every other part of our world and our lives. 

Play is the starting point of everything we might want for ourselves.

Sydney Sweeney’s Used Bath Water

There are endless thinkpieces and TikToks on the death of social media, but it’s hard to really believe them until you look at the statistics. 

The number of people using social has plateaued at 82% since 2021 and it’s not budging. Global minutes per day spent on social media have also plateaued and started to decrease. The numbers are still high but not going higher. Perhaps there was going to always be a ceiling. People still have to live and get things done.

At the same time, attitudes are shifting. More and more people are simply opting out of social, and you've probably seen it yourself. My community slack has been talking about this, and I've seen it first hand in psychographic research we're doing for brands and their gen z and millennial audiences. People are increasingly anxious about touching social like it’s something toxic (Jonathan Haidt, no one knows how to name a catchy movement like you do).

Hyper-consumerism, parasocial worship, addictive trend cycles - I think there’s a real chance all of it has peaked. Yes, a changing economy and the enshittification of platforms are part of the equation. But these are also things we wanted to be free of. We’re very tired.  

Sydney Sweeney has joked about selling her used bath water. That’s very Sydney Sweeney of her, because she’s made no secret of the fact that she wants to get those brand deals locked down while her star shines bright. You have to respect it. 

Naturally, Dr. Squatch partnered with her to sell some used bath water in a bar of soap. The collab did what it needed to do and got lots of tweets and pseudo-discourse and will probably sell many units. But will anyone really care? Was anyone really scandalized? Is anyone truly bothered by what those soaps will actually be used for?

Social media has stretched our limits of caring. Our emotions are not infinite. At some point we have to turn off our phones and preserve what little fucks we have left.

It’s the same reason why the only people who think or care about Liquid Death activations are marketers. It’s why Hawk Tuah girl’s real crime wasn’t blatant financial fraud, but the fact that she didn’t call her crypto “SpitCoin”. 

People are pulling away from social because social has given us everything it has to offer and it’s left us wanting. That’s great. It means we want something more meaningful and fulfilling, and now we have a chance at finding it elsewhere. 

Working The Good Life

I once knew the founder of a VC studio who had a particular way of recruiting CEOs for the portfolio of startups he was incubating. He looked for McKinsey people in their late 30s who’d stalled on the corporate ladder, and were closely networked to crypto and tech founders with successful exits. 

He was looking for someone who felt like they were losing, surrounded by people who were winning, because what he was really after in a CEO was someone with a chip on their shoulder. When you’re in the prime years of your career and you know that your next move is your last chance to prove your worth to your peers and the world, you have a different kind of hunger. 

People in that world will always exist because the consulting-to-startup-founder pipeline is efficient and lucrative. It’s not bad or wrong. Everyone knows what the deal is and we all find happiness and meaning in different ways. People needing to prove themselves have benefited larger society since the beginning of time. 

The issue today, however, is that hard work and reward are starting to decouple in some pretty fundamental ways. Or at least it looks like that, and perception trumps reality right now. If it seems like working harder, being more loyal, trusting the system or putting in your hours no longer promise greater economic or social capital, then it is a very rational response to de-prioritize work and reprioritize your life. 

People feel the shifting landscape of work, but they're also changing their perceptions of what it means to live a good life and putting work in its secondary place. 

Across the U.S. and beyond, there are growing stories of Millennials walking away from conventional career paths to pursue simpler, more fulfilling lives. Major media have profiled burned out young professionals who quit big corporate jobs to move to rural areas or small towns. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But people are experimenting. 

22.1 million Americans were working part-time by choice as of this past April 2025, which is nearly 5 times the number of involuntary part-timers. Researchers have been watching this trend for the past few years and attribute a growing portion of it to millennials choosing part-time work and more modest lifestyles in order to keep their mental health in place. Either people are getting lazier or the work-reward equation is so messed up that workers are recalculating their values.

Do you watch #tinyhome content? Do you pay for a #vanlife Patreon like I do? Unfortunately our shared interests are not that special. These two trends in particular have had massive success, and if you read the reddit threads, it’s because they breed the modern fantasy of minimalism and mobility. 

While Mr. Beast (who now has more subscribers than Netflix) recently had a leaked memo that reads like a manifesto for audience capture, dearly beloved creators like Outdoor Boys have decided to walk away from money and fame in order to raise their families and live more normal lives. We thought Luke posted because he loves us, which he does, but it was good to be reminded that he loves his kids and sanity more. RIP my favorite channel.

The renegotiation of work and life is a sign of our adaptability. Never underestimate peoples’ ability to find non-obvious ways of making life work. Change is deeply disruptive at first, but then we slowly learn to control our emotions around it. We can't slow it down, but we can learn to not let it overtake our nervous systems. For many, the first and best way to do that is to change the meaning and significance of work.

A Cultural Audit of Vitality

Sometimes our industry thinks the best way to understand where culture is headed is to study what’s dying. That sounds silly when I write it down. To know culture you have to track what’s coming to life.

Positive signals are indicators of emergent systems and where new values are starting to take root. They’re where energy is gathering for what comes next. If you only study what's on the doomscroll, you miss the cultural infrastructure that’s being built right under your feet. 

Within minutes of walking into Disney one of my kids asked, “Is there a Netflix-land?” (I swear my kids don’t watch that much TV.) He doesn’t know about nostalgia or why a streaming service with no IP might have trouble getting people to spend a fortune on long lines and churros. He thinks that if something plays a role in life, it should show up in the world, too.

When something begins to matter to us, we start looking for it in the world around us. We want to see it echoed in our spaces, our systems, and in the ways we come together. That desire is subtle but powerful. It shapes how culture moves forward, often long before institutions catch up.

The signs of life aren’t usually loud or spectacular, but they are persistent. I don’t think you have to be an optimist to see them, but you do have to be brave enough to look past the naysayers.

Big Feelings

Here's what we've been consuming.

OpenAI has an unsubtle communications strategy. (The Future, Now and Then): “In order to keep the money spigot flowing at full force across time, you’re going to need to maintain that halo of futurity. Investor cash isn’t premised on deep technical knowledge. It’s premised on hopes and hunches about future returns. They are participating in a Keynesian Beauty Contest. It’s vibes all the way down.”

What I Tell Mothers Who Feel Rejected by Their Adult Children (Wall Street Journal): “Although it’s more common for children to be estranged from their fathers than their mothers—26% v. 6%, according to a nationally representative survey in the Journal of Marriage and Family in 2022—I see mothers struggling more with it. For mothers, who tend to identify more than fathers with their job as a parent, the anguish of a child’s rejection can feel existential. For the ruminating mothers in my practice, we begin by getting to a place of strength in themselves.”

What Hot Dragon-Riders and Fornicating Faeries Say About What Women Want Now (Wall Street Journal): “In both “ACOTAR” and Rebecca Yarros’s “Fourth Wing,” two of the most popular series, mind-reading and “mental bonds” figure prominently…The fantasy of total transparency in romantic communication might be especially refreshing for readers who have come of age in the era of the “situationship”… Many romantasy novels also feature lovers who are fated to be together, biologically or spiritually. In an age of ghosting and endless swiping, this trope seems at least as fantastical as being courted by a suitor with wings… “I always say what I’m looking for in a man is, like—” she paused. “I’m looking for men written by women.””

My Brain Finally Broke (The New Yorker): “More than a decade of complaining about this situation has done nothing to change my compulsion to induce dissociation anew each day. And, though there was once a time when my physical surroundings felt more concrete than whatever I was looking at on my phone, this year has marked a turning point. Now the cognitive tendrils of a phone-based psychosis frequently seem more descriptive of contemporary reality—“Houthi PC small group,” etc.—than the daffodils I see springing up in the park. The phone eats time; it makes us live the way people do inside a casino.”

Magical Plastic Reality II: The Intimacy Economy, Ambient Trust, and our probable futures under algorithmic skies (Anice Hassim on Medium): “It’s plastic in that it’s malleable, shapeable — capable of being bent and molded. And it’s magical in that it enchants us, blurs the line between the real and the imagined. In South Africa and across the world, people increasingly occupy digital spaces that feel as real as the physical world. We find community, meaning, and emotion online — yet something is off-kilter. “We are watching, but not feeling. Living, but slightly offbeat… a simulation of intimacy, a performance of connection”. In this uncanny valley of ourselves, we sense a “dissonance, an eerie hum” beneath the surface of our machined and engineered feeds.”

Practical imagination (Whispers & Giants): “It is possible to train creativity like a muscle—to generate novelty through recombination, transformation or adaptive iteration. Creativity thrives within constraint and is usually focused on producing outcomes. Imagination, however, is something else entirely. It is not just the ability to make something new, but the capacity to hold together what is not yet fully known, to maintain contact with ambiguity and to construct meaning in the absence of certainty. It enables the projection of possibilities that cannot yet be tested, modeled or verified.”

Sometimes the best brand strategy is to give your consumers a new mental model.

This works especially well in categories where the functional benefits are commoditized, but the emotional stakes remain high.

Mental models tell us how to evaluate things and make decisions. Change the mental model and you change the way people choose things:

• Beds are for sleeping, but Eight Sleep tells us beds are for healing
   

• Food is fuel, but Ezekiel tells us food is holy
   

• Baby formula is science, but Bobbie tells us formula simplicity

And the only reason any of these new mental models have spoken to us is because deep down we already felt them, we just hadn't consciously realized it yet. The spectrum of healing was already starting to expand in culture, nutrition was already becoming a new battleground for virtue, motherhood was already retreating to a narrative of ‘simpler times’.

You can use mental models for both good and evil, you can use them to create positive behaviors or bad ones, but you can’t fabricate them out of nothing.

You have to tap into a latent belief that isn’t being addressed in the market yet. You can’t just tell people to care about something different, you have to match your model to the energy of the time.

Goop worked because women who were already invisible to the medical establishment were ready for an experience of wellness that embraced their spirits and emotional states instead of treating them like a disorder. Airbnb worked because it offered a sense of belonging to a millennial class that felt disenfranchised in the world, but now had money to spend.

Mental models can create entire industries that didn’t exist before, that’s how powerful they are. And when they’re that powerful, they go wide.

At some point everything was Goopified or became the Airbnb of X. The only reason everything is a detox now is because brands like Eight Sleep, Ezekiel and Bobbie have cemented the idea that the body is already perfect, it just needs less interference.

Mental models can change who is buying, what other brands are in the consideration set, and what people are willing to pay a premium for. It's a level of positioning that goes deeper than product or UX differentiation, or mere “framing”.

They're not easy to come by, nor are they easy to change, but they are one of the holy grails of brand strategy.

They can make your weaknesses irrelevant and your strengths all that matter.

Yours,

I’m Jasmine Bina, and I’m a brand strategist and cultural futurist. If you love this newsletter and need more:

• My private strategist’s club Exposure Therapy is where the best minds and brand builders come to get better at their craft. It’s also where I drop my best original research.

• My brand strategy agency Concept Bureau works with some of the most powerful cultural brands in the world today.

• My LinkedIn where I post my ideas almost every day, before they turn into reports or articles. I invite you to connect with me. I’d love to meet you!