Start with the farce
What if’s are way more interesting than trends. Trends project forward incrementally – relative change from the status quo. There’s a better way to uncover something truly interesting. Start with a wholly unplausible vision of the future, then work back.
Said another way, instead of starting from a known quantity that everyone else acknowledges as likely to come to pass and taking an slight step further, why not zag? Start with the absolute farce, and then work backwards until you get to something close enough to realistic. Then you know you’re on to something.
So here are ten totally unserious starting points for your next brief.
Quiet Luxury merges with zero-waste living to create The Quiet Mainstream. Detoxing goes too far, blanding takes root as a response to overwhelming burnout. Beige replaces color and form throughout fashion. Mild, mid-temp replaces flavor. “Is it Cake” becomes a rhetorical question. Muzak and white noise rise to the top of the Global Top Streamed charts on Spotify.
The professionalization of casual sports saves Live TV. Live TV is in decline, and the average viewer of sports programming just got their AARP card – that’s accepted as common fact. Instead of assuming e-Sports and streaming replace sports on Live TV as mass audience builders for a new generation, why don’t we assume that broadcast re-organizes around ALT sports? Pickleball is already mainstream. Chess, Go, Darts and billiards have pro leagues and televised world championships. GO FURTHER. Expect to see a rise in ALT Sports from a little further outside the mainstream: Settler’s of Catan Tournaments, KanJam, RC version of Rocket League, donkey ball, Nerf’s new competitive faux war league, player-controlled-soccer and football. Take the casual to the professional level.
Fueled by the Rise Of/Return to Cozy over scale in all aspects of digital, Etsy overtakes Amazon as the largest e-commerce platform in the US. This spawns offshoot parallels – to compete with Twitch, Etsy launches STITCH: livestreaming knitting guides and crafting spectaculars. Instead of two-day shipping, instructions on how to go collect and assemble ingredients become the new fulfillment by Etsy. Etsy effectively clones Reddit to organize into truly social communities based on tastes and crafting interests.
YOLO with a Cause. Hedonistic Doomerism rises as the counterculture response to doomsday preppers and generational warfare. This is a trend going supernova: the long-understood Experiences > Things framing goes further – no need to plan for buying a home, growing a family, or retirement if you have a justified belief in the collapse of society (choose your reason). Enjoy the now. This doesn’t manifest in a “look how crazy the kids are” as much as conspicuous enjoyment of the present getting more acceptable – take the PTO for a once-in-a-lifetime vacation (repeat this every year). Move frequently. Spend more time with friends and friendly strangers. Indulge in great restaurants.
Retirement Communities come to the young-folk with Commercial Communes. WeWork got close before it imploded. I think Chip & Joanna Gaines get us all the way there. If they don’t, the Southeastern Conference will help is make it real with a FootballTopia (probably somewhere on the Gulf Coast). No longer is there a question about commuting or not, urban vs. suburban. People commit to band together for communal living based on a shared lifestyle and form new local townships, local governments, and spawn self-organizing micro-communities.
An Anti-Celebrity is reluctantly and unwillingly propelled to global stardom. Someone who revels in blandness and shunning spectacle is embraced for their humble down-to-earth qualities and becomes a global fascination on par with T. Swift and Beyonce (cleverly named fan community to follow).
The homeless crisis is solved through the freemium-game model. Freemium free-to-play + micro-transactions caught on with mobile gaming but then crossed-over with nearly-no-cost air travel through Spirit and Ryan Air. In 2023 that crossed over into subscription services being unlocked for cars. 2024 takes that a step further with low- and no-cost housing, but all amenities are unlocked through micro-transactions and/or advertising. Want to use the kitchen? 25¢ or watch this 30 second ad.
Unserious guidance comes to serious categories. Vibes-based medical advice. Astrology-based financial planning. The hottest dating app “Serendipity” gets launched to overtake Hinge with the groundbreaking concept: signup and sight-unseen arranged marriages are planned - based purely on who signed up at the same time. Legal-ish GPTs trained on the scripts from police procedurals and law-based TV shows.
LLM births the next era of organized religion. Reverse-engineered through fandoms of popular IP, fanfic, and the rituals and codes of ComicCon – after years of things being covered as new secular religions, and becoming pseudo-religious experiences (and then veering into either farce (Noodle the Pug “bones day” or cult territory (again, WeWork), a yet-to-be announced LLM finally hits the mark and a new mass organized religion takes root.
A group comes together to hit pause. It may be a town, a state, or simply an interconnected community online; but people will come together in a mass thought-experiment-run-amok to hit "pause" on time. The group commits to a mass in-joke (turned delusion) of time stopping in the year 1999, and shuns all advancements, news, or culture that have come after that moment in time. This collective drama unfolds in public as these living historians are observed by those whose clocks have kept ticking. Nostalgia ensues.
