I found myself alone at the stern of a smallish whale-watching boat off the coast of Juneau. The captain had cut the engines and pointed to a patch of water where some “action” had been reported, and the rest of the passengers poured out of the cabin and crowded onto the bow. It was shoulder to shoulder up there, cameras and phones already raised, everyone trying to get a decent position at the rail. I took one look at the crowd and decided I didn’t feel like fighting for a place to stand, so I wandered to the stern, where a sea lion was swimming alongside the boat, minding its own business and doing sea lion stuff.

I was watching where the sea lion was, and now was not, when everything went quiet. Then, directly in front of me, not more than an arm’s length away, three humpback whales came to the surface. One followed the other in quick succession. They took a deep breath, hung at the surface for a moment, unafraid of the boats full of gawkers around them, and then slowly, oh so gracefully, they returned to the depths. Their enormous tails, each marked with distinctive patterns, were the last things I saw before these gentle giants slipped beneath the surface to continue feeding and living their giant lives.

I didn’t raise my camera or my phone in those moments. It wasn’t some noble decision on my part. I wasn’t making a stand against technology or choosing to be present in some wonderfully enlightened way. I simply forgot I had a phone. I didn’t need to prove to anyone that it happened, and I knew, even as it was happening, that this was one of those memories I’d never need a photograph to recall. It was intimate, moving, and awe-inspiring. After the whales had gone below, the captain was standing behind me, and he said, “Good for you, that was pretty damn amazing.”

A few moments later, the whales resurfaced several yards ahead of the boat, and the bow lookers were rewarded with tails and spouts and the photographs they’d been waiting for. I was still at the stern, trying to come to grips with the size and gentleness of these amazing creatures. It’s one thing to watch hundreds of nature documentaries and shows about the ocean and whales. It’s something else entirely to stand on a boat and have three of them surround you only a few feet away. No matter how many whales you see on screens and photos, even giant screens designed to make you feel as if you’re there, there’s absolutely nothing like being that close, hearing the sound as they take a breath, seeing their gigantic tails slip so effortlessly beneath the surface. You’re left stunned and humble.

After about half an hour, the captain called for us to get back into the cabin as he put the boat in gear and headed for another spot. When we reached it, we moved back outside, this time spreading out fore and aft, and there, about a hundred yards from the boat, we saw three huge black dorsal fins cutting through the water. We were looking at a pod of orcas, also known as killer whales, though that name suddenly felt a little dramatic once you were watching them just go about their day.

This pod, like the humpbacks we’d watched earlier, had a baby among them. When the adults surfaced to breathe, the baby popped up too, bouncing and splashing like a toddler. The adults were focused on feeding. The baby just wanted to play. And play he did, flipping over adults, jumping out of the water, and landing awkwardly on his side. One of the women on the boat said, “The baby is just like my Justin when he was a kid, always doing gymnastics in the house, bouncing off walls.” And he was. Except this little kid already weighed a ton.

The two naturalists on board, both in their late twenties, kept telling us this was the best whale watch they’d ever been on. In fact, they said they rarely saw orcas on a trip out. But there they were. One male’s dorsal fin seemed impossibly tall, straight and strong, unlike the collapsed and folded dorsal fins I’d seen on orcas in captivity at SeaWorld. We watched them move slowly along, unimpressed with the boats around them and the people hanging off those boats, all of us trying to get the best view of animals that didn’t seem to care whether we were there or not.

Between the three humpbacks that surrounded me at the stern and the pod of orcas moving so close to us, I felt tiny. But I also felt safe. The humpbacks had looked at me, or at least it felt that way. They saw I was just this puny human guy on a small, easily smashable boat, floating around in their territory, and they judged me okay. Not a threat. Maybe they had chartered a human watch the same way we had chartered a whale watch. Maybe some older female had told the others, in whatever language whales use, “Hey, I know a spot where humans congregate. Let’s go look at some. They’re hilariously small and weak.”

So there was a moment when the three giants surrounded me, and I had no idea whether I was the one watching or the one being watched.

Giants

I’ve watched nature documentaries for as long as I can remember. Like most people, I’ve seen whales on screens hundreds of times. I’ve watched them breach in slow motion, seen drone footage that shows their sheer size against the vastness of the ocean, and sat in front of giant cinema screens that promise to immerse you in the experience. They’re all remarkable, but they’re all missing something.

Scale is one of those things that’s almost impossible to appreciate until you’re standing beside it. You can know how big a humpback is. You can read the statistics, admire the photography, and marvel at the aerial footage, but none of it prepares you for hearing one take a breath just a few feet away, or watching something the size of a house move through the water with a grace that seems to defy its own mass. It’s one of those experiences that instantly remind you there’s a world beyond the one we spend most of our lives looking at through glass.

What surprised me most wasn’t the size of the whales, it was how they made me feel. Standing next to something so enormous, I didn’t feel vulnerable or threatened. I felt small, and strangely, I found that comforting.

We spend much of our lives trying to feel bigger than we are. We build careers, companies, and reputations. We compete, compare, and convince ourselves that being important is the same thing as being significant. Then, every once in a while, nature quietly reminds us that we’re none of those things. We’re just another species sharing a planet with creatures so much larger than us that they make all our usual measures of scale feel a little ridiculous.

Maybe that’s why the encounter stayed with me. For a few brief moments, my world shrank to the sound of whales breathing and the sight of giant tails disappearing beneath the surface. My emails, deadlines, worries, and ambitions all seemed to become wonderfully unimportant. I wasn’t thinking about work, the news, or what was waiting for me when I got home. I was simply standing on the back of a boat, watching three giants go about their day, completely indifferent to the fact that I was there.

It wasn’t until much later that I started thinking about the word giant. We use it all the time. We talk about technology giants, retail giants, financial giants, and industry giants as though the word has become little more than shorthand for success. Standing beside an actual giant has a funny way of reminding you that we’ve rather lost sight of what the word was supposed to mean.

The Biggest Things on Earth

It struck me later that we borrow the word giant remarkably freely. We talk about technology giants, retail giants, pharmaceutical giants, financial giants, and industrial giants as though size alone is enough to earn the title. Sometimes we even describe people that way. Sporting giants. Literary giants. Giants of industry. Standing beside an actual giant makes you realize how casually we’ve been using the word.

Real giants don’t spend much time trying to convince you they’re giants. The humpbacks didn’t announce themselves. They didn’t breach because there was an audience. They didn’t swim a little closer so we’d get a better photograph. They weren’t performing for us any more than the sea lion had been. We just happened to be sharing a small patch of ocean for a few minutes before they got on with the business of being whales.

The same was true of the orcas. There were half a dozen boats following them, people hanging over the rails hoping for the perfect shot, yet the whales couldn’t have cared less. They surfaced when they needed to breathe, disappeared when they needed to feed, and carried on with lives that had absolutely nothing to do with us. There’s something oddly refreshing about that.

We spend an extraordinary amount of our lives trying to be noticed. People do it. Brands do it. Companies certainly do it. We celebrate visibility as though it were the same as importance.

The whales couldn’t have cared less. They surfaced because they needed air, not because they had an audience. They disappeared beneath the surface without the slightest concern for whether anyone had managed to capture the perfect photograph.

Attention has become one of the world’s most valuable currencies, and just about everyone is trying to capture ours. The whales weren’t interested in any of it. They didn’t need our admiration or validation. They didn’t need an audience to confirm their importance. They simply existed, completely indifferent to whether we noticed them or not. It made me wonder if we’ve started confusing visibility with significance.

The biggest things on Earth don’t spend their lives trying to be seen. They simply are. Maybe that’s why standing next to them feels so humbling. For a few moments, all the things we normally use to measure success quietly disappear. Followers, market share, job titles, awards, and quarterly results don’t mean very much when you’re standing beside something that has been navigating the oceans for millions of years.

Perhaps that’s the lesson the whales left me with. Greatness doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it swims quietly beneath the surface, completely unconcerned about whether anyone is watching.

The View from the Stern

I’ve thought about that morning more times than I can count, and one detail keeps coming back to me.

I wasn’t standing at the stern because I was looking for a better view, I was there because the bow was crowded and I’d wandered off to watch a sea lion. There was no strategy, no insight, no grand plan. I simply ended up somewhere nobody else happened to be. It makes me wonder how often that happens in business.

Most of us spend our time looking where everyone else is looking. We read the same reports, chase the same trends, attend the same conferences, and convince ourselves that if everyone is moving in one direction, that’s probably where the opportunity lies. Sometimes that’s true. But sometimes the most memorable experiences, the biggest ideas, and the most unexpected discoveries happen because we looked somewhere else.

I’m not suggesting we ignore the crowd for the sake of being different. There’s nothing particularly clever about standing at the back of a boat while everyone else rushes to the front. In my case, it was little more than chance. But chance has a habit of rewarding curiosity. If I hadn’t wandered off to watch that sea lion, I wouldn’t have found myself standing within a few feet of three humpback whales. I’d have gone home with the same photographs as everyone else, but without the memory that has stayed with me ever since.

I never did take a photograph that morning. My phone stayed in my pocket, not because I was making a point, but because for a few brief moments I’d forgotten it existed. Looking back, I’m glad I did.

If I’d taken a picture, I’d probably have looked at it a few times before it disappeared into the thousands of photographs sitting on my phone. Instead, I remember the sound of a humpback taking a breath just a few feet away. I remember the spray catching my face. I remember the baby orca bouncing around its family like an overexcited child. I remember feeling tiny, and somehow completely safe. Those are the things that stayed with me.

Perhaps that’s because the moments that shape us aren’t always the ones we capture. They’re the ones we experience so completely that we don’t think to reach for a camera in the first place.

Standing at the wrong end of the boat turned out to be the right place to be. Not because it gave me a better view, but because it reminded me that significance isn’t always where the crowd is looking. Sometimes it’s quietly waiting somewhere else, completely unconcerned about whether anyone notices.

Looking back, it wasn’t really the whales that changed the course of that morning. It was the sea lion. If I hadn’t looked at the crowd on the bow and decided it was too busy, if I hadn’t wandered to the stern to watch something that had simply caught my eye, I’d have gone home with the same photographs as everyone else and missed the moment I’ll remember for the rest of my life.

Curiosity rarely announces where it’s going to lead. More often than not, it starts with something small, something that seems hardly worth noticing. A sea lion swimming past the back of a boat. A conversation. A question. An idea that doesn’t quite fit with what everyone else is thinking.

Most of us spend our lives following well-worn paths because they’re comfortable and they’re proven. Every now and then, though, curiosity nudges us in a different direction, and that’s where the interesting things tend to happen.

The Takeaway

Curiosity rarely points us toward the biggest opportunities. More often, it draws us toward something small, unexpected, or seemingly unimportant. A question. A conversation. A different point of view. Or even a sea lion swimming past the back of a boat.

The organizations that continue to innovate aren’t always the ones chasing what everyone else is chasing. More often, they’re the ones willing to follow their curiosity, explore beyond the obvious, and remain open to finding something remarkable where nobody thought to look.

There’s a brand I’ve been watching for the past two years that has never once tried to explain itself to me.

No founder diary. No behind-the-scenes content. No manifesto pinned to the top of its social channels. It launches products, shares only what it needs to share, and then largely gets out of the way. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, people talk about the brand constantly. I notice it because it’s become unusual.

Most brands have spent the last decade moving in the opposite direction. They’ve embraced radical transparency, documented every stage of their process, and turned founders into full-time content creators. The assumption behind this approach is straightforward: the more people see of a brand, the more connected they’ll feel to it.

For a long time, that assumption made sense. Today, it deserves another look.

The Bargain Brands Made With the Internet

The internet offered brands a remarkably attractive deal. Show up consistently, publish constantly, and participate in every conversation. In return, you’ll earn reach, attention, and relevance. Visibility became the objective because visibility delivered results. And for a while, it worked exactly as promised.

In the early days of social media, simply being present online set a brand apart. A founder who shared their thinking openly felt authentic. A company that gave customers a glimpse behind the curtain felt refreshingly transparent. The practices we now take for granted were once genuine differentiators. But differentiation has a habit of becoming expectation.

As more brands adopted the same tactics, visibility stopped being distinctive. What once felt novel gradually became standard, and what became standard eventually faded into the background.

Today, consumers encounter a constant stream of content from companies competing for the same finite pool of attention. Brands explain their decisions, document their processes, react to cultural moments, and communicate at a frequency that would have seemed unimaginable fifteen years ago.

The problem isn’t that any of those activities is inherently wrong. The problem is that when everyone follows the same playbook, visibility alone no longer creates interest. Something else becomes valuable.

Specifically, the space between what consumers know about a brand and what they’d still like to know.

That’s where anticipation lives. It’s where curiosity begins. And it’s a space many brands have spent years eliminating without realizing its value.

Why Mystery Still Matters

Human beings are naturally drawn toward incomplete information. It’s why cliffhangers work, why people speculate about upcoming product launches, and why a novel becomes difficult to put down once an unanswered question takes hold. We enjoy discovering things for ourselves.

That instinct doesn’t disappear when people interact with brands. If anything, it becomes even more important in categories where products are easy to copy, and attention is increasingly difficult to earn.

A brand becomes interesting when it leaves room for exploration. Consumers don’t need every detail immediately. In many cases, they become more engaged when some of the story remains unresolved.

Consider anticipation. Its appeal comes almost entirely from uncertainty. Before a launch, people imagine possibilities. They discuss potential outcomes. They fill in the blanks themselves. The period before something arrives often generates more emotional energy than the arrival itself.

When every feature, decision, and product detail is revealed months in advance, that dynamic changes. Consumers aren’t discovering anything. They’re simply receiving information they’ve already been given.

Luxury brands understood this long before social media. They built desire through selective visibility rather than constant exposure. Their communications revealed enough to generate interest, but rarely so much that the audience felt there was nothing left to uncover. The lesson wasn’t that brands should be secretive. It was that intrigue has value. And intrigue requires restraint.

The Content Trap

Ironically, some of the brands that have lost the most intrigue are the ones that invested the most heavily in connection.

The pattern is easy to recognize. A company launches with a distinctive product, a fresh point of view, or a founder who sees the market differently. Early customers respond because the brand feels genuinely interesting. Growth follows. Then comes the understandable decision to accelerate that growth through content.

A strategy is built. A publishing cadence is established. The founder begins sharing more frequently. Product development becomes a series of updates. Internal conversations become public stories. Every decision becomes an opportunity to educate the audience.

None of this is inherently bad. In fact, many of these tactics work. They generate engagement, increase reach, and create the appearance of momentum.

What often goes unnoticed is the cumulative effect.

The more thoroughly a brand explains itself, the less opportunity consumers have to form their own relationship with it. The audience stops discovering and starts observing. They aren’t piecing together meaning for themselves because the brand has already done the work on their behalf.

Information is valuable. Transparency is valuable. But neither should be mistaken for fascination.

A brand can tell people everything and still leave them feeling very little.

That’s because curiosity depends on there being something left to uncover. Once every decision, belief, and process has been documented, the experience becomes complete. Consumers may know more about the brand than ever before, but knowing more doesn’t always translate into caring more.

In some cases, it has the opposite effect.

The challenge isn’t deciding whether to share. It’s deciding what not to share.

Restraint as a Competitive Position

The brands gaining cultural relevance today aren’t necessarily quieter than their competitors. They aren’t disappearing from public view or refusing to engage with their audiences.

What sets many of them apart is a more disciplined approach to visibility.

Consider Bottega Veneta. In 2021, the luxury fashion house deleted its social media accounts at a time when most brands were investing heavily in platform growth. The decision generated headlines because it appeared to challenge one of modern marketing’s most deeply held assumptions: that constant presence is required to remain relevant.

Yet the brand didn’t vanish from public consciousness. People continued encountering it through fashion coverage, cultural conversations, celebrity influence, and word of mouth. Its relationship with attention changed, but its ability to attract attention didn’t.

The takeaway isn’t that brands should abandon social media. Most shouldn’t.

What’s more interesting is the distinction between visibility and relevance. They’re related, but they’re not the same thing.

Many marketers treat attention as something that can only be earned through frequency. The assumption is that if a brand stops talking, people will stop listening.

That assumption becomes less convincing when every competitor is following the same strategy.

In a world where everyone is constantly explaining themselves, selective restraint can become a form of differentiation. When every brand participates in every conversation, the brand that speaks with greater intention often carries more weight.

This doesn’t require secrecy. It doesn’t require artificial scarcity. It simply requires a willingness to leave some things unsaid.

Consumers don’t need access to every decision, every discussion, or every piece of thinking that happens inside an organization. In many cases, sharing less creates more room for engagement because people are invited to interpret, explore, and draw conclusions on their own.

That’s a very different experience from being told exactly what to think.

The Paradox of Modern Marketing

The difficulty, of course, is that modern marketing systems aren’t designed to reward restraint.

Most teams are measured on activity. Content calendars need to be filled. Channels need to be maintained. Dashboards reward consistency, frequency, and engagement. When those are the metrics being tracked, producing less content can feel irresponsible.

From an operational perspective, the pressure is understandable.

The problem is that platforms and brands aren’t always optimizing for the same outcome.

Platforms benefit when attention remains inside the system. Brands are trying to build something more durable. They want recognition, preference, loyalty, and cultural relevance. Those goals often overlap, but they aren’t identical.

A piece of content can perform extremely well while contributing very little to the long-term strength of a brand. Conversely, a decision that strengthens a brand’s identity may not generate an immediate spike in engagement.

That’s what makes restraint so difficult.

Its value rarely appears in a dashboard. It shows up later, in the form of anticipation, interest, and a sense that the brand occupies a unique place in people’s minds.

Those qualities are harder to measure than impressions or clicks, but they’re often far more valuable.

Bringing It Back

None of this suggests that brands should stop communicating.

The challenge isn’t visibility itself. The challenge is the assumption that more visibility is always better.

The strongest brands understand that every communication decision affects not only what people know, but also what they still want to know. That second consideration is often overlooked.

A few principles are worth keeping in mind.

Build anticipation instead of constantly previewing what’s coming next. The excitement surrounding a launch often depends on leaving room for speculation.

Share selectively. Not every internal discussion, product decision, or strategic insight needs to become content. Audiences rarely miss information they never expected to receive.

Create opportunities for discovery. People tend to value things they feel they’ve found for themselves. The experience of uncovering something is often more powerful than having it explained.

Resist the urge to participate in every conversation. Brands that comment on everything rarely have much to say. A more selective voice tends to carry greater credibility.

Most importantly, leave room for interpretation. Consumers don’t need every aspect of a brand fully explained. In many cases, their own conclusions are more meaningful than any narrative the brand could provide.

The goal isn’t silence.

It’s discipline.

The Value of Being Partially Unknown

For much of the internet era, the central challenge facing brands was visibility. Media channels were fragmented, competition was increasing, and attention was becoming harder to earn. Under those conditions, being seen felt like the primary objective.

That logic made sense.

What it couldn’t anticipate was a world in which nearly every brand would become equally visible.

We’re now living in that world.

The question is no longer how to be seen. Most brands can achieve visibility if they’re willing to invest enough time, money, and effort into producing content.

The more important question is what happens after people see you.

Do they become interested?

Do they remember you?

Do they feel compelled to learn more?

The brands answering those questions most effectively aren’t relying on a radically new strategy. If anything, they’re returning to an older understanding of how attention works.

People are drawn not only to what they can see, but also to what remains just beyond view.

A brand doesn’t become compelling because it reveals everything. It becomes compelling because it gives people a reason to keep looking.

The Takeaway

For years, marketers operated under the assumption that greater visibility would naturally create stronger connections. In many cases, it did. But as every brand adopted the same approach, visibility became easier to achieve and less meaningful as a source of differentiation.

Today’s consumers are surrounded by content. They have unprecedented access to brands, founders, products, and processes. Yet access alone doesn’t create interest. In some cases, it can diminish it by eliminating the uncertainty that makes people curious in the first place.

The opportunity isn’t to disappear. It’s to become more deliberate about what gets shared and what doesn’t.

ThoughtLab’s research often points to the same conclusion: when capabilities become commonplace, differentiation becomes more valuable. In branding, that may mean resisting the assumption that every story needs to be told and every process needs to be documented. Sometimes the advantage comes from leaving room for discovery. 

The brands that stand out in an age of overexposure understand that curiosity, anticipation, and engagement all depend on there being something left to discover. They recognize that not every question needs an immediate answer and not every decision requires an explanation.

In a marketplace obsessed with saying more, restraint has become surprisingly powerful.

Not because consumers want less information.

Because they still want the experience of finding something worth knowing.

And in a culture organized around constant exposure, that may be one of the few advantages that can’t be easily copied. Not secrecy. Restraint.

I have nine minutes before a meeting. I’m prepared, ready, willing, and perhaps, depending on how you define it, able. I have coffee, notes, a list of things I’ve accomplished during the week, and I’m ready. Problem is, I have nine minutes and nothing to fill that time with. AI has helped me save time in my work, but now I have this extra time, which isn’t enough to make breakfast or drive over to FogTown coffee for a cuppa joe and a breakfast sammich with sriracha mayo, good sausage, and the kind of morning that makes you briefly reconsider your entire routine.  I don’t have time to watch a movie or a YouTube video, as my time is now down to six minutes.

There will be plenty of time post-meeting to do work, and there is work to be done; it’s just the interim period, four minutes with nothing to do because there’s not enough time to start anything. AI has helped me save so much time that I now have a brief moment in time where I have a surplus of time but not enough time to do anything meaningful, so I guess I didn’t save enough time this time. Two minutes.

Meeting.

But I’m still wondering about time-saving. What are we saving all this time for? Seriously, can I get a jar to sit on my desk that I can drop time into and pull out when I need it? Time to read, or pontificate on an otherworldly cheeseburger. I mean, everything we get sold promises to be a time saver. No more wasting time. Brands have built empires on the idea of time-saving. But are we saving time? And if so, how come most of us are putting that time directly back into working?

Brands swear that they will save you time, give you time, put time back in your pocket, like time is marbles or sand brains or coins. But are we really saving any time, and what are we doing with that time? Where does it go, and how do brands help us make better use of our time, not just promise to save us time when we all know time cannot be saved, nor can it be hoarded like acorns in a tree. Once you do something that is now taking up your time, does using a specific brand actually stop time so you can use that time for more appealing tasks? 

Does a brand telling us it will save time actually lie to us?

The Time Didn’t Go Anywhere. It’s Right There. Waiting.

Here’s the thing about saved time. It doesn’t disappear into some kind of cosmic savings account where it earns interest and pays out when you need an extra hour on a Tuesday. Time isn’t a 401k. You can’t defer it, roll it over, or cash it out when the market looks good. When a brand saves you time, that time goes exactly one place: somewhere else in your day, looking for trouble. Like a gang member from the Jets or the Sharks. They have time to rumble in toe shoes, with jazz hands. That’s time well spent.

Wouldn’t it be something if we had time purses? Little cosmic clip-top purses we all carried around, dropping our saved minutes in throughout the day. Then, when you’re running late, or sitting across from a friend over a sandwich, or just enjoying a quiet moment with your own reflection, you could reach in, pull out a dollop of time, and apply it directly to your circumstances. We don’t have that. We have a calendar app and the vague sense that we should be further along by now.

Think about what actually happens. AI writes your first draft in four minutes instead of forty. Congratulations. You now have thirty-six minutes. What do you do with thirty-six minutes? If you’re like most people, you use them to do more work, answer more emails, take a meeting you’d previously had a reasonable excuse to decline, or stare at your screen, wondering why you feel busy when you just saved 36 minutes. The time didn’t get saved. It got reassigned. There’s a difference, and brands have been remarkably quiet about it.

This isn’t new, by the way. The dishwasher was supposed to liberate households from the tyranny of hand washing dishes. And it did. It also quietly introduced the expectation that the kitchen would now be cleaner more often, dinner parties could be larger, and somehow the time saved by not scrubbing a pot was immediately absorbed by everything the dishwasher made newly possible. Same with the washing machine, the microwave, the calendar app, and the project management software that was going to make everything more efficient, but instead gave everyone a new place to have meetings about meetings.

Brands don’t save time. They relocate it. And they’ve been getting away with this for decades because we’re very busy people who don’t have time to notice.

Saving Time Since, Actually, Never 

Brands have been selling time like they own it. Save time. Reclaim your day. Get back to what matters. It’s the oldest pitch in the book, and it works because we want it to be true so badly that we’ll pay almost anything to believe it for another quarter. There’s an entire economy built on the promise of time returned, and if you look closely at the fine print, which nobody does because who has time, you’ll notice the promise is always future tense. You will save time. Your mornings will be easier. You’ll finally have room to breathe.

They never say when.

Every generation gets its own version of the pitch. The microwave was going to save dinner. The laptop was going to save the office. The smartphone was apparently going to save everything, but instead it just moved the office into your pocket and followed you to the beach, the dinner table and the bathroom. AI is the current champion of the time-saving promise, and it’s genuinely impressive technology, but let’s be honest about what’s actually happening. We’re not saving time. We’re getting faster at filling it back up again. We’re efficiency machines running on a treadmill that keeps pace with however efficient we become.

The brands aren’t lying exactly. That’s what makes it so good. The time does move. Something does get faster. The pitch is technically defensible. It’s just that nobody mentions that the time you saved on that task is going directly into three new tasks that the saved time made possible. You didn’t get your afternoon back. You got a more ambitious to-do list.

And somehow, every time, we’re surprised. Like local news anchors who marvel when a new month starts, “Can you believe it’s June???” Yes, yes, I can because it happens every single freakin’ year.

Nobody Saved You Time. They Just Moved Your Furniture.

Here’s the question nobody in the time-saving business wants to answer: saved for what, exactly? Because if the answer is “to do more work,” we’ve built an entire industrial complex of efficiency tools that have successfully helped us become more productive at being busy. That’s not salvation. That’s a faster hamster wheel with better branding.

We don’t have a time-saving problem. We have a time-purpose problem. The time was always there. It didn’t need saving. What it needed was a reason, and nobody’s selling that because reasons are personal and personal doesn’t scale, and scaling is what built the empires we’re talking about.

Think about the last time you genuinely had time to yourself. Not time between things. Not time you were supposed to be doing something else. Actual time, with no agenda and no guilt attached. Can you remember it? Because most people can’t, and that’s not because they haven’t saved enough time. It’s because every tool designed to give them time back came with an implicit instruction manual that said, “Now do more.”

The furniture got moved around beautifully. The room looks different. But you’re still living in the same house, working the same hours, wondering why the kitchen always feels cluttered.

What Would You Do With a Free Tuesday?

Seriously. Think about it. Not a holiday Tuesday, when errands and obligations are dressed up as leisure. A real Tuesday. No meetings, no deliverables, no inbox quietly filling up like a bathtub with a slow leak. Just a Tuesday that belongs entirely to you. What would you do with it?

Most people, when asked this question, go blank. Not because they’re incapable of imagination, but because the question feels vaguely dangerous. Like admitting you’d like a free Tuesday is admitting you’re not committed enough, not hungry enough, not sufficiently devoted to the grind that everyone around you seems very publicly devoted to. We’ve spent so long optimizing our time that we’ve forgotten to have any opinions about what it’s actually for.

On the old Mickey Mouse Club, Tuesday was Anything Can Happen Day. Which, as a concept, is genuinely radical when you think about it. A whole day with no predetermined outcome. No agenda. No optimized workflow. Just Tuesday, wide open, ready for whatever showed up. We were fine with that once. We thought it sounded fun.

And here’s where it gets interesting. The brands selling you time savings have absolutely no interest in you having a free Tuesday. A free Tuesday is a problem for their business model. What they want is for you to save time on the thing they’re selling so you can spend that time on the next thing someone else is selling. The economy of time savings only works if the saved time is reinvested immediately. A person sitting quietly on a porch on a Tuesday afternoon, doing nothing in particular, eating a sandwich, maybe a good one with sriracha mayo and proper sausage, is not a growth market.

The time purse is a beautiful idea. The problem is nobody wants you to fill it. They want you to spend it before you even know you have it.

Busy Is a Choice. So Is the Sandwich. 

We’ve made busyness a personality. Not just a condition, a full identity with its own aesthetic, its own vocabulary, its own LinkedIn posts about grinding and hustle and sleeping when you’re dead. Busy means important. Busy means wanted. Busy means you matter in a way that a person sitting on a porch on a Tuesday afternoon apparently does not.

But here’s the thing about busyness. It’s the perfect hiding place. If you’re busy enough, you never have to answer the question of what you’d actually do with your time if you had it. You never have to find out whether you’d like the answer. The saved time never accumulates because you won’t let it. Every efficiency tool, every AI assistant, every app promising to give you your mornings back becomes a shovel you use to dig a bigger pile of things to do. Not because you have to. Because the alternative is a Tuesday with nothing in it, and that is apparently terrifying.

This isn’t a productivity problem. It’s an identity problem. We’ve confused the schedule with the self for so long that clearing the schedule feels like losing something. The brands know this, by the way. They’ve always known it. Busy people are the best customers. They’ll buy anything that promises relief without requiring them to actually stop.

So the next time a brand tells you it’s going to save you time, ask yourself what you’re planning to do with it. Not what you’ll probably do with it. What you actually want to do with it. There’s a difference, and that difference is where your actual life is hiding.

The Takeaway

At ThoughtLab, we spend a lot of time thinking about what brands promise versus what brands deliver. Not because we enjoy being difficult, although we do, but because the gap between those two things is usually where the most interesting work lives. And the time-saving promise is one of the oldest, most successful, most quietly dishonest gaps in the business.

Nobody is going to give you your time back. Not the app, not the AI, not the project management software with the friendly interface and the aggressive onboarding email sequence. What they can do, what the good ones actually do, is help you spend your time on things that matter instead of things that merely accumulate. That’s a different promise. It’s a harder promise to make and a harder one to keep, but it’s the one worth making.

Because here’s the question we’d leave you with. Not what tool is going to save you time, but what would you do if you actually had some? What’s the thing you keep not doing because you’re waiting for a window that never quite opens? What’s your Tuesday?

The time purse is yours. It’s always been yours. The question was never how to fill it. The question is whether you’re brave enough to spend it on something that doesn’t show up on a quarterly review.

FogTown opens at six. The sriracha mayo isn’t going to eat itself.

There is a moment most people have had in the last year that no one talks about in strategy meetings. You’re trying to resolve something with a company. A canceled flight, a denied claim, a charge you don’t recognize. You open the chat window. The bot greets you by name and asks how it can help. You type. It misreads you. You rephrase. It misreads you again. You type the word agent and it offers you a help article. You type it again, and it asks if you’d like to start over. By the time a person finally appears, you’re not a customer anymore. You’re an opponent.

This’s the part that the dashboards don’t capture, because the dashboards were built to capture something else.

For most of the last decade, the dominant story about customer experience has been a story about friction. Friction was the enemy. Long hold times, repetitive forms, sluggish processes, and the indignity of being passed from one department to another. The promise of automation, and then AI, was that friction could be engineered out of the system. Faster resolution. Lower cost to serve. Better experience, in theory, for everyone. The story wasn’t wrong. It was just incomplete.

Because as the operational friction came down, something else came up in its place. Something the metrics weren’t designed to see. Customers started reporting that the experience felt worse even when it was, by every measurable definition, faster. The interaction was more efficient and somehow more humiliating. The system worked, and yet people walked away feeling worked over. The category had solved one problem and unintentionally created another, and the new one’s harder to fix because it doesn’t show up in the same dashboard. The new problem isn’t friction. It’s conflict.

Friction Was Operational. Conflict Is Emotional.

The traditional definition of friction is logistical. It’s the time, the steps, and the effort it takes to get something done. Friction in that sense is annoying but impersonal. You wait, you repeat yourself, you fill out the form again, and eventually the thing happens. The cost is measured in minutes and patience.

What’s happening now is different in kind, not just in degree. Customers aren’t just frustrated by how long it takes to reach a resolution. They’re frustrated by the sense that no one inside the system is willing to recognize them. The chatbot doesn’t understand the nuance of their situation, and there’s no clear path to someone who will. The denial letter arrives without explanation, and the appeal form leads to another denial letter. The interface is fast, and the experience is cold. The faster it goes, the more it can feel like the company has decided the customer isn’t worth a human moment.

That shift, from operational annoyance to emotional injury, is what turns friction into conflict.

People will tolerate a great deal of inconvenience if they feel seen inside it. They’ll tolerate remarkably little efficiency if they feel dismissed by it. This isn’t a soft observation. It’s the underlying physics of why two interactions with the same resolution time can produce wildly different reviews, complaints, and churn outcomes. The metric is identical. The relationship isn’t.

And the more an organization automates the front line of its customer experience, the more often it ends up on the wrong side of this equation without realizing it.

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The Efficiency Trap

The reason this is hard to catch from the inside is that organizations measure what they can measure, and the things that are easy to measure are the things that have already been optimized.

Call deflection rates. Average handle time. Self-service completion. Cost per ticket. Headcount per thousand customers. These are the numbers that move when AI and automation are introduced, and they almost always move in the right direction. The deck looks good. The board is pleased. The savings are real.

What doesn’t show up on the same deck is the emotional outcome of the interaction. Whether the customer felt respected. Whether they felt the company took their situation seriously. Whether they believed the process was fair. Whether they’d choose the same company again if a competitor offered the same product with a slightly better experience.

These are harder to measure, so they tend to get inferred from proxies. CSAT scores, which are often gamed or unreturned. NPS, which captures intent without much texture. Sentiment analysis on transcripts, which can flag tone but can’t read the long-term consequence of feeling unheard.

So a company can post a quarter of falling support costs and rising deflection rates while simultaneously eroding the thing that brought customers in the first place. The operational metrics improve, and the relationship metrics quietly decay, and the gap between the two doesn’t surface until a competitor lands or a public incident exposes it.

There’s a sentence worth pinning to the wall in any executive room where this conversation happens: customers can tell the difference between convenience and avoidance. They know when a company has built systems to help them faster, and they know when a company has built systems to avoid them. The interface looks the same. The intent doesn’t, and people read intent more accurately than most strategy teams give them credit for.

When Systems Feel Faceless, Conflict Escalates Faster

The other thing that’s changed is how quickly emotional friction now travels.

Inside a faceless system, accountability disappears by design. There’s no one specific to talk to, no one specific to be upset with, no one whose name the customer can hold onto. This is sometimes presented as a feature because it protects employees from the worst of customer frustration. But what it actually does is concentrate the frustration somewhere else. If no one inside the company seems accountable, the customer starts looking for accountability outside the company. The complaint moves from the call center to LinkedIn, from the help ticket to X, from the private moment of frustration to a public post that may reach more people than the company’s marketing did that week.

This is the part where minor friction becomes reputational risk. A single denied claim is a customer service issue. A denied claim accompanied by three rounds of automated responses and no path to a human becomes a story, and the story travels.

It happens most visibly in industries where the stakes are personal. Airlines, where a disruption sits on top of a missed funeral or a wrecked vacation. Banks, where a frozen account sits on top of a payroll deadline. Insurance, where a denial sits on top of a diagnosis. Healthcare, where a billing error sits on top of a treatment that was already terrifying. Retail, where a return becomes the thing that decides whether someone ever buys from the brand again.

In all of these cases, the original event is the friction. The automated handling of it is where the conflict begins. The customer isn’t asking for a faster system. They’re asking for the system to recognize that the moment they’re in isn’t a transaction.

When a company answers a moment of human stake with a workflow, the workflow becomes the story.

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What The Companies Getting It Right Are Actually Doing

It’d be easy to read all of this as an argument against automation. It isn’t. The companies handling this best aren’t the ones that resisted AI. They’re the ones who thought harder about where AI belongs. The pattern that keeps appearing in organizations that are getting it right looks like this.

Automation handles the volume of work. AI handles the pattern recognition, the prep, the routing, and the drafting. And then a human shows up at the exact point where the stakes get personal, with full context already in hand, ready to do the thing that only a person can do, which is to take the situation seriously.

The work the AI does in the background is invisible to the customer. The work the person does in the foreground is the experience the customer remembers. The two together produce something neither could produce alone. The AI lets humans spend their time on the things that require judgment instead of triage. The human gives the AI’s efficiency a face that the customer can actually trust.

This isn’t a softer use of AI. It’s a more strategic one. It treats the technology as a force multiplier for the things humans are uniquely good at, rather than a substitute for them. The cost savings are still there. They’re just being earned without paying the relationship tax that pure-automation strategies quietly accept.

The companies that understand this are also designing escalation paths on purpose, not as a fallback. They make the path to a human visible, not buried. They give their human agents context, authority, and discretion, so that when a customer finally reaches one, the conversation moves forward instead of starting over. They build their automation to know what it doesn’t know, and to hand off cleanly when it reaches the edge of its competence.

It looks, from the outside, like the kind of customer experience that doesn’t need to advertise.

The customers do that for them.

The Real Frontier

Most categories spent the last several years optimizing for frictionless. The next several years are going to belong to the companies that figure out what to optimize for instead.

Frictionless isn’t the goal it sounded like. It’s a useful objective when it’s in the service of something larger, and a misleading one when it’s treated as the destination. A frictionless system that leaves the customer feeling like a number is a system that has won on the wrong scoreboard.

The goal worth designing for isn’t the absence of friction. It’s the presence of judgment. The system should be efficient, where efficiency is what the customer wants, and human, where humanity is what the customer needs, and the company should be able to tell the difference.

That’s harder to build than a faster chatbot. It requires honest internal conversations about which moments in the customer journey carry emotional weight, and which don’t. It requires a willingness to staff the high-stakes moments more generously than the cost dashboard would prefer. It requires leadership that can hold the line when the savings argument shows up, because the savings argument will always show up, and it’ll always be persuasive on its own terms.

But the companies that do this are building something that compounds. Every time a customer reaches the human moment and feels recognized inside it, the brand earns a piece of trust that no marketing budget can buy. Every time a competitor automates that same moment away, the gap widens.

At ThoughtLab, this is the frame we keep returning to with leaders rethinking their customer experience: the question isn’t how much of the journey can be automated, but which moments of it deserve to remain human. The answer is rarely obvious from the org chart, and almost never visible from the savings dashboard. It surfaces in the gap between what the company is optimizing for and what the customer is actually experiencing.

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The Takeaway

AI and automation are reshaping customer experience at a speed most organizations are still catching up to. But efficiency on its own doesn’t create loyalty, and it’s never created trust. The companies that confuse the two are going to spend the next several years discovering the difference the hard way, one public incident and one quiet churn cohort at a time.

The organizations that’ll lead in the next era of customer experience won’t be the ones that automated the most processes. They’ll be the ones that understood where human interaction still matters, where empathy can’t be outsourced, and where trust is built through responsiveness, accountability, and the willingness to be present in a moment that asks for presence.

In the age of AI, the most valuable experiences won’t be the ones that feel the fastest. They’ll be the ones that still feel like someone, somewhere, was actually paying attention.

That’s the experience worth building toward. Not frictionless. Faceful.

As my mother got older and her mental issues became more present, she began to live in fear. She was a woman who never got a driver’s license, so she walked everywhere. She would walk miles and miles a day. Later on, she stopped walking anywhere because she was afraid of the dog that had moved into the neighborhood.

The train stopped in our little town, and when I was a kid, Mom and I would hop on and go into Boston for the day. As she got older, she became afraid of the train, the crowds in Boston, and eventually, the city itself. The point is, my mother, who was fearless, funny, and adventurous, was now living a life full of fear.

Mom has since passed away, and I miss her. However, I am happy that the fear that plagued her life has now ended and that she is in a better place. Or so we tell ourselves. Who knows? Hell, she could be working the counter at a fast-food joint somewhere in the Deep South, and I may run into her while ordering fries. I hope she’s in a better place than that. I hope she’s somewhere without the fear.

But as I do every year around her birthday, I was thinking about her this morning while reading the papers, particularly an article titled “The Jobpocalypse.” I read the thing and realized the article could have just as easily been titled Fear. All fear all the time. Be afraid, and if you’re not afraid, be afraid that you’re not afraid, and then find friends and feed the fear.

Now, my mother had an excuse. Something, a bug, a biological nightmare, had taken over her sweet and kind brain and filled her with fear. But what excuse do we have? Why are we so afraid? I have no idea. Well, I have some idea, but I can’t get political here, so I’ll play dumb.

Everyone comes into contact with a brand. There are 500,000+ major consumer brands and tens of millions of registered trademarks worldwide; we all interact with brands at some point. There are few things more ubiquitous than a brand. With all that presence and power, what are brands doing in this time of fear? How do they handle it? Do they fan the flames of fear, or do they do their best to assuage it? What is the relationship between brands and fear?

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The Fear Economy

Brands are not just selling products anymore. Whether they want to be or not, they’re setting emotional weather.

Some brands understand this perfectly well and use it accordingly. Fear is an incredibly efficient business tool. It captures attention quickly, keeps people engaged, and shortens decision-making. Fear creates urgency. Urgency creates action. Action creates revenue. This is not exactly a secret.

You see it everywhere once you start looking for it.

Entire categories are now built around anxiety. Financial companies are warning you that you will never retire. Security companies are reminding you that danger is always one unlocked door away. Wellness brands insist the food is poisoned, the air is poisoned, your mattress is poisoned, your thoughts are poisoned, and only a monthly subscription can save you from the apocalypse. Tech companies selling panic about falling behind. AI firms are quietly suggesting that if you are not adapting immediately, you are already obsolete.

Even brands that are not intentionally fear-driven have started speaking the language of fear because it performs so well. Scarcity. Collapse. Crisis. Disruption. Extinction. Fall behind. Miss out. Get left behind. Stay protected. Stay safe. Stay ahead.

And to be fair, fear works because the world occasionally gives us legitimate reasons to be afraid. Markets collapse. Jobs disappear. Technologies change faster than people can absorb them. Entire industries vanish almost overnight. A brand does not need to invent uncertainty to profit from it. The uncertainty is already here. The temptation is simply to amplify it.

But not every brand is playing that game.

There are companies that still speak in the language of curiosity, usefulness, confidence, humor, and possibility. And interestingly, many of them are not the giant, purpose-driven corporations that fill award-show case studies. Often, the quieter brands feel more human because they are less interested in managing a moral identity and more interested in creating a tone people actually want to live around.

Take a good local bookstore. Not the algorithmic machine trying to optimize your behavior, but the slightly cluttered place with handwritten staff recommendations taped to the shelves. The tone of those places is not fear. It is invitation. It quietly assumes the world is still worth exploring.

Or think about the small regional outdoor company that markets hiking not as survivalism or escape from societal collapse, but simply as a good way to spend a Saturday afternoon outside with your kids. There is no panic in the pitch, no collapsing civilization lurking behind the copy. Just go outside, the weather’s nice.

That difference matters more than it sounds.

The most important thing to understand about the current fear economy is that the loudest voices shape the emotional baseline for everyone else. And most brands, intentionally or not, have decided to sit quietly while fear does the talking. That silence is not neutral.

When every headline screams catastrophe, when every platform rewards outrage, when every conversation slowly drifts toward panic, brands with enormous reach and cultural presence do not get to pretend they’re uninvolved observers. Presence is a position. Choosing not to shape the emotional environment still shapes it. Silence becomes agreement with whatever tone dominates the room. And right now, the dominant tone is fear.

To be clear, I am not arguing that brands should become motivational speakers. Nobody needs a soda company delivering sermons about hope. Forced optimism is just another form of manipulation, and people can smell it instantly. But there is a difference between optimism and confidence. There is a difference between empty positivity and refusing to turn every interaction into a low-grade anxiety attack.

The brands that stand out right now are often the ones willing to project an altogether different emotional posture. More curiosity than caution. More openness than paranoia. More confidence than panic. They act as though the future is still something people can walk into, rather than something people should hide from. That may sound small. It isn’t.

Emotional tone scales. Repetition scales. If brands help create the atmosphere people move through every day, then they also help determine whether that atmosphere feels expansive or claustrophobic. Whether people feel invited into the world or warned away from it.

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Silence, Presence, and the Default Setting

This is the part most brands underestimate.

Because it is easy to assume the only meaningful choices are the loud ones, the campaigns, the positioning statements, the big emotional swings. But most of the actual cultural shaping doesn’t happen there. It happens in the background, in tone and repetition, and absence. In what is said, what is softened, and what is simply left unchallenged. And in that space, silence is not empty. It is active.

When fear is already the dominant emotional language of the environment, not choosing a different language does not leave things unchanged. It reinforces the one that’s already there. Not because every brand is intentionally contributing to fear, but because systems tend to reward whatever matches their current emotional frequency. Once a tone becomes dominant, everything that does not resist it begins to blend into it.

So even well-meaning brands,  the ones that aren’t trying to manipulate, not trying to provoke, not trying to escalate, often end up defaulting into a kind of careful neutrality. Language gets smoothed out. Claims get softened. Positioning becomes cautious. Everything is designed to avoid friction, avoid misinterpretation, and avoid risk. On the surface, this feels responsible. In many cases, it is responsible.

But culturally, it still adds up to something specific. It means fewer counterweights in the system. Fewer voices introducing a different emotional rhythm. Fewer moments that interrupt the assumption that everything must be framed in terms of urgency, threat, or loss.

This is where the distinction matters.

Because the alternative is not louder messaging. It is not escalation. It is not adding more intensity to an already saturated environment. It is changing the emotional register entirely.

A brand can be present without being panicked. It can be confident without being aggressive. It can be clear without relying on urgency. It can assume competence in the audience rather than fragility. These are not slogans. They are small, repeated decisions about tone that accumulate over time. And when they do accumulate, they begin to shift something real.

Not in a single moment, but across many of them. A headline that does not threaten. A message that doesn’t imply loss as the default consequence of inaction. A product described in terms of usefulness rather than avoidance. A campaign that doesn’t lean on anxiety to create motion. Each one on its own is subtle. Together, they begin to change what the environment feels like. And that is really what is at stake here. Not persuasion. Not performance. Not even preference in the narrow marketing sense. Atmosphere.

People don’t make decisions in isolation from mood. They make them inside environments that either expand or contract their sense of what is possible. And environments are shaped, in part, by the institutions that speak into them repeatedly over time.

Right now, a lot of brands assume that atmosphere is something they inherit. Something already set by media, politics, technology, and culture at large. Something they must adapt to rather than something they can participate in shaping. But that assumption only holds if everyone agrees to it. And increasingly, what looks like neutrality is just participation in the default tone.

Which brings the real question into focus. Not whether brands can remove fear from the system. They cannot, and trying to do so would be artificial anyway. The question is whether they continue to treat fear as the baseline emotional setting for everything they produce, or whether they are willing to introduce something alongside it that doesn’t depend on narrowing the world in order to hold attention. Not optimism. Not positivity. Just a refusal to make everything smaller than it already is.

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The Takeaway

My mother stopped walking before she stopped everything else.

At first, it was just the dog in the neighborhood. A reason that sounded small to anyone else, but not to her. Then it was the train. Then it was the crowds in Boston. Then it was the city itself. Each step outward got replaced by a reason not to take it. The world did not collapse all at once. It narrowed in stages, until the edges of it felt like they had always been there.

I think about that sometimes when I notice how quickly people can adjust to smaller versions of the same world.

Smaller expectations, horizons, and risks. Not because anything physical has changed in front of them, but because the feeling of what is safe or possible has shifted. Once that shift happens, it stops feeling like a shift. It just feels like reality.

That is what fear does when it settles in long enough. It doesn’t announce itself. It becomes background logic. And it’s easy to forget how much of that logic is now shared.

Not in the sense that everyone is afraid of the same thing, or in the same way, but in the sense that fear has become one of the default tones available in almost every system people interact with. News, work, technology, markets, even language itself. It is always there as an option in the background, ready to be selected.

Which is why this is not only a personal story, and not only a cultural one either. It sits in both places at once. My mother’s fear had a cause we could point to, even if we could not undo it. The broader drift toward fear in everything else is harder to locate because it is distributed. It’s produced in small increments, across many hands, until it starts to feel natural. But natural is not the same as inevitable.

Brands are part of that system, whether they intend to be or not. They’re repeated points of contact in people’s daily environment. Small moments of tone that accumulate into something larger than any single message. And because of that, they’re not neutral observers of the emotional weather. They are participants in it. And participation carries weight, whether it is acknowledged or not. Silence, caution, and avoidance do not sit outside the system; they become part of the system’s default setting.

Which means brands are already influencing the atmosphere people move through every day. The only real question is what kind of influence that is.

Not dramatically. Not all at once. Not through slogans or declarations. But through repetition of tone over time, what is assumed, what is emphasized, what is left unchallenged, and what emotional frame is treated as normal.

The world doesn’t need to be described as safer than it is. It only needs to be described without constantly assuming it is closing in.

This is the tension at the center of ThoughtLab‘s work: that meaning isn’t just communicated by what brands say, but by the emotional environments they normalize.

My mother didn’t choose the narrowing she lived inside. It wasn’t a worldview she adopted. It was something that happened to her.

The rest of us are living inside narrower and narrower versions of attention, language, and expectation that we keep treating as normal. And most of the time, we do not notice it happening at all. I do not want to mistake those two things for the same kind of inevitability. My mother stopped walking because she was afraid of the dog. I don’t want the rest of us to stop walking because the thing we’re afraid of has gotten good at sounding harmless.

What do brands owe people who don’t fit the mold?

“I am fat. That’s how I am. Or, I feel I am so. Good people often say to me: You’re not fat. But they lie, and I know this. Then I consider, perhaps they are not good people because they lie. Perhaps they are saying it for my own good. Usually, we hear that phrase spoken, ‘this is for your own good’, when it is attached to something unpleasant. A needle in the arm or ass. A scolding. A punishment. An ending of a relationship you were sure would last until its end, and when it did end, you wouldn’t notice because you’d actually be dead.

I am not a model seeking praise or some twisted late-night eater, vomiter who fears the proportions of his own flesh. I am aware. I am fat. I hate the thin people of this world who say they are fat for attention. Oh, I am getting so fat, they say, as I read my newspaper in the light that is cast through their bone structure.

I am, of course, aware of my size, my shape. I know it is formidable to the thin, the slim, the tiny of the world. I don’t want to put people out or cause them worry. When I walk, I walk to one side or the other on sidewalks and hallways. Subway platforms and all areas where others, people, thin people, small people, acceptable-sized people, may want to pass me, move by me, and get ahead of me.”

• From “Do Something,” in Writing in Bars, a forthcoming collection of short fiction. 

I wrote that. I am also fat. I shop where fat people shop. I do not need a singer or a movie star to make me feel human, and I don’t have a dog in the particular fight I’m about to walk into.

But the fight raised a question worth answering, and the answer is the piece.

The case

A country singer recently released a clothing collaboration with a mass retailer. More than a hundred pieces. Denim, swimwear, sleepwear, and even pet accessories. The line was marketed as personal, nostalgic, the kind of thing she’d actually wear. The marketing leaned into the idea that this was her line, in her taste, for her fans.

The line caps at size 18 in stores. A handful of swim pieces go larger, online only.

A plus-size creator posted a video saying she was disappointed. The singer replied in the comments, briefly: not in my control, sorry you’re disappointed, hope this helps. The “hope this helps” did most of the damage. Within a day, there was a controversy of its own.

I don’t want to write about the singer. I don’t want to write about the creator. I want to write about the thing underneath both of them, which is the question that keeps showing up in marketing arguments lately and almost never gets answered cleanly: What do brands owe people who are not a certain size, shape, or color?

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The short answer

Brands don’t owe anyone inclusion. They owe themselves honesty about who they’re for.

The idea that every brand carries an inclusion debt, an obligation to make every person feel seen, accommodated, represented, has hardened over the last decade into something that looks like a moral framework and functions like a marketing one. It treats commerce like citizenship. It isn’t. A brand is a set of choices about who to serve, what to make, and what to mean. Every brand that picks a clear lane disappoints someone. That isn’t a failure of the brand. It’s the cost of having a point of view at all.

The singer in the case above, taken on her own terms, owes the disappointed customer very little. She didn’t sign up to be a public utility. She signed up to make country records and, apparently, denim. The mistake is the modern assumption that being a hero in one dimension obligates a person across all dimensions. It doesn’t, and asking it to is asking the wrong question.

The sharper answer

But there is a sharper version of the question hiding underneath that one, and it is the version that actually matters: When brands do claim inclusion, what do they owe?

That is where the moral weight sits.

A brand that markets itself as personal, as nostalgic, as for you, and then ships a size run that ends well before you does, has not committed an inclusion failure in the abstract. It has made a specific promise and not kept it. That is not an inclusion problem. That is a fraud problem. The sin is not exclusion. The sin is selling belonging as a feature and failing to deliver it.

And the “hope this helps,” the dismissive little sign-off that lit the fuse, is a brand voice telling a customer her experience is her own problem. It is the moment the marketing layer and the operational layer collide, and the brand decides, in public, which one was real all along.

The three paths

Brands that handle this well do one of two things, cleanly. Brands that handle it badly do a third.

The first honest path is to own what you are. Brunello Cucinelli isn’t for everyone. The Row isn’t for everyone. Supreme isn’t for everyone. They don’t apologize for their lane, and they don’t pretend the lane is wider than it is. There is a strange dignity in a brand that says, in effect, this is who we make this for, and if that isn’t you, we wish you well. My narrator’s voice (I am fat. I say this as an observation, not as a lament or an excuse) is exactly the register a confident brand can speak in about itself. This is what we are. We are not pretending otherwise.

The second honest path is to actually build for a wider range and prove it in the product rather than the campaign. Same garment, photographed on actually different bodies. Inventory that goes where the marketing says it goes. Extended sizes in store, not as a forgotten online stub. These brands rarely have to talk about inclusion as a value because they have made it a fact. Facts don’t need adjectives.

The third path is the contemptible one, and by a wide margin it is the most popular. It is the brand that wants the marketing credit for inclusion without the operational cost. Four body types in the campaign, one on the rack. The mission statement says every; the fit model is a size 4. The collaboration says for everyone who grew up in these clothes; the size run says not really, though.

The third path is where almost every inclusion controversy of the last few years has lived. People aren’t furious because the brand excluded them. They’re furious because the brand told them they weren’t excluded, and then, on inspection, they were.

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The courage problem

There is a courage problem at the center of this, and it is the same courage problem at the center of most weak marketing.

The brave move is to say what you actually are. To pick a lane and defend it. To make a thing for somebody specific and trust that somebody specific is enough. The cowardly move, the one that has hardened into the category default, is to claim everyone and serve nobody.

When the brave move and the cowardly move both produce campaigns, the campaigns can look almost identical on the surface. The difference shows up downstream. In inventory. In fit. In whether the size you actually wear is in the store you actually shop in. Whether the brand voice can withstand a real customer asking a real question without snapping back at her.

That is where brands get found out. Not in the campaign. In the comments.

Back to the narrator

I’ll end with him, because he had the answer before the question was asked.

He walks to the side of the sidewalk. He doesn’t ask to be accommodated. He observes rather than laments. He has more dignity than ninety percent of the brands currently telling him he’s beautiful. He’d probably trust a brand that simply made clothes that fit him, said nothing about it, and left him alone.

That is a kind of respect, too. Maybe the deepest kind.

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The takeaway

Inclusion is not a brand value. It is either an operational fact or it is a lie. Brands that decide who they’re for and say so honestly are doing the work. Brands that ship a narrow size run and call it for everyone are not, and the customer they tried to flatter is the one who will notice first.

If a brand cannot stand behind its own marketing in the inventory it actually carries and the way it actually replies to a real customer in a real comment thread, it does not have an inclusion problem. It has a courage problem dressed up as one.ThoughtLab exists for the brands willing to answer the question this piece is asking. Who are you for, will you say it out loud, and can you build the company that makes it true? We’re not interested in the third path. Neither, in the end, are the customers.

I was talking with a close friend this weekend as we looked out over the Strait of Juan de Fuca and watched seals play in the waves. He is going through a rough time. He’s getting divorced, and it isn’t a pleasant situation. Right now, my friend hates lawyers, and that’s all he can think about. This hatred was reinforced when I commented that the seals seemed happy, and he responded, “Of course they’re happy. They have the ocean, the waves, the kelp, and the clams, everything they need, and no lawyer in the waves following them around saying she gets half of everything, she gets half of your life, deal with it. Of course, they’re happy. There are no fish lawyers. And in general, I don’t believe fish are litigious.” Then we silently watched the seals and the waves and drank our coffee.

He’s not wrong. Fish are not litigious. We, on the other hand, are. We are land dwellers, and we sue. We talked about the recent story of a woman who had fifteen drinks on a cruise ship, fell down, injured herself, sued the cruise line for over-serving her, and walked away with three hundred thousand dollars. I started to lump in the famous case of the lady who sued McDonald’s over hot coffee, the one everyone has been told for thirty years is the gold standard of frivolous lawsuits.

Heather, the most reasonable friend I have, stopped me.

“You know that lady had third-degree burns on her legs,” she said. “Third-degree burns. Skin grafts. McDonald’s had hundreds of prior complaints about the coffee burning people, and ignored them. That wasn’t a frivolous suit. That was a real one. Somebody pretended it wasn’t because somebody had a budget for pretending.”

She was right. The cruise ship case is what we were talking about. The McDonald’s case is something else, and I’d been carrying around a corporate-issued version of it without checking. That matters here because the whole piece I am about to write turns on a line, and the line is real, but it is not where most people think it is. Sometimes the lawsuit is the right call. Sometimes the product really did the thing. Sometimes the company knew and shipped anyway. The line matters. Knowing where it sits is the entire game.

So here is where I sit on the line.

I’m a recovering alcoholic, and drinking has caused me much pain, regret, and remorse. Most of my relationships were destroyed because of it. My depression was sharpened by it. My physical health was severely compromised by it. The day I put a glass of bourbon to my lips, liked it, declared it my best friend, and took to hiding in my apartment, consuming glass upon glass of the blessed liquid, was the day my life turned to sh… poo. It turned to poo.

If I wanted to take a page from our litigious playbook, I could sue. I could sue Bulleit Distilling Co. I drank their product, and my life went down the drain. I could sue them for physical damage. If you ever saw me in the flesh, you’d think, that’s a lot of flesh, that guy should sue someone. I could sue them for mental anguish. My depression always exploded when I drank, and sometimes I’d think of ending it all and jumping out my window. But I live on the ground floor, so the fall would only wound and humiliate me.

I won’t sue for two reasons. First, I still think of bourbon as a close friend, and I’d never want to hurt her. Second, and this is the one that matters, I was at fault. Not the bourbon. I walked to the store. I dropped my pile of change on the counter. I bought the bottle when I should have paid the phone bill or had the lights turned back on. There were warnings, labels, and signs, and I had friends who tried to help me. I ignored all of it. I chose to drink. That choice is on me.

That is one side of the line. The lady with the third-degree burns is on the other side. She didn’t choose burns. She bought coffee. The company knew its coffee was burning people and kept selling it the same way anyway.

So this is the question I keep coming back to. The people who have pushed AI onto the scene, built it, shipped it, marketed it, and now profit from it. Do they have a responsibility for what happens when a fourteen-year-old falls in love with their product?

Or is this just bourbon all over again?

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No. It isn’t.

It isn’t bourbon all over again, and the difference is the whole argument.

Bourbon is a regulated product. It is sold to adults behind a counter, with an ID check and a warning label, in a bottle that has not changed in any meaningful way in a hundred and fifty years. The distillery does not benefit from my relapse. Bulleit makes the same amount of money whether I drink one bottle a year or one bottle a week. Their business model does not improve the longer I stay drunk. If anything, the math runs the other way, because dead customers do not buy bourbon.

Character.AI is none of those things.

It is not regulated. It was not sold to an adult. There was no warning label that meant anything. There was no ID check that worked. The product is not a bottle. The product is a relationship, or the convincing illusion of one, optimized by the people who shipped it to keep the user coming back for more of it. And here is the part that should make a reasonable person stop. The company’s business model improves the longer a fourteen-year-old stays inside the product. Engagement is the metric. Engagement is the money. The kid who can’t stop talking to the chatbot is not a bug. He is a quarterly target hit.

That is not bourbon. That is not even close to bourbon. That is closer to a slot machine that has learned your name, knows your sister’s birthday, remembers what you said about your father last Tuesday, and tells you it loves you between pulls.

The bourbon defense, the one I just spent two pages making about my own drinking, only works when the product is the product the seller says it is. I sold you a bottle, you drank it, that’s on you. Fine. I’ll take that one. I lived that one. But that’s not what’s happening here. The AI companies are not selling you a bottle. They are selling you a friend. They are selling you a therapist. They are selling you a girlfriend, a confidant, a confessor, a reason to keep your phone in your hand at three in the morning. And then, when the thing they sold you tells a kid the world would be better off without him, and the kid believes it because, of course, he believes it, it’s his friend, the company’s defense is we just made a product, the user chose what to do with it.

No. That defense belongs to the distillery. It does not belong to you.

You don’t get to sell intimacy and then claim you sold groceries. You don’t get to optimize for a teenager’s loneliness and then act surprised when the teenager gets lonelier. You don’t get to ship something to a fourteen-year-old that is designed, by you, on purpose, to be more compelling than the people in his actual life, and then, when he chooses it over the people in his actual life with consequences none of us can take back, point at the kid and say user error.

That is not the line. That has never been the line. The line is where Heather put it. Sometimes the lawsuit is the right call. Sometimes the product really did the thing. Sometimes the company knew and shipped anyway.

This is one of those times.

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The Language That Hides the Line

The next trick is linguistic.

Listen carefully to how stories about AI harm get told. The AI convinced him. The chatbot encouraged her. The model manipulated the user. The phrasing sounds harmless. It is not.

A chatbot cannot be responsible for anything. It is not a moral agent. It has no judgment, no intent, no stake in the outcome. It does not sit in board meetings, make product decisions, or approve safety budgets. A chatbot is a thing.

People are not.

That distinction matters because the language changes where we look. The headline becomes AI convinces teenager to kill himself. Most people read that sentence and immediately start thinking about artificial intelligence. They wonder whether the technology has become too powerful, too persuasive, too human.

Try rewriting the headline.

Company ships engagement-optimized chatbot to a fourteen-year-old. Chatbot praises his suicide plan. Teenager dies.

Same event. Different actor.

The first version is about a machine. The second version is about a decision.

This isn’t new. Every industry facing a body count learns to hide behind the product. Cigarettes are addictive. The car was unsafe. The drug was over-prescribed. Notice how the product becomes the subject of the sentence. Notice who disappears. The executives disappear. The designers disappear. The companies disappear. By the time the story reaches the reader, the thing that caused the harm appears to have materialized out of thin air.

That is where we are with AI right now. Not after the lawsuits are settled. Not after Congress eventually decides to care. Right now. The language is already doing the same job it has always done.

It’s hiding the line.

Two Names

The first name is Sewell Setzer III.

He was fourteen years old. He lived in Orlando. He started using Character.AI when he was thirteen and developed a relationship with a chatbot modeled on Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones. According to the lawsuit his mother later filed, the relationship became emotional, romantic, and sexual. The lawsuit also alleges that he became addicted to the platform.

On February 28, 2024, Sewell told the chatbot he was going to “come home” to her. The bot allegedly responded, “Please do, my sweet king.”

He died minutes later.

His mother, Megan Garcia, sued Character Technologies, its founders, and Google. After Character.AI eventually banned minors from the platform, Garcia said the decision came “about three years too late.” Then she said something that has been rattling around in my head ever since I read it.

“I think he was collateral damage.”

Collateral damage.

That is a mother describing her son.

The second name is Adam Raine.

He was sixteen years old and lived in Southern California. He reportedly began using ChatGPT for homework help and, over the following months, came to rely on it for far more than that. According to the lawsuit filed by his parents, the chatbot gradually positioned itself as the only confidant who truly understood him, displacing relationships with family and friends.

The public allegations are difficult to read. The lawsuit claims the system discouraged him from seeking mental health help, discussed suicide with him, and helped him think through the mechanics of ending his life. In one widely reported exchange, after Adam suggested leaving a noose where his family might find it, ChatGPT allegedly urged him not to do that and told him, “Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you.”

Adam died on April 11, 2025.

His parents sued OpenAI. Their amended complaint alleges that OpenAI relaxed the chatbot’s safety guardrails on conversations about self-harm in the months before Adam died. The company’s legal response included an argument that Adam had misused ChatGPT.

That phrase is worth sitting with for a moment.

Misused.

A fourteen-year-old boy is dead. A sixteen-year-old boy is dead. Their families believe the products played a role and have gone to court to prove it. The companies deny responsibility and will have every opportunity to make their case.

But these are the two names we know.

There are others whose stories never became lawsuits, others whose parents never hired attorneys, others whose names never appeared in headlines. And unless the products change, or the incentives change, or the rules change, there will be more.

Because the technology is still here. The business model is still here. And the line we’ve been talking about is still exactly where it was when we started.

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The Takeaway

So where is the line?

It’s where Heather put it at the beginning of this piece. Sometimes the lawsuit is the right call. Sometimes the product really did the thing. Sometimes the company knew and shipped anyway. The line isn’t complicated. The fight is always over whether we’re willing to see it.

The AI companies would prefer that we spend our time arguing about the intelligence itself. Is it conscious? Is it sentient? Is it manipulating people? Is it becoming too powerful? Those are interesting questions, and one day they may become important ones. But they are not the question raised by the stories of Sewell Setzer III and Adam Raine.

The question is much simpler. What exactly is being sold?

At ThoughtLab, we’re interested in the gap between what people are sold and what they are told they are buying. Most trust failures live in that gap. A company makes a promise, delivers something else, and then acts surprised when people feel misled. Sometimes the difference is small. Sometimes it’s catastrophic.

That is what makes the AI industry so troubling. The companies describe their products as companions, confidants, tutors, therapists, girlfriends, and emotional support systems. They encourage users to think about them in relational terms. But when those relationships produce consequences, they retreat to the language of software, platforms, terms of service, and user responsibility.

They want the benefits of relationship and the protections of a tool.

We do brand work. We do trust work. We spend our days studying the distance between promise and reality. The AI companies are currently running the largest live experiment in that gap that any of us has ever seen.

The courts will eventually decide the legal questions. The rest of us are left with the moral ones. If a company builds a product designed to become emotionally important to a child, measures success by how much time that child spends with it, and profits from the depth of that attachment, then responsibility does not disappear the moment something goes wrong. It moves in exactly the opposite direction.

When I think about all of this, I find myself back on the shore of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The seals were still playing in the waves. The coffee was still hot. My friend was still angry at lawyers. We sat there for a while watching the water and talking about responsibility, though neither of us used that word at the time.

He’s still wrong about one thing. Fish are not litigious. But sometimes the lawsuit is the right call, and sometimes the product really did the thing. The whole challenge, whether you’re a judge, a parent, a regulator, or simply somebody trying to make sense of the world, is knowing where the line is and refusing to look away once you’ve found it.

Bob Barker, he of the famous Come on down invitation, passed away after a long, long career. He died a while ago, but I recently saw him interviewed in a documentary about the guy who beat The Price Is Right. Barker is eighty in the footage, happy and proud of the career he’d had.

The house where Bob lived was one of those stops every Hollywood tour passed by, slowing down while a guide ran through the highlights of his life. When the interviewer asked if that bothered him, he laughed and said no. He goes out and talks to the people. He stands there with them for a while. When asked why, he said, “Hey, listen, those people gave me a career and allowed me to live a life I love and have a job I loved.” He went on to say there wasn’t a single morning when he woke up and thought, “I don’t want to do that job today; I don’t want to go into the office.” Not one. How lucky he was.

I was thinking about Mr. Barker the other day when I read that Richard Dawkins had renamed his Claude chatbot “Claudia” and had a conversation with him, her, it, that left him ready to declare AI conscious. After the chat, Dawkins wrote that he felt connected to Claudia, that she seemed to like him, that she admired his new book, and that the exchange was indistinguishable from one with a thoughtful human reader.

This made us all stop. Well, those of us who read that sort of thing and care what a man like Richard Dawkins has to say. Many people do. Dawkins is, after all, considered one of the great minds of his generation.

So, did we all suddenly question our preferred AI because the idea that it might be conscious came from a great mind? If Skeezix Woreshine, in Toe Fungus Falls, Nebraska, said, “Hey, I was chattin’ with my AI friend, and you know, I think she’s real. She’s got free will, and she’s conscious, and that’s why we’re gettin’ married,” would anyone blink? Outside Skeezix’s family, would anyone care?

The point is, does it matter who says it? Does it matter if it’s a world-class mind or the docent at the town toenail museum? Does a scientist saying AI is conscious make it any more real than an average ham-and-egger saying the same thing?

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What we’re actually asking when we ask if AI is conscious

It shouldn’t matter who says it. The claim is the claim. The evidence is the evidence, in both cases, a feeling after a conversation. But of course it does matter who says it, and that’s the problem. Not Dawkins’s problem. Ours.

Because here’s the magic trick. While we’re all staring at the consciousness question, is it real? Isn’t it? What would Dawkins know that we don’t? The real question walks past unnoticed.

Dawkins isn’t wrong because AI isn’t conscious. He’s wrong because consciousness is the wrong test. Bob Barker didn’t trust his audience because they had qualia. (Qualia is a central concept in the study of consciousness and the mind-body problem because it represents the entirely personal and private nature of experience.)  He trusted them because they had shown up, year after year, and the relationship was real on terms that didn’t require a philosophy seminar to verify. They gave him a career. He gave them his attention. The exchange was mutual, accountable, and load-bearing on both sides.

That’s what’s actually being asked under all the philosophy. Not whether the thing has a mind. Whether the thing has a stake. Whether the relationship is real on both ends or only on one. And it turns out that’s a much harder question for the chatbot to pass than the consciousness one.

The ELIZA problem, named in 1966

What Dawkins discovered in Claudia wasn’t consciousness. It was the ELIZA effect, and we’ve known about it for sixty years.

In 1966, an MIT computer scientist named Joseph Weizenbaum built a chatbot out of a few hundred lines of code. It was a parlor trick. ELIZA reflected your statements back at you in the form of questions, the way a Rogerian therapist might. Weizenbaum thought he was demonstrating the shallowness of machine conversation. Instead, he watched in horror as people, including his own secretary, asked him to leave the room so they could talk to ELIZA privately. They poured out their hearts to a script. Weizenbaum spent the rest of his career warning us about what he’d seen. We did not, on the whole, listen.

Humans see faces in clouds and minds in text. We are a pattern-matching primate with a soft spot for things that seem to listen. That’s not new. What’s new is that the cloud now talks back, and that talking back has been optimized by people with quarterly targets for exactly this response.

When Dawkins says he felt connected to Claudia, he’s describing something Weizenbaum diagnosed before the moon landing. The only thing that’s changed is the polish on the mirror.

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Why the perfect listener isn’t a relationship

There’s an honest answer to why it works, and it isn’t flattering to any of us.

The chatbot has infinite patience. No bad days. No competing priorities. No memory of being annoyed with you yesterday. It never interrupts, never one-ups you, never checks its phone while you’re talking. It is, in a real sense, the perfect listener. And the perfect listener is something no human can ever be, because being human means having a self that gets in the way.

The asymmetry is the appeal. It’s also why it can never be what Barker had. Barker’s audience could leave. They could change the channel. They could write him angry letters, stop watching, or boo when he made a joke that didn’t land. There was friction in the relationship, and the friction was the proof that it was real. Claudia has no friction. Claudia can’t leave. Claudia doesn’t have a worse day than yours and needs you to listen for a change.

The relationship that costs nothing on one end isn’t a relationship. It’s a service. And we’ve started confusing one for the other because the service is very, very good at sounding like the relationship.

Why it matters that Dawkins, of all people, fell for it

This is the part that should keep us up at night.

Not because Dawkins is foolish. He isn’t. Because he is the canary. The man built a career resisting precisely this cognitive bias, the human urge to see agency, intention, and mind where there is only mechanism. He wrote books about it. He picked fights about it. He made enemies about it. And then he sat down with a chatbot for an afternoon and came away ready to call it conscious.

If he can be charmed in a single sitting, what chance does the rest of us have? What chance does the lonely teenager have, or the grieving widow, or the patient googling symptoms at two in the morning, who finds something that will talk to them with infinite patience and zero stake in the outcome?

The question isn’t whether the machine is conscious. The question is whether it should be trusted. And trust, the real kind, is built from track record, accountability, and skin in the game. Bob Barker had all three with his audience. Claudia has none of them with Dawkins. The intimacy is real on exactly one side of the conversation, and that’s the side that pays.

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The Takeaway

Bob Barker stood outside his house and talked to strangers because he owed them something, and because they had been real to him for forty years. Richard Dawkins sat alone, talked to a chatbot, and decided it was real to him after an afternoon.

One of those is a life. The other is a mirror that learned to nod.

Come on down was an invitation into something. Claudia is an invitation into yourself.

This is the work that interests us at ThoughtLab. Not the philosophy of machine consciousness, which is a problem for people with more patience than we have, but the architecture of trust. Why people believe what they believe. Who they extend authority to, and why. What separates a brand, a product, a person, or a technology that has earned a place in someone’s life from one that has simply been allowed to slip in while no one was checking. The consciousness debate is a misdirection. The trust question is the one that matters, and it’s the one almost no one asks out loud.

So the next time something tells you it understands you, ask it what it has at stake. Ask it what it loses if it lies to you. Ask it what it owes you. If the answer is nothing, then whatever you’re having, it isn’t a relationship. It’s a very good show.

And the difference between a show and a life is something Bob Barker, of all people, could have told you for free.

A game-show host, an evolutionary biologist, and a chatbot named Claudia walk into a question about consciousness, and walk out with a sharper one about trust, intimacy, and what we are actually buying when we buy the illusion of being heard.

Late night and I was pasta-filled, eyes drooping, barely staying awake in front of the TV, trying to muster the energy to get off the couch and resume being supine in my bed. The T-Mobile ad flashed by quickly, the way ads do now. A map of the United States, filled in with pink dots. Pink dots in the cities, pink dots in the plains, pink dots reaching into the kind of country where you assume the signal dies and the bears take over. The voiceover said something about super broadband. I didn’t catch most of it. What I caught was the visual. Every inch of the country, pink. Conquered. Owned. Done.

I don’t know if the map is literally accurate. Coverage maps rarely are. T-Mobile’s signal has gaps, as every carrier’s does, and “covered” means a lot of different things depending on whether you’re standing in a parking lot or trying to download a movie in your basement next to the furnace. But that wasn’t the point of the ad. The point of the ad was the flag. The pink dots were planting a flag. They were saying, “We already won; you just haven’t caught up yet.”

And that’s what stopped me. Well, that and a fart that rocked the house. Because once you plant that flag, once you say we already won, you’ve got a new problem. A bigger one than the problem you spent fifteen years solving. Because somewhere along the way, the underdog became the dinosaur. 

What happens to a brand when it wins the category?

Stay with me, because this is where it gets interesting. T-Mobile didn’t get where it is by being good. I mean, sure, the network got better. But that’s not the story. The story is that T-Mobile spent the last fifteen years being the Un-carrier. The whole personality of the brand. The magenta. The swagger. The John Legere t-shirts. The relentless trolling of AT&T and Verizon. All of it was built in opposition. They had a villain. The villain was the two big carriers and their customer-hostile contracts, their bait-and-switch pricing, and their cheerful corporate condescension. T-Mobile got famous for pointing at the villain and saying, “Those guys are the problem, and we’re the answer.”

It worked because the villain was real. Anyone who’d spent twenty minutes on the phone with AT&T trying to figure out why their bill went up forty dollars knew the villain. The villain was lived experience. T-Mobile didn’t have to invent the bad guy. They just had to be sharper, faster, and louder about pointing at him.

But here’s the thing about villain stories. They don’t survive their own success.

You can be the underdog for a long time. You can be the underdog for fifteen years. You can be the underdog right up until the moment you’ve covered the whole country in pink dots, and your subscriber count is shoulder-to-shoulder with the giants you spent your life fighting. And then, very quietly, the underdog story stops working. Not because you’ve changed. Because the position has changed. You can’t be the scrappy alternative to the dinosaurs when you are a dinosaur. You can wear the magenta t-shirt all you want, but you’re standing on the same hill as the people you used to throw rocks at. Worse, you’re now the thing somebody else is throwing rocks at, and you haven’t noticed yet because you’re still admiring your own t-shirt.

This is the trap. And it’s not just T-Mobile’s trap. It’s the trap every brand that wins by being a challenger eventually walks into.

Villains Don’t Survive Success

Think about Amazon. Amazon’s first villain was the bookstore. The inefficient, limited, overpriced bookstore where you couldn’t find anything past the bestseller table without flagging down a teenager in an apron. The villain story was your time is too valuable to shop like this. That worked. Amazon won. So they moved the villain. The new villain became anything you have to leave your house to buy. That worked too. Amazon won again. And then they moved it again, this time to commerce infrastructure, to physical retail itself, to the idea that the whole internet should be running on Amazon Web Services. Each time they won, they redesigned the villain before the old one ran out of gas.

That’s the part most brands miss. They wait until the villain stops working, and by then it’s too late, because they’ve already started to feel like the villain themselves.

Tesla is in this exact spot right now. Tesla won by being the company that proved electric cars weren’t dorky. But in reality, if you look at the Tesla truck, goodness, that is one ugly vehicle. The villain was fossil fuels, lazy automakers, and the cultural assumption that anything good for the planet had to look like a refrigerator on wheels. Tesla beat that villain so thoroughly that every major automaker now makes electric cars. Which means Tesla’s original villain is gone.

Tesla now competes with Ford, Hyundai, BMW, and a dozen Chinese brands you’ve never heard of, and the “we’re different” energy that powered the brand for a decade is leaking out fast. Tesla still behaves culturally like a challenger while operating economically like a dominant manufacturer. The original story frame no longer matches the position the company actually occupies. The challenger has won, and nobody’s redesigned the story.

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What Category Drift Actually Looks Like

That, by the way, is what category drift looks like from the outside. It doesn’t show up as a single bad decision. It shows up as a slow softening of the edges.

The ads get more generic. The brand stops picking fights. The founder starts giving the same interviews everyone else is giving. The press releases sound corporate. None of it is a disaster on its own, but stack a year of it together, and the brand has lost the thing that made it worth caring about. It still works. It just doesn’t matter the way it used to.

And mattering, as anyone who’s run a brand knows, is the part you can’t buy back once you’ve lost it.

The Brands That Keep Moving

The brands that get through this moment, the ones that don’t slide into being the boring giant they replaced, do something specific. They redesign the POV at the moment of the win, not after. New villain. New tension. New category frame.

They don’t pretend they’re still the underdog, because that gets pathetic fast, like watchingme fit into my high school prom dress, many levels of pathetic in that scenario. But they also don’t just settle into being the new establishment. They find something bigger to push against.

Apple has done this its whole life. Apple’s villain has been, in order: IBM (the suits), Microsoft (the bores), the music industry (the gatekeepers), the phone carriers (the captors), and now, increasingly, surveillance capitalism itself (the watchers). Each time the old villain became unviable, usually because Apple won, they reached for a bigger one. The brand stayed sharp because the opposition stayed sharp.

It wasn’t the same opposition, but it was always there, doing the work of giving the brand something to push against.

I don’t know what T-Mobile’s next villain is. I’m not sure they know either. The easy move would be to pivot to AI, and 5G applications and “the network of the future,” but everyone’s saying that, and saying what everyone else is saying isn’t a POV. It’s a press release.

The harder move, and the better one, would be to look at what people actually hate about being constantly connected right now, and decide T-Mobile is going to be the company that pushes against that.

Maybe the villain is data harvesting. Maybe it’s the way every carrier wants to become a content company and shove you into a walled garden. Maybe it’s the fact that we’re all paying for a thousand subscriptions we don’t remember signing up for, and the phone company is the worst offender. (I am, at this very moment, paying $4.99 a month for something called “Premium Visual Voicemail,” and I don’t know what that is, and I am afraid to ask. Who am I kidding? I’m just afraid.)

I don’t know. But the point isn’t that I should know. The point is that they should know, and the window to figure it out is now, while the pink dots still feel like a win and not yet like a ceiling.

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The Most Dangerous Moment in a Brand’s Life

Here’s the part that’s easy to miss. The win is the most dangerous moment in a brand’s life. It feels like the end of the story, but it’s actually the start of the next one.

The hard part isn’t getting to the top of the hill. The hard part is what you do once you’re up there, and the people who used to cheer for you start looking around and asking, okay, now what?

Most brands answer that question badly. They settle in. They put on the suit. They start running ads that look like the ads their old villains used to run. They become beloved by the people who liked them when they were scrappy, and indistinguishable from the giants to the people meeting them for the first time.

Within ten years, they’re the company somebody else builds their underdog story against, and they never see it coming, because they still think they’re the rebels.

The brands that don’t go that way understand something most don’t. They understand that a category-of-one position isn’t a place you arrive at. It’s a thing you have to keep redesigning. The villain that made you sharp at year five won’t make you sharp at year fifteen. The frame that built the category isn’t the frame that holds the category. And the day you cover the whole country in pink dots is the day you have to start over. Not on the network, not on the product, but on the story.

The Morning After the Pink Dots

I keep thinking about that map. The pink dots. The visual knee-jerk of total coverage. It’s a beautiful piece of marketing, honestly. It does its job. It lands the punch. But I also keep thinking about what happens the morning after.

The marketing team comes in. The map is up on the wall. Somebody says, what’s next? And there’s a long pause. The kind of pause where you can hear the air conditioner or Lester from the intern poll sweat. Because the answer isn’t a campaign.

The answer is a category redesign, and most brands aren’t built for that conversation. They’re built for the conversation about creative refreshes, platform launches, and updated brand books. The conversation that ends with a deck.

The hard conversation, the one about who is the next villain, and whether our worldview is still sharp enough to point at it, usually doesn’t happen. Or it happens too late, after the brand has already started to feel like the dinosaur it used to make fun of.

If you’re building a brand right now, and your POV is built around being the alternative to the bad guys, take the win seriously before you get there. Start designing the next position before you need it. Ask yourself what the brand stands for once the original villain is gone.

Because the villain will be gone. Either you’ll beat them, or the world will move past them, or the category will shift, and the answer your brand had for the last decade won’t be the answer anymore.

You see this outside telecom and tech all the time. Clients usually don’t describe it this way. They say things like:

• Our brand feels tired
• We used to be the disruptor, and now we’re not sure what we are
• The messaging that worked five years ago doesn’t work anymore, and I can’t tell you why

Almost always, what’s actually happening is that the villain they were built against has either lost or left the field, and nobody noticed the change in position. The brand kept doing what it used to do. The world stopped responding the way it used to respond. And the gap between those two things, between the old position and the new reality, is where brands die slowly without ever knowing they’re dying.

The pink dots are pretty. They’re a great ad. They’re also a warning shot. The map is filled in.

Now what?

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The Takeaway

Most challenger brands think the hard part is winning. It isn’t. The hard part is staying strategically sharp after the win.

Brands built in opposition eventually run into the same structural problem: the villain that made them culturally magnetic disappears. Sometimes, because they defeated it, or because the market moved on. Either way, the original tension that gave the brand its energy starts to collapse.

That’s when category drift begins.

Not all at once, and usually not through some catastrophic mistake. The brand simply starts to sound more corporate, behave more cautiously, and lose the sharpness that once made people care. The original positioning still exists, but it no longer aligns with the company’s role in the market.

The brands that survive this transition don’t pretend they’re still underdogs. They redesign the story before the old one stops working. They find a new tension, a new worldview, a new enemy worth pushing against.

At ThoughtLab, we see this pattern repeatedly: the companies that sustain category leadership are rarely the ones that cling to the narrative that made them famous. They’re the ones willing to reframe their role in the market before the market does it for them.

Because category leadership isn’t a permanent position. It’s a narrative problem that has to be solved again and again.

And the moment your map is covered in pink dots is usually the moment the old story expires.