From the way we create our identities and manage our health, to the way we employ therapy-speak at work and vote in elections, it’s apparent that people are increasingly being guided by feelings and intuition in places where they may have once relied on reasoning or ideology.

This noetic, direct-knowing way of moving through the world may sound familiar to you. Perhaps a colleague was “guided” to change careers, or a friend decided to “detox” their personal life. Maybe you, yourself, have dabbled in any form of “energy” practices.

None of these major decisions came from religious ideology. None of them came from scientific reasoning. They came from a third place of intuition, and this is an important cultural shift that revalues knowledge in our world.

When 87% of Americans believe in at least one New Age spiritual belief, it's clear this third place of knowing is growing. But what is really interesting is what we see when we drill down into that majority.

What we find is not so much spirituality but instead the very definition of noetics: “knowledge that is felt to be true, inside, by the self, with intuition as its defining experiential characteristic.“  

In this week’s article, Senior Strategist Zach Lamb gives us a clear, compelling look at what this third epistemology actually is and how we’ve seen this new belief system emerging for the past few years in our work at Concept Bureau.

Springing up from the crack between science and religion, noetics has become our new compass for knowing. 

The field of relevance for brands is changing. For CEOs, investors and brand leaders, it means looking at the landscape as two camps - those that keep us locked in values-based branding, and those that push us into the far more pertinent domain of noetics.

It is a domain that is both needed and felt, but not yet surfaced in our culture… and that is the formula of a golden opportunity.

Zach sees noetics as the driving force behind brands like Peoplehood, Somewhere Good, The Nearness, Chillpill and Theta Noir, but it can have incredible applications in any category. He asks, “What might a more ensouled car buying experience be like, for instance? Or intuitive beauty? What about feelings-based education? And aren’t our most basic institutions crying out for a fresh jolt of feeling?”

It’s not as weird as you might think. Brands like Febreeze, Kin Euphorics and Dooz have already gone there.  

And besides, it’s our unofficial motto that the future always starts as the weird. 

Forever Young

Here's what we've been consuming.

The Biohacking Devotees Spending Hundreds of Thousands—Even Millions—to Enhance Their Homes (Wall Street Journal): “Biohacking became a buzzword around the time Silicon Valley entrepreneur Dave Asprey’s Bulletproof coffee, a.k.a. butter coffee, morphed into an energy-boosting lifestyle in the 2010s. Between then and now, biohacking has become an eclectic umbrella term encompassing everything from sleep journaling to hyperbaric oxygen therapy to human augmentation via device implantation. At the core of all biohacking, however, is one pursuit: optimization.” 

You can't reach the brain through the ears (Experimental History): “Humans have this rich, strange, kaleidoscopic mental experience. [...] You simply can’t fit a thought into a sound wave. Something’s gotta go, and what goes is its ineffable essence, its deep meaning. You have to hope that the other person can reconstruct that essence with whatever they have lying around in their head. Often, they can’t.”

The bella swan hair tuck is a coded language (mixedfeelings.earth): “In 2023, most people have resumed various degrees of integration into the physical world, but TikTok’s chokehold on culture has remained—from fashion to music to, more subtly but enduringly, our physical language. These movements that started as an earnest translation of our new digital culture have lingered as tongue-in-cheek nods to an internet in-joke. Now, they’re a somewhat cringe holdover from years of online isolation that we power through anyways.” 

‘Am I Ugly?’ This May Be the Only Place to Get an Honest Answer (Wall Street Journal): A decade-plus-old Reddit forum has seen a surge in activity, with users requesting feedback on their unfiltered photos... “When people are looking for input from others, they’re looking to prove something to themselves,” said Anne Poirier, author of “The Body Joyful” and a self-esteem trainer. Confirmation bias is often at play in the process. 

“Girl” trends and the repackaging of womanhood (Vox): Women on TikTok are thinking like the marketing teams at Simon & Schuster, analyzing the data and determining which cute name for an otherwise uninteresting habit or aesthetic has the most likelihood of going viral. What was once the province of marketing teams or journalists or magazine editors to christen cultural trends is now up to the public, and, it turns out, the public does a much more efficient job at this than the traditional gatekeepers ever could.

[BONUS] I was featured in this week's "Why Is This Interesting" where I talked about the podcasts I'm obsessed with, the recent books that have changed me, and a Youtube rabbit hole I can't seem to get out of. If I could add one more thing, it would be the book 'The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets' by Barbara G. Walker. It is a remarkable compendium and historical study that deconstructs every cultural story that shapes our beliefs about "woman". If you like it, let me know. I'll gift a hardcopy to the first 5 people that respond to this email. 

The Shape of Things

Quick hits of insight in socially acceptable places.

• What the entire internet looks like
   

• The Netflix formula for virality and conversion
   

• One of the most genius organic growth engines of all time
   

• “The shape of the curve is what matters. Not their origins.”
   

• How founders validated their startup ideas

Found Letters

Creative inspirations for the other side of your brain.

• For the lover and friend of words
   

• Obituary for a quiet life 
   

• Can't convince me we don't live in a simulation
   

• Best McKinsey slide of all time
   

• The overlooked value of context

I'm coming to the conclusion that novelty is all that matters.

In the epilogue of The Way of Kings, a character asks the guards, "What is it that men value in others?"

After some thinking he realizes that the answer to this question, as with all questions about humans, is to simply observe their behaviors.

"If an artist creates a work of powerful beauty... she will be lauded as a master... Yet what if another, working independently with that exact level of skill, were to make the same accomplishments the very next month? Would she find similar acclaim? No. She'd be called derivative.

"Intellect. If a great thinker develops a new theory of mathematics, science of philosophy, we will name him wise... But what if another man determines the same theory on his own, then delays in publishing his results by a mere week? Will he be remembered for his greatness? No. He will be forgotten."

Being first very often beats being the smartest, the most imaginative, or even being right. We're wired and further conditioned to admire fresh, new, dazzling things. It pays to be first.

When we consider the quandaries of how artificial intelligence will impact society, who deserves to be called a creator, what constitutes status and culture today, or if trends are even trends anymore, what we are really struggling with is how to continue valuing novelty. 

In all of these conversations, we are asking ourselves, How can I know what is actually new?

It's hard to place value in this world when you don't know what came first, or what came from where. 

Novelty is about to get a lot harder to attain, and a lot more important to reach for.

Yours,

Jasmine Bina
Founder & CEO
Concept Bureau, Inc.