This week’s Outside Perspective Community Edition is a takeover by Joel Stein, thanks for giving me a little bit of a break from writing emails, so I can focus on family things! — mk
Hi 👋 I’m Joel, an independent writer and creative consultant, currently living nomadically as a full-time housesitter.
I’m writing this from Shetland, where I’ve been based for the last month. This week, I’ve been thinking about how ideology warps wellness, and how valuable I find communities like this one.
I’ve never actually had ‘strategy’ or ‘strategist’ in my job title, but I’ve always loved the mix of truth-hunting, sense-making, belief-building, and imagination the discipline involves.
In today’s little feature below, I’m hunting for truths and wondering what it all means in public. I hope it sparks something useful or interesting for you…
I’m a big believer in weird research.
Digging around in dark corners for interesting signals, often just for the pure curious thrill rather than because anyone’s paying me to do it.
Stuff like checking into the ‘random polls’ channel on WhatsApp, where thousands of kids vote daily on everything from “puppies or kittens?” to “What’s your dream job?” to “What do you think of Labubus?”
Stuff like this helps me sense the zeitgeist in ways that trend reports rarely manage. But it’s admittedly a pretty superficial view of how (young) people feel, right now, about very specific things. Interesting, for sure, but it doesn’t tell me much about the deeper cultural currents we’re swimming in.
For a broader, arc-of-history-level lens, I love playing around with Google’s Ngram Viewer. If you’ve not come across it before, it’s a free web tool that graphs word and phrase frequency in books over time using Google's massive digitised book collection. It reveals patterns in human knowledge and preoccupations, offering an unusually expansive lens for thinking about big societal shifts (including the darker and more complex ones companies often prefer to ignore). Messing around with Ngram Viewer also helps me cultivate a more long-termist disposition; something that seems increasingly rare in a world where the average lifespan of an S&P500 company has dropped from 67 to 15 years.
Below, I’m sharing some of the more thought-provoking patterns I’ve unearthed with Ngram Viewer. I’d love to hear if anyone has different reads on the data.
Has our faith in logic peaked?
Since the Enlightenment, we’ve been living in a hyper-rational era. But as I wrote in an article for MediaCat in 2023, “No amount of spreadsheets and software and central planning seem able to stem the sense of chaos and impending doom.” The resurgence of astrology, tarot, and yes, religion, has been much-discussed — this graph suggests that we’ve been on a collective journey of re-enchantment since around the turn of the 21st century.
Crossing the adaptive chasm
We thought technology would give us god-like powers, but our species’ collective fantasy of controlling the world might be starting to fade. Are we learning greater humility? Are we heading towards an Age of Adaption, potentially fuelled by an accelerating climate emergency? Or will AI rekindle our hubris and keep our destructive propensity for domination alive?
Getting to grips with complexity
As strategists, we often fetishise simplicity. Usually for valid and well-intentioned reasons. But the systems we live in, and work with, are fundamentally complex things; webs of interconnected elements with emergent properties that can’t be easily predicted from understanding the individual pieces. Thanks to fields like quantum mechanics, systems theory, and ecology, that emerged in the 20th century, awareness of complexity is growing. But don’t be fooled by this graph — we’re still only at the beginning of working out what this means for how we approach education, running organisations, and driving social change.
Rediscovering ambition?
Earlier this year, Timothée Chalamet broke with self-effacing convention and declared “I want to be one of the greats” during his acceptance speech at the SAG Awards. He cited Daniel Day-Lewis, Marlon Brando, Viola Davis, Michael Jordan, and Michael Phelps as inspirations. As pop culture critic Simi Dhindsa wrote in response, “Maybe it is now the cool thing to try hard.”
Are we returning to a more romantic, more heroic mode of moving through the world? Does NASA’s plan to build a nuclear reactor on the moon herald a new era of human audacity and adventure? Or will the dark side of ‘greatness’ win out? This isn’t just about effort. It’s also about power, and the global rise of demagoguery is very real. Competence isn’t the opposite of greatness, as much as we might associate it with sober mediocrity. It’s often less visible, less spectacular, but something we desperately need to value and nurture in a world where so many things seem broken.
I hate ending on a low. So here’s a final graph that suggests everything’s probably gonna be fine…
» Rewrite the rules or be ruled by them: the system is shifting, are you moving with it? from Anna Sampson
» The Burnout Matrix from Joe Burns
» The vernacular of change — Jen Briselli
» How Gen Z creates meaning — Rob Estreitinho
» Stress, spinning plates and free pitching – what’s it like to start your own studio?
» AI: If you think men are in crisis right now… just wait
» The cultural narrowness of AI training data
» Genes, memes, and manufactured dissent
» People aren’t lingering anymore
Thanks to Joel for this takeover - and giving Matthew a break! If you’re keen to takeover the Community Edition (and that’s one of the main reasons we started the substack, to create opportunities for our members to share their thinking), drop me a note.
We’ll be taking a little rest over the summer. Gigs and Curiousity Stream will be here, but we might otherwise be a little leaner. So if you’d like to do a weekly takeover, and fill the feed with your thinking, here’s the schedule:
W33: Takeover scheduled
W34: Open for submissions
W35: Open for submissions
W36: Open for submissions
W37: Open for submissions
Briefs discovered and curated from across the stratosphere.
Promote your brief - or tell us if you’ve found work via the project.
»» Freelance Research Facilitation Support with unpitchd Remote (UK/US)
»» Comms planner role with M&K Design (UK)
LATAM Marketing Strategist, fluent in spanish (NY,USA)
https://outsideperspective.co/gigs/20250808-pod.html
Open Call: Strategists, researchers, analysts (UK)
https://outsideperspective.co/gigs/20250808-neon.html
Freelance strategist with music festival exp (UK)
https://outsideperspective.co/gigs/20250808-music.html
Experience Strategist - Digital Banking Project (UK)
https://outsideperspective.co/gigs/20250804-studio.html
Freelance semioticians / cultural analysts in India (India)
https://outsideperspective.co/gigs/20250804-semiotics.html
Social First Freelance Strategy Lead
https://outsideperspective.co/gigs/20250804-mp.html
If you’re a business working with freelance strategists, Outside Perspective can now host your alumni. Keep your best freelancers close, reducing costs and saving time - plus share your briefs to our entire network for no additional cost.
If you’re keen to know how we can support your bench … drop me a note.
That’s all for this week.
mk✌️
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