Barbarian.

We throw around phrases in the world today, like Popular Culture, without ever thinking of what that alleged culture is and who it's popular with.

In fact, we have, as an industry, I think, embraced a tautology, i.e. some circular reasoning: "If it's popular, it must be good."

I'm writing today because I think that that thinking is the ruination of a lot of things. Maybe our industry. Maybe originality and creativity. And further, it estranges a lot of people from brands, "culture," social media, and almost everything else.

To my glaucy ancient blues, the embrace--mania is a better word--to grab ahold of the "hot," the latest or the shiny-object du jour is a sickening appurtenance of the modern world. We, as a society, are like serial drug addicts experimenting with the latest death concoction always seeking a higher high, and when reaching that high, rejecting it for an even more soaring loft into destroying unreality.

Since 2023 began, we have 5G'd, Metaversed and NFT’d and Crypto'd. We have ChatGPT'd and Elon'd and Ukrained and Apple Goggled and, of course, Trumped and Trumped, and now we're deep into Barbie Barbarianism and everything is pink and pointless and along the way our minds and social feeds are clogged with "learnings," and lectures and lies about all that we're supposed to be gleaning from this, the one-true truth and phenomenon.

As a culture we are looking for the eternal amid the momentary. 

Hey! 

Let's start a "Supreme Being-of-the-Month Club." Let's find permanence from a cosmic Etch-a-Sketch. Let's find our personal code amid a trillion inane and unfounded tweets a day. And change it all tomorrow.

Right now, Barbie is everywhere. Afflicting our consciousness like a violent epidemic of explosive diarrhea. It's every ad, every post, every tweet, every "How Barbie will change marketing for ever." And "How Barbie will change changing the change in marketing forever." 

It goes on and on. Like a hurricane storm-front. 

Nuance is slaughtered. 

Independent thought is slaughtered.

In fact, with all the ubiquity, thinking itself is slaughtered. Everyone seems to pile on with the same thinking everyone else is thinking. 

What started as unique and interesting is vomitous. And our entire industry chooses to do the same as everyone else and proclaim it different. It's way easier than doing something different. It's way easier to plow over individuality and say, "if I do what they do, I'll be like they are, and I'll be unique just like everyone else is."

In other words, when 97.7-percent of everything you see and do is walking and working in some Orwellian New Speak Lockstep, or lock-jaw, maybe the road not taken is the road you should take. Maybe questioning, not blind band-wagon-leaping-upon, is the right move.

It seems to me as a society and an industry, we are chasing after bubbles. The stupidly popular ones.

Never realizing how quickly they burst.

And how little of substance they leave behind.