Practicing Wisdom — Issue #12
1. What I Learned This Week
Theme: In a world where meaning is contested, narrative trumps data and resonance trumps truth.
There’s a line Benn Stancil drops — “In data we trusted; now, God is in the vibes”— that captures something deeper than a trend. It names a civilizational pivot. The post-empirical turn isn’t just about decision-making style. It’s about legitimacy — how we decide what is real, true, or worthy.
The institutions that used to arbitrate truth — data, expertise, procedural rigor — are losing their narrative monopoly. AI doesn’t need to “prove” itself; it just needs to feel right. Executives don’t need detailed dashboards; they want “what customers are vibing with”. OpenAI doesn’t optimize for AGI milestones anymore — it optimizes for engagement dashboards.
This vibe-first orientation is not just present in tech or media — it's foundational to a broader cultural transformation. Cate Hall’s “burnout as broken sacred pact” reflects a similar post-rational shift, where our emotional systems — the “elephant” — revolt against deferred rewards and rational overreach. What counts isn’t the goal, but the feeling. The body refuses to be gaslit by productivity logic.
Even in geopolitics and streaming wars, Scott Galloway observes the primacy of narrative power over policy or price: a Netflix-Warner merger isn’t just a business deal, it’s a consolidation of narrative monopolies. Affordability itself becomes less about economic indices and more about perceived betrayal, the sense that institutions no longer serve the people they claim to represent.
This week made me feel like we are living through a power transition — not just from one institution to another, but from one epistemology to another. In the age of AI and aesthetics, power increasingly accrues not to those who are right, but to those who can shape what feels right.
Sources Referenced
AI and the Human Condition — Stratechery (link)
Burnout is Breaking a Sacred Pact — Cate Hall (link)
Pure Heroin — Benn Stancil (link)
The Vibes and the Noise — Benn Stancil (link)
The Streaming Wars — Scott Galloway, No Mercy / No Malice (link)
2. Key Distillations
“You don’t need to be right if you can be resonant.” - In a post-truth world, truth is what gets traction. Influence is downstream of narrative control.
“Burnout happens when the body stops believing the brain’s lies.” - Cate Hall reframes burnout as the elephant going on strike — a mutiny against broken promises and rational overreach.
“Capital may build the future, but vibes determine who gets to live in it.” - As Thompson puts it, “humans still want humans” — and in that gap between AI abundance and emotional scarcity lies a new battleground.
3. One Contrarian Viewpoint
Data-driven thinking was never about truth. It was about legitimacy.
We like to think the rise of data was about discovering objective reality. But maybe it was just the fashionable logic of an era that needed institutional justification for power. As taste and narrative return to dominance — whether in AI product design, cultural influence, or even political leadership — we may simply be reverting to an older regime of soft power: charisma, aesthetic coherence, intuition. It’s not irrational — it’s pre-rational.
4. One Investable Idea
Build tools for the vibe-native class.
The new decision-makers don’t want dashboards — they want interpretations. They don’t need data pipelines; they need narrative scaffolding. The next $10B enterprise tool won’t be a BI platform — it’ll be a cultural intelligence layer. A qualitative AI, tuned not to facts, but to feelings. Think: Canva meets GPT meets Gallup Poll — a sentiment-centric OS for leaders making decisions in ambiguity.
5. From the Archives: A Recall Highlight
“Markets don’t reward truth — they reward coherence, velocity, and vibe.” - Issue #3
It’s a reminder that in today’s world, it’s not the accuracy of an idea that gives it power, but how fast it spreads, how tightly it holds together, and how well it resonates. We mistake virality for validity — and that mistake shapes everything from product design to politics.
