Look, I’m not going to get mad about any dog. I am dog person through and through. I think dogs were created to teach us the meaning of love and they are furry gods that walk amongst us.
But seriously, why are there so many goddamn Goldendoodles?
I spend a decent amount of time in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It’s where I landed in 2001 when the neighborhood was all grungy abandoned factories, sex workers outside our apartment window, and Tops, the strangest, most wondrous grocery store ever. Over the past 20+ years I’ve boomeranged back to the ‘Burg many times, contributing to its radical transformation through purchases at the lululemon and Chanel stores that now stake out the main drag. I’m now that asshole.
Time man. It changes things.
Williamsburg has gone from one-eyed junkyard dogs to being absolutely saturated in fucking Goldendoodles - they are everywhere. And I will love on any Goldendoodle you put in front of me, but can we also admit that these dogs are:
Kinda too freakishly nice?
Kinda too adorably floppy?
Kinda too conveniently non-allergenic?
Kinda too brilliantly engineered?
Kinda too boring?
Goldendoodles live in the same suburban cul-de-sac of my mental map that Casper, Warby, Glossier and all the other Instagram/DTC brands that took over in the mid-teens occupy. They all have that humming perfect “thing” - the pleasing fonts and muted color palettes and quirky but approachable illustrations and copy. All built to tickle and sooth our collective brains and ride the hell out of the algorithm.
But after being washed over with this vibe via content and stores and restaurants and product after product (and now they’ve come for the dogs too), I feel like I’m deadening and losing my fucking mind.
It’s like when Spotify creates a custom playlist for me - every single damn time I get served the same 20 damn songs over and over again. This insipid repetition makes me not only hate my once-favorite songs, but now I associate them with the feeling that I’m in some sort of mental institution’s experiment on how to kill the human experience.
I miss weird.
I miss the crackly strangeness of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. Or the absolute gobsmacking joy of holding JEM doll in my hand. Have you ever watched the film “The Adventures of Baron von Munchausen”? I mean, what the fuck is that film? It’s gloriously strange.
I really want to feel this rawness, this weirdness again.
I want to go to a restaurant where the items on the menu are crossed out because the owner didn’t see the need to print a bunch of perfect, new menus that day. I want to see art that drips and rips and roars because it’s so fundamental and true. I want to go to a shop where the layout is janky AF and there are pictures of the family vacation on the wall.
Instead, I’m awash in smooth edges, perfect design and words that are numbingly the same as the last ones. It’s familiar, predictable, patterned; processed through and for a corporate, algorithmic cycle.
The struggle of our age? Staying human.
But more than that, being weird.
I’m pondering this all the damn time these days. And it’s something that I have conviction that we need to be not only incredibly intentional about, but fight for in this era.
Our brains are elastic AF. They physically change throughout our entire lives, constantly rewiring based on the inputs. So when we blast it with shitty digital wormholes dictated by algorithms built to ensnare us, where the edges are smoothed out into slippery nothingness, I believe our brains get dumber, less patient, less interesting, sadder.
But remember, Elasticity. ELASTICITY!
We can just as easily feed that wondrous blob of grey matter challenging books, weird films, charged art, invigorating music, time with people we love and all the good stuff.
It’s just really, really hard right?
Because we have tremendously powerful and incentivized companies that make a lot of money from our incessant scrolling, sucked into the screens thing. This isn’t a story of our weakness; it’s their business plan - we are mere humans in the face of their tremendous technology and manipulation tactics.
Because it can feel like the whole world is THERE. The updates are there, the Halloween pictures (god I love Halloween pictures), the big announcements, the news, the gossip, that article you must read… it’s all there.
Because if I’m not there… if I take a hike in the woods and don’t Instagram it, if I don’t post my professional hot take, if I’m not tweeting my latest wry burn about Epstein… did it happen? Will people remember me? Do I matter? Do I exist?
You do exist.
Like you really, really do exist.
And you’re wonderful.
It’s just time.
It’s time to be a little more weird.
It’s time to consciously step out of the stream.
To say no to so much dopamine.
To ask for phone calls instead of status updates.
To be okay with being slightly out of the loop.
To take the apps off your phone.
To be a little more bored, a little less on it, a little more present.
To give that weird little kid that lives inside you more space.
To force yourself to take in longer, slower inputs so your brain can wire itself back towards depth and flow.
It’s time.
We thought that these platforms were going to be amazingly good, connective, creative playgrounds. But we know what’s going on now, we know how they’re exploiting our attention and rage, our creativity, we know what they do to us.
It’s time.
We know this digital wretched system has already dehumanized us and now we’re going to throw some AI rocket fuel into it. Good lord.
It’s time.
It’s not only time to step back, it’s time to make.
Make the things that put you in flow.
Make the things that keep your hands busy and your phone at bay.
Make the things that show yourself you love yourself and others that you love them too.
Make the something that isn’t washed through an algorithm but exists because you want it to exist and that’s good enough.
Make something makes people gasp, laugh, sigh, scrunch their forehead, dance.
Just make something.
And with that, I’ll end with this:
“We’re all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it, that’s all.”
- The Breakfast Club
Let’s stop hiding it.
The world needs our weird.
Who’s with me?
I'm with you! I've been writing about this recently too, we def need more weird.
Interesting stat in this - there are now nearly three times more running clubs in the uk than nightclubs. It's great that people are spending time together in real life, but the loss of night clubs makes me sad because running doesn't allow for quite the same expression as dancing 😒
I’m in. All my time at R/GA (back in the formative years of these platforms) we talked about the need for “fitting in” in contrast to the “traditional medias” that talked about “standing out”. I now understand why I hated that idea. It takes off all the sharp edges. All advertising is now platform marketing. It’s all “fitting in” slipping frictionless into our lives and we are all just sliding into the algo’s vision for humanity that is reductionist and conforming (targeted awareness and mindless consumption…anything other is silenced and suppressed).Humanity is being shaped by algorithms that feed the emptiness that Carl Jung called “a persona” ie. life without ‘individuation’ - weirdness.