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.

Here is what I just did.

I was holding my Plaud in one hand and talking into it. On the desk beside me, my phone was open to the Plaud app, and I was watching the words appear on the screen as I said them a half-second behind my mouth, like someone with a delay translating me back to myself.

When I finished, the file moved from the device to the app to a transcription service, which I will paste into a writing tool, which I will then run through an AI to clean up. By the time these sentences arrive at you, my one small observation will have passed through four pieces of technology.

The observation, for the record, was this:

I am using four pieces of technology to capture one thought.

That was it. That was the whole thing. I could have written it on a napkin. I caught myself, mid-sentence, watching the words travel from my mouth to the phone screen, and I thought: crazy, man, just crazy. Not the deep kind of crazy. The middle-aged kind. The kind that arrives when you notice you have been doing something elaborate for a long time, and you cannot remember when it started.

A Few Years Ago, I Wrote About the Luddites

A few years ago — December of 2022, to be exact — I wrote a piece about the Luddites.

The cartoon version of the Luddites is the one most people carry around: men with hammers, smashing machines, terrified of the future, doomed to be a punchline two centuries later. Don’t be such a Luddite. The real Luddites were more interesting than that.

They weren’t anti-technology. They were skilled textile workers who liked the new machines. What they were against was the way the machines were being used to circumvent fair labor practices, to push out trained workers, and to flood the market with shoddy products that the machines made possible and the manufacturers found convenient.

They didn’t want the looms put down. They wanted the looms in the hands of people who had earned the right to run them, paid honestly, making something worth making. The Luddites, in other words, were not asking the question should we have this technology. They were asking what is this technology doing to us, and who is it serving while it does it.

In the 2022 piece, I had a cat named Ned Ludd. The cat didn’t exist; I made him up because I needed someone to argue with in the kitchen.

The line I gave him was that we don’t need to put the machines down. We need to know what they’re doing to us while we use them. I wrote that four years ago and then mostly forgot about it.

Then I picked up a Plaud.

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What Earned Its Place

Here is what I want to be honest about, because I’m writing this piece on the very stack I’m about to question, and a piece that doesn’t admit that is a piece that has already lost.

The Plaud is useful. The app is useful. The transcription is useful. The AI cleanup is useful. Each individual link in the chain solves a real problem. I can capture an idea while I’m walking. I can find it later. I can turn the captured idea into a usable draft. I am not going to throw the Plaud in a fire. I’m going to keep using it. I’m probably going to recommend it to people. That isn’t the question.

The question is whether the whole stack earned its place, or whether I assembled it because each piece arrived separately and made sense on its own, and now I am running an elaborate four-step apparatus for thoughts that used to fit on a Post-it. That is a Luddite question in the real sense of the word. Not should this exist. But what is this doing to me while I use it, and have I noticed?

When I look honestly at my Plaud-and-phone-and-laptop-and-AI workflow, here is what I find: Some thoughts genuinely needed it. A long conversation I want to remember. A meeting where I want to be present rather than taking notes. A walk where an idea arrived, and I knew I would lose it if I tried to hold it in my head until I got back to a keyboard.

For those, the stack pays for itself.

Other thoughts didn’t need any of it. I’m using four pieces of technology to capture one thought, which is a thought I could have caught with a pencil. I used the stack because it was there. The marginal cost of using it felt like zero. It’s not zero. It’s the time I spent watching the words appear on the second screen, the time I spent transferring the file, the time I spent in the AI cleanup, the small mental tax of being inside a workflow when I could have been inside an idea.

None of those costs is big. All of them are real. Add them up across a year, and they are not nothing. This is what the Luddites were trying to get us to notice. Not the machines. The drift.

The Tax Hiding in the Toolkit

I think this is the version of the Luddite question that the AI era will make harder, not easier.

In the old industrial Luddite story, the cost of the machine was visible. You could see who lost the job. You could see the shoddy product. You could see the cottage industry dying. The harm had a shape.

In our version, the cost is paid in small, invisible currency: a second of attention here, a second of friction there, a habit of reaching for a tool because the tool exists, a slow rewiring of how a thought even arrives. We’re not losing our jobs to the machines. We’re losing the part of ourselves that used to be able to think without immediately handing our thoughts to a piece of software for processing.

That is a much sneakier kind of harm. It doesn’t show up on a balance sheet. It shows up as the slightly diminished quality of your own thinking, which you cannot benchmark, because you no longer remember what your thinking was like before.

I’m not arguing against any of these tools. I am arguing for the discipline the original Luddites were trying to teach us: use the machine. But know what it’s doing to you while you use it.

And every once in a while, ask whether this particular thought needed this particular tool or whether you reached for it because reaching for it is now what you do.

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Some Thoughts Deserve a Stack

I will keep using the Plaud.

I will also, more often than I have been, put it in a drawer. Some thoughts deserve a stack. Some thoughts deserve a pencil. The mistake is using the stack for everything, because the stack is fast, and the stack is easy, and the stack is here.

The Luddites weren’t asking us to give up the loom. They were asking us to know who it was serving and at what cost. Two hundred years later, in my office, with four pieces of technology spread across my desk to capture a single sentence I could have written on a napkin, I think the question still stands.

Ned Ludd doesn’t exist, except when I need him. He’s standing in the doorway right now, looking at the Plaud, the phone, the laptop, and the AI window I have open in the corner.

He’s not telling me to throw any of it out. He’s asking me, in the same dry tone he used in 2022: Did all of that earn its place this time, or did you just reach for it because it was there?

I’m going to think about that for a minute before I answer. Then I’m going to put the Plaud in the drawer and finish this piece by hand.

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The Takeaway

The danger of modern technology is rarely the tool itself.

More often than not, it’s the unnoticed behavioral drift that comes with constant convenience.

At ThoughtLab, we know that the most powerful tools earn their place individually. The problem begins when an entire stack forms around us, piece by piece, until we are spending more energy servicing workflows than engaging directly with the thought, conversation, or problem the workflow was supposed to support.

The original Luddites understood something we are relearning in the AI era: the important question is not whether a technology works. It is whether we remain conscious of what the technology is quietly training us to become while we use it.

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.

I sit and talk into a small recorder, which I have always done when it’s late at night, and I don’t feel like putting pen to paper. Right now, it’s a Plaud. Most of what I record is fine, the kind of thing that disappears if you don’t catch it.

The other day I caught this.

A commercial came on for a video game. Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred. That’s the actual name. There was an earlier one called Vessel of Hatred. I know the obvious argument is about games and kids and violence, and I don’t really want to have that argument. It’s been litigated for forty years and exhausted everyone. What stayed with me was smaller and stranger.

The product is called Hatred.

Not “the villain in the game is hatred.” Not “the game explores themes of hatred.” The expansion is named hatred. Hatred is the brand. Hatred is what you buy. The marketing department sat in a room and decided that the word most likely to land hardest on a TV screen during a commercial break was hatred.

And they were probably right.

Because I don’t think this is a story about kids. I think it’s a story about us.

Somewhere along the way, hatred stopped being a thing we were embarrassed to sell. It became a thing that sells. Not as a warning. Not as a cautionary tale. As the headline. As the offer. The product equivalent of writing YES, HATRED, THAT ONE on the box and watching the box move.

I’m not arguing the game shouldn’t exist. I’m noticing what it tells us about the moment this title landed. That a marketing team workshopped it and won. The world is in a mess. Everyone who is paying attention agrees on that much, even when they agree on nothing else. And in that mess, the products that travel are often the products that name the mess as the feature.

I noticed it because I’m old. That’s not a flex because at my age, flexing hurts, and it’s not an apology. It’s just true that people inside a culture stop smelling the house they live in, and visitors notice the smell immediately. I’m a visitor now. I get to notice.

THE WORD ON THE BOX 

The thing about a name is that it always gives something away. It tells you what a brand thinks will get through, what kind of signal it believes people are ready to receive, and how much work it expects one word to do. A name can be gentle, clever, blunt, or trying a little too hard, but it’s never nothing.

That’s what stayed with me about hatred being used this way. Not buried inside the story, or held at a distance, or treated as dangerous, corrosive, sad, human, ugly. Put right there on the box instead, polished up and made sellable. The stranger thing is that the word doesn’t seem to need much explaining anymore. It arrives already understood.

A brand name has a job. It has to carry mood, promise, category, audience, and energy. It has to move fast because people don’t stop to study most things. They glance, they feel something, they decide whether to lean in or keep moving. So when a product leads with a word like hatred, it’s not an accident. It’s a bet on recognition. It assumes the audience will know what to do with it, and that the word will carry enough heat to pull the eye.

That’s the part that feels different. Hatred is not being smuggled in under the guise of metaphor. It’s not dressed up as conflict or darkness or revenge, some cleaner and safer version of the same appetite. It’s standing in the front window. And maybe that’s where the question begins. Not whether a brand is allowed to use the word, of course it is, but what happens when the hardest word in the room becomes one of the easiest to sell.

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THIS IS NOT REALLY ABOUT VIDEO GAMES 

The easy version of this piece would be to turn it into a complaint about video games. I don’t want to do that. For one thing, I don’t know enough about the game to make that argument honestly. For another, the broader argument has been going on forever, and most people in it already know what they think.

What caught me was the marketing instinct. The commercial confidence of it. The sense that hatred is no longer too much, too dark, too blunt, or too ugly to carry the offer. It can sit there in the title and do its job.

That feels like the more useful thing to notice. Not because this one game explains anything on its own, but because it belongs to a larger weather system. We are surrounded by products, headlines, shows, campaigns, platforms, and personalities that understand how well anger travels. They know resentment has velocity, conflict gets shared, and the darker feelings are often easier to activate than the better ones.

This is not about video games. It’s about what the culture has made available to sell. It’s about the emotional inventory sitting on the shelf now. And hatred, apparently, is in stock.

BRANDS DON’T INVENT THE APPETITE. THEY READ IT. 

Brands are not innocent in all this, but they’re rarely magicians either. They don’t create desire from a blank page. They listen for it. They study where the attention goes, which words carry voltage, which emotions make people pause long enough to care. Then they build around what they find.

A name like “Lord of Hatred” is not just a creative choice. It is a reading of the room. Someone believed the word would work because the culture had already made room for it to work.

That’s the harder truth. Hatred sells because some version of it is already moving through the bloodstream. Not always in the obvious ways. It can show up as contempt, tribal comfort, or the little private pleasure of seeing the people we dislike get what we think they deserve. The Germans have a word for it: Schadenfreude, which means exactly that, pleasure from someone else’s pain. Those wacky, wacky Germans.

That’s not a gaming problem. That’s not even just a marketing problem. That’s a human problem with a media plan.

Marketing is very good at finding the part of us that is already awake. It can put a handle on a feeling and make the vague thing visible. Once that feeling has a name, a campaign, and a little universe around it, it becomes easier to carry around — and harder to put down.

That may be the part we don’t like to admit. The market doesn’t only sell us what we need. It sells us what we’re willing to recognize in ourselves. Hatred would not make it onto the box if everyone recoiled from it. It gets there because enough people understand the signal, even if they would never describe themselves that way.

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THE MOMENT TEACHES THE MARKETER 

This is where naming gets serious. A name is not just a label you stick on something after the real work is done. It is part of the work. It tells people where to look, what to feel, and what kind of emotional contract they are entering.

That does not mean every name has to be gentle or morally spotless. Nobody wants a culture where every product sounds like herbal tea for nervous accountants. There is room for names that are sharp, dark, or unsettling. The issue is not whether a brand can use difficult language. The issue is whether anyone in the room stops long enough to ask what the language is doing.

That question matters because marketing has a way of making things feel normal. Put a word in the right typeface, repeat it enough, wrap it in music and motion, and the word starts to change temperature. After a while, it no longer arrives as a shock. It becomes part of the room.

At ThoughtLab, we spend a lot of time on the hidden work language does before anyone buys, shares, or repeats. The best branding does not just grab attention — it understands the cost of the attention it grabs. A name can do its job and still be cheap. It can be memorable for the wrong reason. Those aren’t always popular things to say in a meeting where everyone wants the sharpest hook. But they should probably be said more often.

THE LINE QUESTION 

The question is not whether a brand is allowed to sell something. Most of the time, the answer is yes. A brand can sell darkness, conflict, or danger. It can push against good taste. It can live in the uglier parts of the imagination. That has always been part of art, entertainment, and commerce. The better question is whether every sellable feeling deserves to be sold as hard as we know how to sell it.

That’s not a censorship argument. It’s not a panic button. It’s the question that seems to disappear when the room gets excited about a strong idea. A name can hit, a campaign can have teeth, and the audience can respond before anyone asks what everyone is actually nodding to.

Maybe that’s the line. Not a rule written in permanent ink. Not a committee with clipboards deciding what words are allowed. Just a moment in the room where someone asks: are we amplifying something we actually want more of?

That question won’t always kill the idea. It probably shouldn’t. Dark ideas can be honest, and uncomfortable language can earn its place. But there is a difference between exploring a hard human feeling and turning that feeling into the cleanest hook in the room.

That difference matters. Not because brands are responsible for the whole moral condition of the planet — that would be a ridiculous burden to put on a naming meeting. But brands participate. They add weight. They make certain feelings easier to repeat. They help decide what starts to feel ordinary. And once something feels ordinary, it gets much harder to notice.

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THE TAKEAWAY 

Maybe the point is not that a video game used the word hatred. The point is that the word felt commercially useful enough to lead with, and most of us barely blinked.

That is what brands should pay attention to. A name can land and still normalize something while it lands. The strongest hook in the room can also be the cheapest one. Speed through the culture is not the same as worth.

At ThoughtLab, we believe language does work before anyone notices it working. A name can invite, sharpen, or sell. It can also make something ugly feel ordinary if enough craft is wrapped around it. That does not mean brands need to become timid. It means they need to become more awake.

Every brand is answering a question, whether it means to or not: what are we putting into the world, and what are we asking people to stop finding strange?

I’m not sure where the line is. I’m suspicious of anyone who claims they do. But I think there should be people in the room willing to ask whether a sellable thing is also a thing worth selling.

I’m going back to the Plaud. Something else will arrive.

Last night, in a lot by the sea, I went to the circus. A huge red-and-white tent was set up on the lot, the ocean air filling it with a sweet combination of brine and possibility. I had a great seat, close enough to see the expressions on the performers’ faces, yet far enough away to get the whole picture. I love the circus. Where else can you see clowns, acrobats, contortionists, and jugglers in one spot and not worry about catching an STD? We don’t have vaudeville any longer, but the circus is working hard to keep that tradition alive.

I was a clown. Not a class clown, an actual performing clown. I worked under a tent. I did bits. I made people laugh and rarely made a kid cry. Because I had good teachers, I understood the purpose and meaning of being a clown. I loved it and, you know, I was good at it. So when I go to the circus, and I go whenever I see an ad for one, I’m watching with a love of the craft and a memory of what it was like.

Sitting there last night, watching the tent breathe and the audience lean forward, I felt that old recognition. Not nostalgia exactly. More like remembering a language I used to speak with my whole body. There are some forms of imagination that don’t ask permission before entering the room. They arrive painted, sweating, grinning, already in motion.

After the show, as I walked home, I bumped into a friend of mine who is an artist. A real, working, pieces in a gallery, artist. He said I seemed excited, and I congratulated him on his keen observation skills. “I am excited,” I told him, “I’ve just been to the circus.” With that, I let loose all the thrills of the acts, the fun, the excitement, the danger, and how it all brought back memories of my clown days. “And now,” he said, “What are you doing now?” I was thrown by the question. I knew he didn’t mean at that moment. I was heading home; he knew that, but his question was more all-encompassing. Not what are you doing this moment, but what are you doing with these feelings, memories, and emotions. What will you create? is what he was asking. I don’t know, was all I could say to him. He smiled, put his hand on my shoulder, and said,  “Your muse is out of focus.” And then he walked off toward his usual bar, leaving me on the street, alone, wondering what the hell he meant and if I could get a muse on DoorDash.

The thing is, I’ve never had a muse. I’ve met women who inspired me, but usually they inspired me to act like an idiot and put notes and flowers on their cars. But I never considered any woman as a muse. Mostly because the idea of a muse seems old-fashioned, out of date, and it’s hard to have a muse when said muse has a restraining order out on you. But the women in the diaphonous dress, lying about on couches, teasing me, looking at me with smoky eyes and inspiring me into writing more, better, deeper, that has never been a part of my process. I know only a few folks who’ve had muses, and they mostly turned out to be dysfunctional relationships, and no writing was done. 

So, my friend’s comment about my muse being out of focus was interesting, and it started me thinking about muses, what is a muse, why is a muse, and, as is always the case, how it connects to my work with ThoughtLab. And this brought up the question: if you’re a brand, do you have a muse?

What a brand muse actually is

I don’t think a brand muse is mystical. I don’t think she floats into a quarterly planning meeting wearing a sheer robe, taps the CMO on the forehead, and whispers the next campaign platform into existence. Though, honestly, I would attend that meeting.

A brand muse is less dramatic than that, and probably more useful. It’s the instinct underneath the work. The thing a brand keeps returning to when it has to make a choice. It’s the pressure that says, ” This sounds like us, this doesn’t, this is alive, this is just approved.”

That matters because brands make decisions all day long. Brands make choices all day long, from campaigns to product names to the weird little customer emails nobody thinks matter until they sound like they were written by a haunted compliance department.  written by someone who has clearly been trapped in a compliance basement since 2009. Every one of those choices either sharpens the brand or blurs it a little more.

When the muse is in focus, the brand knows what kind of world it belongs to. Not in a precious way. Not in a “we are a movement” way, unless the brand has earned that, and very few have. I mean, it has a kind of weather, a sense of humor, and enough nerve to know what belongs to it and what doesn’t.  The difference between a sentence that would be said and a sentence that only exists because sixteen people survived a meeting and nobody had the strength to fight anymore.

That’s the part I keep coming back to. A muse is not the work itself. She’s what helps the work know where to go.

For a clown, maybe that’s timing. For a writer, maybe it’s the little internal shiver that tells you a line is either honest or trying too hard. For a brand, it’s the creative instinct that gives everything a center. Without it, the work can still be clean. It can still be strategic. It can still be very pleased with itself in a deck.

But it won’t have a pulse.

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When the muse is in focus

You can feel it when a brand knows what it is doing.

Not everything is loud. Not everything has to juggle fire while riding a horse. Sometimes the work is quiet and exact. Sometimes it’s strange enough to make someone in the room nervous. The point is not volume. The point is focus.

Old Spice knew. At some point, somebody looked at a men’s body wash brand and decided the answer was not more steam, more abs, or another man staring into a mirror as if soap had finally solved his childhood trauma. The answer was absurdity with a straight face. A man on a horse. A voice that moved faster than logic. A whole little universe where confidence had become unhinged, but somehow still smelled good.

That is a muse in focus. You may not like the work. You may be tired of the work. But you know, immediately, that it belongs to Old Spice.

Liberty Mutual has it too, even though I still can’t fully explain why. LiMu Emu and Doug should probably not work. An emu and a man in a little insurance sitcom sounds like the result of a whiteboard session that went unattended for too long. But there they are, year after year, living inside this odd little world the brand keeps choosing on purpose. That “on purpose” matters.

A lot of brands stumble into something interesting once, then spend the next three years sanding it down so nobody gets blamed for liking it. The braver thing is to keep going. To protect the strange little door once it opens. To say, yes, this is ours, even if someone in a conference room has questions.

That’s what focus looks like. The work has a center. It can bend without becoming someone else. It can change campaigns, change formats, change the joke, and still carry the same charge.

The muse is not there to make the brand pretty. She is there to make the brand recognizable in its bones.

When the muse gets blurred

You can feel that too, though it doesn’t always announce itself as failure. The work still looks professional. That’s the dangerous part. Nothing is broken in an obvious way. The lighting is good, the voiceover is warm, and the message has been tested until everyone who needed to feel safe could feel safe before lunch. Then the thing arrives in the world with no pulse.

This is why so many car commercials feel like they were all raised in the same extremely clean suburb. There is always a road and a view, always someone driving as if changing lanes has revealed something tender and enormous about the human condition. And, they never use their directional.

Nobody sets out to make forgettable work. I don’t believe that. Somewhere early on, the idea probably had teeth. It might have let the car behave strangely, or given the driver something more interesting than a smoother commute. It might even have come close to telling the truth, which in advertising can be treated like finding a raccoon in the nursery. Then the idea entered the room, which is usually where the blur begins. Not because the people there are stupid. Most of them are smart, and many of them have good taste. But a clear instinct is hard to defend when everyone else is holding a spreadsheet. The unusual thing has to explain itself. The safe thing just has to sit there looking responsible.

So the edge comes off. The joke gets smaller. The line that made everyone nervous becomes a line that makes no one feel anything. By the time the work is finished, it has survived the process, but survival is not the same as life.

That’s the blurred muse. You can still see the outline of what might have been there, something with shape, something with nerve, something that once knew where it wanted to go. But now it’s just another car on another beautiful road, heading nowhere in particular.

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The people who blur her

The easy version of this argument is that boring work comes from boring people. I don’t buy that.

Some of the people in those rooms are talented. The boring work is not proof that everyone involved is boring. A person can have taste, nerve, and a half-finished screenplay in a drawer, then still spend Tuesday afternoon asking whether the strange idea might make legal uncomfortable. That’s not a lack of imagination. That’s fear with a calendar invite. They didn’t enter the room, hoping to sand the life out of something. They entered the room responsible for money, reputation, timelines, jobs, and the terrible little weather system known as approval.

That kind of pressure changes people. A strange idea can be thrilling when it’s still in someone’s head, but once it has to survive a meeting, thrill starts looking like risk. Risk needs a defense. Defense needs numbers. Numbers have a way of making instinct seem childish, even when instinct is the only reason the work was alive in the first place.

So people get careful. They ask for the line to be softened. They wonder if the joke will land. They say the concept is interesting, which is often where interesting concepts go to hear the bad news. Nobody thinks they’re killing anything. They’re just making the work easier to approve.

That’s how the muse gets blurred. Not by one villain with a red pen, but by good people trying not to be wrong in public.

And I get it. Being wrong in public is awful. Being the person who approved the weird thing is even worse if the weird thing fails. But there’s a cost to making everything defensible before it’s allowed to breathe. After a while, the work no longer feels created. It feels managed.

That may be the real danger. Not failure. Not even bad taste. The real danger is a room full of smart people slowly teaching each other to distrust the first living thing that walks in.

How to know she’s gone

You can usually tell when the muse has left the building because the work starts sounding perfectly reasonable.

That’s the curse of it. Dead work rarely announces itself by being terrible. Terrible would almost be a mercy. Terrible has a smell. What usually shows up is something clean, balanced, approved, and impossible to remember five minutes later. The sentences behave. The visuals behave. The whole thing behaves itself right into the grave.

This is where brand work gets tricky, because everyone can point to the parts that are technically working. The message is clear. The audience is defined. The strategy has a nice little sentence at the top of the deck, wearing the shoes it bought for a conference. On paper, nothing looks wrong. But the work could belong to anyone.

That’s the giveaway. Swap the logo, and the body doesn’t reject the transplant. The voice has no fingerprints. The idea has no strange little scar that makes it unmistakable. It may be professional, but professional is not the same as alive.

A brand with no muse can still produce a lot of work. It can fill the calendar, feed the campaign, and keep the machine warm. What it can’t do is make people feel that someone with a point of view was in the room. There’s no sense of choice. No pressure. No odd little angle that tells you a human being fought for something.

And maybe that’s what my friend meant when he said my muse was out of focus. Maybe he wasn’t accusing me of having no imagination. Maybe he was telling me the signal had gotten soft. The thing I used to recognize under the tent, the thing that arrived painted and sweating and already in motion, was still there somewhere. I just wasn’t looking at it clearly enough.

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The Takeaway

I keep thinking back to that tent by the sea.

The performers knew where the edge was. You could feel it. Not because everything was dangerous, though some of it was, but because the whole thing had a pulse. Clowning, when it’s done well, is not just falling down in large pants. It’s timing, taste, nerve, and a deep respect for the audience. You have to know what you’re serving. You have to know what kind of foolishness belongs to you.

Maybe that’s true for brands too.

A brand without a muse can still function. It can sell things, run meetings, make ads, send emails that begin with “We’re excited to announce.” The machine can keep moving for a long time without anyone asking whether the work still has a soul. But when the muse is out of focus, everything gets a little softer. The voice loses its shape. The strange parts get explained away. The work becomes easier to approve and harder to care about.

At ThoughtLab, that’s often where the real work begins. Not with making a brand louder or prettier, but helping it see what’s already trying to come through. The instinct. The nerve. The thing under the makeup.

I don’t know if I have a muse. I still think she sounds like trouble, and I have enough of that without inviting a woman in a diaphanous dress to start making notes in the margins. But I know what it feels like when something comes into focus. I felt it under the tent. I felt it walking home. I felt it when my friend put a hand on my shoulder and said the thing I didn’t want to hear.

Your muse is out of focus.

Maybe that’s not an insult. Maybe it’s an invitation to look harder.

My father had this little quirk. Whenever we kids did something wrong, he would pull us aside and say, “Let me tell you a story.” Then he’d basically say, if you do that again, I’m gonna kick your ass. Simple, clear, to the point. However, as I got older, I began to realize he wasn’t really telling us a story. A story has a hero, a journey, guides, and lessons. My father’s stories had him kicking our asses.

Did we go on a journey? Nope. Did we have guides in these stories? No. It was Dad kicking the asses of his kids. Not a story, well certainly not a good story. There were never any surprises. A mean character never had a change of heart. A main character never discovered their purpose. His stories could be boiled down to seven words: “Do it again, I’ll kick your ass.” But no matter what happened, Dad would always start with, “Let me tell you a story.”

Storytelling is really big in branding. Everything has a story, an arc, a main character, and on and on. Brands don’t say to customers, “Here’s a story, buy this product or service, or you’ll get your ass kicked.” Why? Two reasons. One, that’s not something you say to a customer. Threatening has never been a good sales technique. Two, because it’s not really a story. “Once upon a time, I got my ass kicked, so I bought a jet ski” is not a good story.

As a copywriter, I find story important. Finding a brand’s story, the story of a logo, and all sorts of storytelling go into branding and marketing. But from time to time, I have to wonder whether storytelling is really the be-all and end-all I was taught to believe. Does everything need a story, or have we started calling everything a story because it makes the work sound deeper than it is?

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Not Everything Is a Story

That’s the thing about the word story. It can make almost anything sound more important than it is. A company history becomes a story. A mission statement becomes a story. A homepage becomes a story. Suddenly, every piece of brand communication is being treated as if it needs a main character, an emotional arc, and a little music swelling beneath it.

But sometimes a thing is just a thing. A product description is there to describe the product. An About page is there to tell people who you are, what you do, and why you exist. A service page needs to explain the service before it takes anyone on a journey. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, there’s something kind of refreshing about it. 

The problem is not storytelling. The problem is calling everything storytelling because the word makes the work feel deeper. Story sounds warm, human, and meaningful, so we keep reaching for it, even when what we actually have is a message, a claim, a promise, an explanation, or a perfectly useful bit of information.

And those things matter too. A message can be powerful. A promise can mean something. An explanation can be generous. Information can be exactly what someone needs. Not every sentence has to carry the burden of myth.

A real story has movement. Something changes. Someone wants something. Something gets in the way. There’s pressure, consequence, discovery, or at least some kind of shift from where we began. Without that, you may have good copy. You may have smart positioning. You may have a clean paragraph that does its job beautifully. But you probably don’t have a story.

Why Brands Love the Word So Much

There’s a reason storytelling became such a big word in branding. It sounds warmer than strategy, deeper than messaging, and more human than content. Nobody wants to sit in a room and say, “Let’s organize some useful information in a way people can understand.” That may be the right thing to do, but it doesn’t exactly make the lights flicker. 

Story gives the work a little glow. A product can start to feel like part of something bigger. A company history can become more than a timeline. An About page can carry emotional weight rather than just listing names, dates, values, and a polished team photo. 

And honestly, some of that is good. Story helps people care. It gives a brand shape. A founder’s frustration becomes a reason for being. A customer senses there’s a human mind behind the business, not just a group of people trapped forever inside a slide deck. 

The trouble starts when the word becomes automatic. Suddenly, brand exercises have to uncover the story, copy has to tell the story, and presentations promise a narrative arc even when the real job is much simpler than that. At a certain point, story stops being a useful tool and becomes a fancy label we slap on anything that has more than two paragraphs. 

That’s when the word begins to blur. Story starts to mean message, positioning, brand platform, or whatever happens to be on the screen when someone says, “What’s the story here?” 

And maybe that’s the real problem. Not that brands care about story too much, but that we’ve made the word so large it can barely do its job anymore.

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A Real Story Needs Tension

A real story needs something to push against. It doesn’t have to be dramatic in the movie trailer sense. Nobody needs to be running through an airport, chasing a stolen briefcase, or standing in the rain realizing they’ve misunderstood love for the last twenty years. But something has to be unsettled. Someone has to want something, and it has to be difficult enough to make us care what happens next. This is also where my father’s stories fell a little short. There was tension, technically. I’ll give him that. But tension is more than when, where, and how I might get my ass kicked if I did the thing again. That was more of a warning with stage direction. It had stakes, sure, but not much discovery. There was no mystery, no turn, no deeper meaning hiding under the threat. The whole thing started with “let me tell you a story” and ended exactly where you knew it would end.

That’s where a lot of brand storytelling gets thin. The language says story, but the actual material says summary. A company was founded. A product was created. A team believed in quality. A service was built to help people. All of that may be true, and some of it may even be useful, but it doesn’t become a story just because we put it in chronological order and add a few warm adjectives.

The tension is usually hiding somewhere else. It’s in the thing the founder couldn’t stop noticing. It’s in the problem everyone else had learned to tolerate. It’s in the frustration that kept showing up until someone finally said, there has to be a better way to do this. That’s where the story begins to breathe a little. Not in the date the company opened its doors, but in the reason those doors needed to open in the first place.

This matters because people can feel the difference. They may not sit there analyzing structure or asking where the inciting incident is, because thankfully, most people have better things to do. But they can tell when something has weight. They can tell when a brand is circling something real instead of decorating a timeline. They can tell when the words are pointing to actual human pressure, not just arranging facts into a prettier shape.

That’s why tension matters. Without it, you may have a nice origin paragraph. You may have a polished About page. You may have a neat little sequence of events that moves from “we saw a need” to “we built a solution” to “now we’re passionate about helping customers.” But story needs more than movement from one sentence to the next. It needs a reason to keep listening.

Sometimes Clarity Beats Storytelling

This is where brands can get themselves into trouble. They take something that needs to be clear and try to make it feel profound. A simple point gets wrapped in a journey. A useful answer gets buried under so much atmosphere that the customer has to dig through the story just to figure out what’s being offered. Not every brand moment needs that. A product page may just need to explain the product. A service page may need to say what the service is, who it helps, and why it matters. A pricing page may need to be a pricing page, where the real hero isn’t the founder or the bold new future of the industry. It’s the price being easy to find. There’s nothing small about clarity. In fact, clarity can be one of the most generous things a brand offers. It respects the person on the other side. It says, ” We know you’re busy. We know you came here for a reason. We’re not going to make you wander through our emotional landscape before we tell you what we do.”

That doesn’t mean the writing has to be dry. It doesn’t mean the brand has to become a vending machine with a logo. Clear doesn’t have to mean flat. It can still have voice, warmth, and a point of view. It can still feel human. It just doesn’t have to pretend every sentence is part of some grand narrative arc.

Sometimes the strongest copy is not the copy that tells the biggest story. It’s the copy that knows exactly what job it has, does that job well, and gets out of the way before it starts wearing a cape.

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The Danger of Story-Shaped Fog

When brands force story where it doesn’t belong, the writing starts to get foggy. Simple ideas stretch into big emotional claims. Clear points become soft and rounded. Everything starts to sound important, but not always useful. You can feel the copy trying very hard to mean something, even when the thing underneath it might have been stronger if someone had just said it plainly.

That’s how you end up with brand language that sounds good until you ask what it actually means. “Our journey began with a simple belief.” “We’re redefining what’s possible.” “We exist to empower people to live better.” None of these are automatically bad, but they become a problem when they float above the real thing. What belief? What possibility? Better how? For whom? In what actual way?

Story-shaped fog happens when brands confuse emotional language with emotional truth. Instead of making the idea more specific, they make the language bigger. The message gets dressed up, but it doesn’t get clearer. 

And people feel that too. Maybe they don’t stop and think, this brand has confused narrative framing with strategic clarity. That would be a strange thing to think while shopping for socks or looking for a dentist. But they can feel when the words are doing too much. They can feel when a brand is asking for emotional investment it hasn’t earned yet.

A real story reveals something. Fog hides something. And if the audience has to keep pushing through all that mood just to understand what the brand actually does, the story is not helping. It’s getting in the way.

The Better Question

Maybe the better question is not always, “What’s the story?” Maybe the better question is, “What is this really?”

Because once you ask that, the work gets more honest. Maybe there really is a story. Maybe there’s a real tension, a meaningful shift, and a reason to care. But at least now the story has to prove it belongs there. 

But maybe it’s not a story. Maybe it’s just a message, a promise, or one clean sentence that tells people what they need to know. 

That doesn’t make it less valuable. It might make it more valuable. The job is not to turn everything into a story. The job is to understand what each piece of communication needs to do, then let it do that thing as clearly and honestly as possible.

The answer might be story, strategy, or plain language with a little life in it. The real skill is knowing the difference. 

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The Takeaway

Storytelling still matters. I believe that. This isn’t an argument against story, and I don’t want it to be. Stories help people understand. They help people remember. They give shape to things that might otherwise feel scattered or flat. A good brand story can carry belief, tension, purpose, personality, and a reason to care all at once.

But not everything is a story. Some things are messages, promises, or useful pieces of information standing there, doing honest work, asking not to be dragged into a hero’s journey against their will. 

That’s where brands need to be more careful. When story is real, use it. When the tension is there, shape it. When there’s a human reason behind the brand, bring it forward and let people feel it. But when clarity would serve the audience better, don’t bury it under narrative just because “storytelling” sounds more important in the meeting.

At ThoughtLab, we spend a lot of time helping brands find the difference. Sometimes there’s a story worth uncovering. Other times, the better work is sharpening the message and stripping away the fog until the idea is clear enough to use. 

Because the goal is not to call everything a story. The goal is to say the thing in the way it deserves to be said.

Addiction is no joke. No matter what form it takes, it can wreck your life. I know because I’m a recovering alcoholic who hasn’t had a drink in ten years. If you’re in recovery too, you know ten years doesn’t mean the story is over. Encouragement still matters. Understanding still matters. Every bit of reinforcement helps. Addiction is insidious. It lies to you. It makes destructive things feel necessary. And one of the hardest parts about addiction is that people often only recognize it when the damage looks obvious.

Alcohol is easy for people to understand. Drugs are easy for people to understand. But addiction doesn’t only attach itself to things that look dangerous from a distance. It can also hide inside behaviors that seem normal, productive, even healthy. Take working out. Loving exercise is one thing. Structuring your life around it because you enjoy it, feel better, and want to stay healthy is not the same as needing it so badly that missing one day makes you anxious, pushes you to ignore pain, and starts costing you relationships. That’s the shift. Something good stops being a choice and starts feeling like a command.

That difference matters because it helps explain something a lot of people still struggle to take seriously: social media addiction.

I was thinking about this while reading about the lawsuit against Meta and Google. The case centers on whether social platforms can be held accountable for designing experiences that pull people in, keep them there, and contribute to real harm. What struck me wasn’t just the legal argument. It was how familiar the logic felt. If you’ve lived with addiction, you learn something important. The object changes. The mechanism doesn’t.

Functioning is not the same as living

For a long time, I told myself I didn’t have a problem because I was still functioning. I never drank before an audition, a rehearsal, or a shoot day. I was never late. I was never hungover at work. I was never drunk on set, onstage, or on air. From the outside, I looked fine. More than fine, really. Responsible. Reliable. In control.

That’s one of the quieter lies addiction tells you. It teaches you to use competence as proof. It tells you that as long as you’re still showing up, still doing the work, still keeping your life moving, then nothing’s really wrong. It gives you such a dramatic idea of what damage looks like that anything short of collapse starts to seem acceptable.

But functioning isn’t the same as living. Never was, never will be.

What I couldn’t see then was how much of my inner life had already been handed over. Even when I was doing what I needed to do, my mind was somewhere else. A huge amount of my mental energy was going toward when I’d next be free to drink, what I’d drink, how I’d get it, whether I’d go out for it or just go home to the bottles waiting in my apartment. That was the real occupation of my mind. Everything else had to fight for what was left.

And when that much of your attention is wrapped up in the anticipation of escape, you’re not really present for your own life. You may be there physically. You may be doing the work. You may be saying the right thing at the right time and hitting every mark. But some central part of you is already gone. Your body’s in the room. Your mind’s on the clock.

That’s one of the big things people miss about addiction. They think the problem starts when life visibly falls apart. They look for missed appointments, public mess, and obvious ruin. Sometimes that comes. Sometimes it comes fast. But a lot of the time, addiction starts doing its real damage much earlier and much more quietly. It steals focus, narrows your world, and makes your life smaller before it makes it look broken.

That was true for me. Alcohol didn’t blow up my life in one dramatic burst. It slowly reorganized it. It changed what I prioritized, what I avoided, and how much of me was actually available to the people, the work, and the relationships in front of me. Even before the consequences looked dramatic, the cost was already there. I was living in a reduced state and calling it fine.

That’s why the phrase functioning alcoholic can be so misleading. It almost sounds reassuring, as if the word functioning somehow takes the edge off the word alcoholic. Like competence cancels out compulsion. It doesn’t. It just means the damage is easier to hide, excuse, and overlook. Sometimes it’s easier for you to miss too.

The truth is simple and hard. A person can be highly functional and deeply unwell. A person can be productive, punctual, talented, outwardly steady, and still be giving an addiction the best part of their attention. That doesn’t make the addiction less real. In some ways, it makes it harder to confront, because the absence of obvious collapse gives you endless reasons to postpone the truth.

That was the trap. Not disaster, but delay. Not the spectacular crash, but the quiet permission to keep going. And that’s part of why addiction can be so hard to recognize in other forms. If we’ve been taught to only notice it once life becomes visibly unmanageable, we’ll miss the earlier signs. We’ll miss the shrinking freedom, the internal dependency, the way a person’s attention and emotional life can start revolving around something long before the outside world decides it counts as a problem.

That blindness matters. It matters in private life and in culture. Because once you understand that addiction doesn’t always announce itself with chaos, you start to see how easily it can hide inside ordinary routines, accepted habits, and systems that look harmless from the outside.

People only easily recognize the addictions they understand

One of the stranger things about addiction is how quickly people believe in the ones they already understand and how slowly they recognize the ones they don’t. Most people don’t need alcohol explained to them. They get it. They know what it looks like when drinking starts running someone’s life. Same with drugs. The danger is already built into the public story. People know what they’re supposed to notice there, so they notice it faster.

But once addiction shows up in a form that looks ordinary, useful, or socially acceptable, people get weird about it. They minimize it. They joke about it. They treat it like bad discipline or a bad habit instead of asking whether something deeper is going on.

I had that reaction myself when I started reading about social media addiction. My first thought was, how could anyone be addicted to that? To me, social media has always felt hostile. Loud, negative, brain-frying, exhausting. I’ve never looked at it and thought, yes, here’s something I want more of in my life. So the idea of being addicted to it didn’t land naturally for me at first. Then I caught myself.

Because I know better than that. The fact that I don’t feel the pull of a thing doesn’t mean the pull isn’t real. There are people who can have one drink with dinner and forget the bottle exists. Good for them. Truly. That was never my relationship with alcohol. To me, bourbon was glorious. It felt like relief, escape, reward, anesthesia, and celebration all at once. Someone else could take a sip and think, how could anyone get addicted to that? I could wonder how anyone could possibly stop.

That’s the part people miss. We tend to assume our own instincts are universal. If something doesn’t hook us, we assume it shouldn’t hook anyone. If we can put it down, we assume everyone else can do the same. But addiction doesn’t care about that logic. It doesn’t ask whether the thing makes sense to outsiders. It only asks whether it’s found the right opening in the right person at the right time.

And once it does, the object almost matters less than people think. What matters is the mechanism. The craving. The ritual. The relief. The dependency. The way something starts as a pleasure or comfort and slowly becomes something you organize your life around. That’s why I don’t think the most useful question is “How could anyone get addicted to social media?” The more honest question is, why are we so surprised when they do?

These platforms are built to be returned to. They offer stimulation, distraction, validation, novelty, outrage, connection, comparison, and escape, sometimes all in the span of a few minutes. They fit into every dead space in a day. They’re always there. They’re socially normalized. In a lot of cases, they’re professionally expected. That doesn’t automatically make them addictive for everyone. But it does make them the kind of thing addiction can attach itself to very easily.

And because they don’t look like the addictions we were taught to fear, people are slower to take the harm seriously. If somebody’s drinking alone every night, people worry. If somebody’s checking their phone a hundred times a day, losing focus, sleeping badly, feeling worse, and getting twitchy the second they’re away from the feed, that still gets brushed off as modern life.

Maybe that’s part of the problem. Social media addiction doesn’t always look dramatic. It can look productive. It can look connected. It can look like staying informed, building a brand, keeping up, promoting your work, responding to messages, being reachable, and staying engaged. From the outside, it can look like participation. From the inside, it can still feel like compulsion.

And that’s where this starts to matter more than people want to admit. Because the addictions that do the most cultural damage are often the ones we’ve decided look normal.

What social media addiction actually looks like

This is where people can get a little slippery, because the second you start talking about social media addiction, somebody says, well, everyone’s on their phone. Which is true. Everyone is. That’s part of what makes this hard to talk about clearly. Heavy use and addiction aren’t automatically the same thing. Liking something isn’t the same as being trapped by it. Using it a lot isn’t the same as losing control of your relationship to it.

It’s probably important for me to say plainly here that I don’t think social media is evil, and I don’t think the answer is to strip it away from everybody or hand every detail of it over to the government. I don’t think that any more than I think alcohol is evil or that the answer to alcoholism is prohibition. My weakness was not a reason to punish everybody else. There are millions of people who can have a drink, enjoy it, and move on with their lives. There’s no reason they should lose that just because I couldn’t handle my liquor.

Same here. The fact that some people can use social media without being consumed by it matters. It should matter. Not every user is addicted. Not every platform experience is destructive. Not every bad habit needs to turn into a moral panic. But none of that changes the fact that addiction is still real when it happens, and real harm is still harm even when the thing causing it is normal, legal, and woven into daily life. The difference, at least to me, has to do with freedom.

Can you put it down without feeling pulled back almost immediately? Can you be away from it without getting itchy, anxious, or weirdly unsettled? Can you go through your day without needing that hit of distraction, validation, stimulation, outrage, connection, or whatever your particular version is? Or has it started running in the background of your mind all the time, calling to you like a jar of chocolate chip cookies, breaking your attention into little pieces, making actual presence feel harder and harder to hold onto. Making you buy inhuman amounts of milk. That’s where it starts to look familiar.

Because addiction doesn’t always announce itself with some giant dramatic moment. A lot of the time, it shows up as compulsion disguised as routine. You check your phone without thinking. Then again, a minute later. Then, while someone’s talking to you. Then, in the middle of work. Then, while watching something. Then right before bed. Then, when you wake up. Then, in the strange dead zones of the day when nothing much is happening, your own mind might otherwise have a chance to breathe.

And after a while, it’s not even about enjoyment anymore. That’s another tell. You’re not necessarily having a good time. You may not even like what you’re seeing. You may feel worse after being on it. More agitated, distracted, envious, and depleted. But you still go back. That’s the piece people tend to miss. They assume addiction always looks like pleasure. A lot of the time, it looks like repetition in spite of the fact that the thing isn’t even giving you much anymore.

That feels important here because social media can do so many things at once. It can distract you, flatter you, or numb you out. It can make you angry and briefly connected. It can make you feel left out, but also feel seen. It can make you feel invisible or give you a little spike of novelty when your day feels flat. It can give you something to do instead of sitting quietly with yourself. That’s a powerful mix.

And because it’s woven into daily life, the consequences are easier to wave away. You’re a little more distracted than you used to be. A little less able to read, rest, or focus. A little less present with people. A little more fragmented. A little more dependent on being interrupted. A little more uncomfortable with silence. None of that sounds as dramatic as somebody drinking themselves into oblivion. But quieter damage is still damage.

I think that’s why the language of control and flexibility matters so much. Can you choose, or do you just obey? Can you step away, or does stepping away make you feel off? Can you let a moment stay empty, or do you have to fill it immediately? Those questions tell you a lot.

Because once something starts colonizing every spare second, it’s not just taking your time. It’s changing your inner life,  training your attention, reshaping your tolerance for boredom, your relationship to silence, and your ability to stay with one thing long enough for depth to happen. And that has consequences far beyond the feed.

That’s why I don’t think social media addiction is some soft or exaggerated idea people invented to sound alarmed about technology. I think it’s often a real pattern of dependency that’s harder to see because it’s so normalized, so portable, and so thoroughly built into modern life.

The old picture of addiction is a person alone with a bottle. The newer picture might be of a person surrounded by everyone, yet still not fully there, because some part of their attention is always being pulled elsewhere. And that, to me, is still addiction territory.

Why social media is especially hard to see clearly

Part of what makes social media addiction so hard to talk about is that the thing itself is woven into ordinary life. Alcohol, at least, still carries a visible warning label in people’s minds. Same with drugs. There’s already a story there. People know those things can go bad. They know excess has consequences. They know addiction is part of the territory.

Social media doesn’t come with that same built-in suspicion. It comes wrapped in normal life. It’s where people talk to friends, follow the news, promote their work, share their lives, watch clips, kill time, flirt, argue, joke around, post pictures of their dogs, and keep one eye on the world while pretending they’re just checking one thing. It doesn’t present itself as a danger. It presents itself as participation. That makes a difference.

It’s harder to spot a problem when the behavior looks exactly like what everyone else is doing. If someone is drinking bourbon alone every night, most people will clock that as possible trouble. If someone is on their phone all day, bouncing from app to app, checking notifications, losing focus every ten seconds, and feeling a low-grade panic whenever they’re away from it, that can still pass for normal life now. In some circles, it practically is normal life. That’s part of what makes it slippery. It hides in plain sight.

It also gets cover from usefulness. Social media isn’t just entertainment. For a lot of people, it’s professional. It’s how they network, market themselves, stay visible, promote projects, maintain contacts, and avoid disappearing. That usefulness gives it a kind of protective camouflage. The more necessary something seems, the harder it is to question the hold it has on you.

And then there’s the fact that it’s not always making you feel bad in one obvious way. It can feel good, useful, distracting, or energizing, yet still somehow keep you there. It can be the place where you laugh, compare, get attention, or where you feel ignored. The place where you learn something, and the place where your brain turns into a room full of fire alarms. That mix makes it harder to pin down. It doesn’t behave like one thing. It behaves like a delivery system for whatever your nervous system is most likely to respond to.

And because of that, people tend to misread the problem. They think that if something is useful, it can’t also be harmful. If it’s normal, it can’t also be addictive. If everybody’s doing it, then maybe nobody should make too big a deal out of it. But that’s never been a very good standard. Plenty of destructive things become easier to ignore once enough people are doing them together.

I also think social media gets protected by the fact that its damage often looks soft at first. Not soft in reality, but soft in appearance. You’re distracted, restless, fragmented, or less able to sit still. You’re less able to read deeply, listen well, or stay with one thought long enough for it to become anything interesting. You feel pulled apart all day. Your attention gets thinner. Your moods get more reactive. Your sense of self starts leaning a little too hard on response, feedback, visibility, and affirmation. None of that looks as dramatic as someone passed out drunk on a floor. But it can still hollow out your life in its own way.

And maybe that’s the bigger problem. Social media addiction often doesn’t look like collapse. It looks like erosion. A little less focus, stillness, and tolerance for boredom. Less real presence, and less ability to be where you are while you’re there.

That kind of damage is easy to dismiss because it arrives in fragments. It doesn’t always announce itself as a catastrophe. It just keeps taking small bites out of your attention, your peace, and your ability to live unbroken.

That’s why I think so many people miss it, or at least miss it for a long time. They’re looking for the old picture of addiction. The public mess, obvious downfall, or the flaming wreckage. But some addictions don’t come at you with that kind of theater. Some just slowly train you to be somewhere else all the time. And when that happens at scale, when millions of people are living in that low-level state of tugged-apart attention and calling it normal, it stops being just a private problem. It starts becoming a cultural one.

Why the Meta and Google lawsuit matters

What makes this lawsuit matter isn’t just the verdict itself. It’s what the verdict suggests about where the culture is starting to move. For a long time, a lot of the conversation around social media harm has lived in that vague space where everybody sort of knows something is off, but nobody seems especially eager to name it too clearly. Parents worry. Teachers worry. People talk about anxiety, distraction, depression, comparison, isolation, and attention spans turning to dust. But even with all that, there’s still been a strange reluctance to say that maybe these platforms aren’t just popular. Maybe some of them are built in ways that make dependency more likely. That’s why this case feels important to me. It pushes the conversation out of the realm of private suspicion and into public accountability.

And that’s a big shift.

Because once a case like this gets taken seriously in court, once a jury is willing to look at a platform’s design and ask whether it contributed to real harm, the whole frame starts to change. The question is no longer just, do people spend too much time on these apps. The question becomes, what exactly are these systems designed to do, and what happens when they do it very, very well? That’s the part that matters.

I don’t think this lawsuit matters because it proves every argument people have ever made about social media. It doesn’t. I don’t think it means every platform is equally harmful, or that every user is trapped, or that the whole thing should be smashed apart by sunrise tomorrow. It means something more specific than that, and in some ways more useful. It means the old defense, that this is all just harmless engagement and personal choice, is starting to crack.

Because if a product is deliberately built to keep people coming back, if it rewards compulsion, if it weakens stopping cues, if it feeds dependence while pretending to offer connection, then at some point we have to stop talking about it as though it were neutral.

That doesn’t mean people have no agency. Of course they do. I had agency when I drank. I also had an addiction. Those two things can exist at the same time. Personal responsibility is real. So is design. So is vulnerability. So is exploitation. The fact that a person makes choices does not magically erase the reality that some systems are built to lean hard on human weakness.

And that, to me, is where this starts becoming more than a legal story. It becomes a cultural one.

Because if we keep treating every destructive pattern as a purely private failure of discipline, we let the systems behind those patterns off the hook. We act as though the only thing worth examining is the user. Not the architecture. Not the incentives, the design choices, the business model that benefits when people stay pulled in, overstimulated, emotionally reactive, and unable to stop.

That’s why this case matters. It asks whether the design itself belongs in the conversation. It asks whether the people building these platforms get to shrug and say, well, nobody forced anyone to log in. It asks whether a system can be profitable and normalized while still doing real damage at scale. And honestly, I think that’s overdue.

Because one of the smartest tricks harmful systems ever pull is convincing people that the harm is too diffuse to name. Too ordinary to challenge. Too wrapped up in daily life to question. This lawsuit doesn’t settle every argument. It doesn’t end the debate. But it does make one thing harder to ignore. More and more, the question is no longer whether social media can be harmful in an addictive way. The question is how long we plan to keep acting surprised by it.

The responsibility question

This is the point where people can get a little twitchy, because the second you start talking about responsibility, somebody hears control. Somebody hears censorship. Somebody hears the government kicking down the door and replacing every app with a pamphlet. That’s not what I mean, and it’s not what I’m arguing for.

Responsibility doesn’t mean treating grown adults like children. It doesn’t mean banning everything that can be misused. By that logic, we’d have to outlaw liquor stores, casinos, sugar, dating apps, and half the internet before lunch. That’s not serious thinking. And it’s not my point.

My point is simpler than that. If you build something designed to capture human attention, shape behavior, and keep people coming back, you have some responsibility for what that design does in the world. That shouldn’t be a radical statement. It should be obvious.

We already understand this in other areas of life. If a company makes a product that harms people at scale, we don’t usually shrug and say, well, nobody forced them to buy it. We look at the product. We look at the design. We look at what the company knew, what it encouraged, what it ignored, and what it profited from. Somewhere along the way, social media got treated like it should be exempt from that kind of scrutiny, as if code were somehow morally weightless just because it lives on a screen.

It isn’t.

Design choices matter. Incentives matter. Friction matters. The absence of friction matters too. What gets amplified matters. What gets rewarded matters. If outrage keeps people engaged, and engagement drives profit, then pretending those outcomes are accidental starts to look a little silly.

And I don’t think this only lands on tech companies. It lands on all of us who work in any area related to persuasion, engagement, brand building, content, growth, product, and experience design. At some point, everybody in those worlds has to ask the same uncomfortable question. Are we helping people use something, or are we helping a system use them?

That’s not always an easy line to find. I get that. Every brand wants attention. Every company wants relevance. Everybody wants to be memorable, useful, sticky, and engaging. None of those goals is automatically sinister. But there’s a line somewhere between making something compelling and making it hard to leave. There’s a line between usefulness and dependency. Between resonance and compulsion. Between building a relationship and building a trap.

That line matters.

Because once a business starts depending on dysregulation, once it starts making more money when people are more compulsive, more reactive, less present, and less able to stop, then we’re not just talking about good product design anymore. We’re talking about a system that benefits from human weakness and has every incentive to deepen it.

That should bother people.

It should especially bother people now, because we’ve spent years talking about attention as though it were an endlessly harvestable resource, as though the human mind were just one more field to strip for yield. More clicks. More time spent. More return visits. More engagement. The language sounds clean. The effects often aren’t.

And this is where I think the whole conversation gets more honest. The question isn’t whether people should have agency. Of course they should. The question is whether companies should be allowed to pretend they bear none. Whether the people designing these systems get to benefit from compulsive use while acting shocked that compulsive use happened.

I don’t buy that anymore.

If you build a system that keeps finding the cracks in people, you don’t get to wash your hands of what comes through them.

That doesn’t mean every platform is malicious. It doesn’t mean every designer is a villain. It doesn’t mean every user is helpless. It just means responsibility has to exist in more than one place. The user matters. The system matters. The incentives matter. The people profiting from the behavior matter too.

And if we can’t say that plainly by now, then we’re probably still not being honest about the problem.

The Takeaway

I know what addiction feels like from the inside. I know what it is to build your day around the thing you keep insisting you still control. I know what it is to look functional from the outside while something else is quietly taking up far too much room on the inside. I lived that way for years.

And because I did, I want to be careful here.

I don’t blame anyone else for my alcoholism. I don’t blame bartenders. I don’t blame bars. I don’t blame restaurants. I don’t blame bourbon for existing. My addiction was mine. My recovery is mine too. There are millions of people who drink, enjoy it, and go on living their lives without it taking them over. They shouldn’t be punished because I couldn’t handle my liquor.

That’s how I feel about social media, too.

I don’t think it’s evil. I don’t think every platform is predatory in the same way. I don’t think the answer is panic, prohibition, or trying to regulate every inch of public life until it goes flat and joyless. That’s not what I mean.

What I do mean is simpler than that. We should be honest about what addiction is, how it works, and how easily it can hide inside things that look normal. We should be honest that something can be useful and still harmful. Popular and still damaging. Legal and still be built in ways that lean hard on people’s weak spots.

That’s why this feels like more than a story about social media to me. It feels like a wider question about the kinds of systems we build and what we ask people’s minds to absorb every day.

And to me, that’s where ThoughtLab comes in.

Because this isn’t just about platforms and lawsuits. It’s about design, experience, incentives, and about what happens when engagement becomes the highest good, and nobody wants to ask what that engagement is costing the people giving it. If you work in strategy, brand, digital experience, content, or product, that question belongs to you, too. Not in some abstract, hand-wavy way. In a real one.

What are we building people toward, rewarding, and what are we normalizing? And at what point does something built to attract attention start asking for too much of a person’s life in return?

I’ve been sober for ten years. I’m grateful for that. I’m proud of it. I also know addiction doesn’t always show up the way people expect it to. The object changes. The mechanism doesn’t. The more honest we are about that, the better chance we have of building a world that asks a little less from people’s weakest places.

I recall saving up money from my job as a bagger at a grocery store, getting on the bus with some friends, heading to Beverly, Massachusetts, and walking to the Cabot Street Theater to see Le Grand David and His Own Spectacular Magic Company. The longest-running live stage magic show in one theater in history. It was spectacular. All your classic magic tricks: sawing a woman in half, the metamorphosis, one man is put in a bag, the bag is sealed with chains and locks, and he’s dropped into a chest. The chest is then chained and padlocked, and another man stands on top of the chest, pulls a curtain up around himself, drops it in two seconds, and the guy in the chest is now on top of the chest, and the guy in the bag in the chest is the guy who was on top. And it happened in the blink of an eye.

I have a friend who is a magician, and I used to go see this show with him. He knew how to do the illusions, but he still studied every moment like he was finding the secret to life. I loved the show: classic Auguste clowns, beautiful women, live music, and just the most mind-blowing illusions. My friend would say, “I know how to do that one,” but he’d never tell me, and I was so happy. One of my favorite moments in the show was when an older magician would come right to the lip of the stage wearing a cape. He’d take the cape off, spin it in the air, and pass it over the ground, and as he pulled it away, there was a bunny. It was the moment of pure magic to me. All the other illusions had boxes, ropes, and stuff. This was a man, a cape, and a bunny. I loved it.

Now, I could have asked my friend how it was done, and with enough hounding, he would have told me. I could probably look it up online. I mean, magicians have to learn how to do this stuff, so there must be information on it, right? I never did. The other stuff I could figure out if I thought about it enough, but the bunny and the cape, no idea, and I liked it that way. My friend said to me once, “Be careful. You can learn how all the tricks are done, but that will ruin the magic.” And he was right. For me, and for most of us, we may wonder, “How did he do that?” but we don’t really want to know. There’s an understanding between performer and audience. We each know there is a practical answer to how the woman levitates, but we let the moment go undiscovered so we can feel the magic. We want to believe for a few hours that the laws of physics can be broken, that a woman can fly, that a man can cut a woman in half and she’ll live. Or, even simpler, that a man with a cape can make bunnies appear out of thin air.

I’m thinking about this today because I fear there is a lack of magic in our lives. Maybe it’s not magic. Maybe it’s wonder. There is a lack of something that allows for magic and wonder to be part of our lives. This became crushingly clear when I read a BBC article saying that Banksy’s identity has been discovered. Following that, there were stories asking whether the person they identified is really Banksy, with more speculation and on and on. Instead of just appreciating his work, his cleverness, and the mystery around him, people had to know. They had to know who this guy is and how he does his work. They all wanted to know how the bunny appeared. And my question is, why?

Why do we need to know his identity? Why do we need to know how the bunny appears? To know is to, well, know, I guess, but in some situations, to know is also the end of it. Once you know the trick, why bother seeing the show? Once you know who Banksy is, he’s just a guy. The mystique of the guy who painted the revolutionary throwing a sandwich is just another graffiti artist. Part of what makes Banksy Banksy is the mystery. One day, a wall is just a wall, but overnight it’s transformed by the artist’s skill and vision into a political statement, a rallying point, a social commentary that’s speaking to a huge swath of the population. Knowing who he is actually diminishes the message, because now it’s about the man, not the art. So I ask again, why?

This movement away from mystery and toward we need to know how it’s done has fed a weird style of advertising. You know the one where a stern and knowledgeable voice says, “Big hardware doesn’t want you to know about this,” and then there’s an ad for a hose or a water cooler. They’re claiming to expose the secret, a secret, some secret that some nameless, faceless group is hiding from the public, and now, late at night on basic cable, the answers are being given. And we need those answers, right? But do we?

What Explanation Takes With It

We tend to assume explanation makes things better. More context, more access, more information. We talk about all of that like it’s automatically a gain, as if knowing how something works always deepens our experience of it. But that isn’t always true. Sometimes explanation enters the room, and something else leaves.

What leaves is often the part that made us care in the first place. Tension leaves. Anticipation leaves. That strange little gap between what we’ve seen and what we can account for leaves too, and that gap matters more than we admit. It’s often where wonder lives. Once everything gets reduced to process, identity, method, and mechanics, the experience changes. We may know more, but we feel less. We’re no longer inside the moment. We’re outside it, studying how it was built.

That’s true of magic, obviously, but it’s true of much more than magic. It happens in art. It happens in performance. It happens in culture. There are some things that want to be experienced before they’re dissected, and sometimes the dissection is the thing that drains them. You get the answer, sure, but the feeling that sent you searching in the first place starts to thin out.

Maybe that’s the trade we keep making without fully noticing it. We satisfy curiosity, but we flatten the experience. We get access, but lose awe. We get the mechanism, but lose the moment. And once that happens, it’s hard to recover what was alive in it before.

That’s the part I keep coming back to. Knowing is not always the same as seeing, and explanation is not always the same as understanding.

Clarity Is Not the Same as Exposure

None of this is an argument for vagueness, and it’s not an argument for hiding things that matter. People deserve honesty. They deserve clarity. If something affects trust, safety, money, or truth, then yes, say it plainly. Be clear. Be direct. Don’t hide behind mystique and call it depth.

But that’s not really what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about the strange modern belief that everything becomes better once it’s fully explained, fully exposed, fully dragged into the light. That belief sounds smart, maybe even virtuous, but it misses something basic about how people actually experience the world. Not every meaningful thing arrives as information. Some things arrive as feeling first. Some things work because they leave room. Room to wonder, room to interpret, room to lean in.

That’s the difference. Clarity helps us understand what something is. Overexposure can strip away how it feels. One creates orientation. The other can collapse tension. And tension, in the right places, isn’t a flaw. It’s part of the experience. It’s what keeps us engaged. It’s what gives certain things their charge.

You can see this all over the place now. The endless behind-the-scenes footage. The constant decoding. The insistence that every artist, every idea, every piece of work needs to come with a full explanation attached to it, as if the audience can’t be trusted to meet it halfway. As if the work itself isn’t enough. As if interpretation is somehow inferior to disclosure.

Maybe that’s what feels off. We’ve started treating total exposure as a kind of virtue, even in places where it leaves the experience thinner than it was before.

We’ve Turned Revelation Into a Reflex

Somewhere along the way, revelation stopped being an occasional pleasure and became a reflex. We don’t just encounter things now. We decode them. We explain them, expose them, reduce them, package them, and pass them around as if the highest form of engagement is to strip away whatever made the thing shimmer in the first place.

You can see it in the way people talk about artists, ideas, and even experiences now. Everything comes with a demand for the backstory, the process, the identity, the hidden meaning, the trick behind the trick. The work is no longer enough. It has to be opened up and accounted for. It has to be made legible from every angle, even if that legibility drains some of the life out of it.

That instinct has shaped advertising, too. So much of it now is built around the promise of revelation. The secret they don’t want you to know. The thing hiding in plain sight. The truth finally exposed. It’s all framed as access, as if access itself were the prize. But access is not the same thing as depth, and exposure is not the same thing as meaning. Sometimes it’s just more information wrapped in urgency.

What gets lost in all of this is the audience’s role in the experience. If everything is explained, there’s nothing left to feel your way toward. Nothing left to interpret. Nothing left to discover in your own time. The whole thing arrives already flattened, already solved, already dead on the table.

The Takeaway

Maybe that’s what I’m really arguing for here. Not secrecy. Not confusion. Just a little restraint. A little respect for the fact that not everything meaningful needs to be pulled apart the moment it appears.

We’ve gotten very used to the idea that more explanation is always better. More access, more context, more exposure, more reveal. But there are parts of life that don’t improve under that kind of light. They shrink. They lose air. They stop moving. What once felt alive starts to feel handled.

Maybe that’s because some things need space to work on us. A magic trick. A piece of art. A public mystery. Even a person. Not everything has to arrive with an answer attached to it. Not everything gets deeper once the mechanism is exposed. Sometimes the experience is the meaning. Sometimes the wonder is the point.

I still think about that bunny. Not because I solved it, and not because I ever wanted to. I think about it because for a moment it let me feel something clean and impossible, and I was smart enough, or lucky enough, to leave it alone.

Maybe we’d all be better off if we left a few more things alone. Not out of ignorance, but out of respect for what mystery makes possible.