Some of us haven’t spoken properly in a decade, but thanks to the Royal Mail, a glittered robin perched on a snowy fence somewhere in the Cotswolds reassures me that we’re all still thinking fondly of one another.

Which got me wondering…How on earth did we wind up here?

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So of course, I went looking, and eventually I found myself nosing around the diary of a Victorian civil servant named Henry Cole which is kept at the V&A.

It was Cole who, in 1840, helped launch the Penny Post, the great democratiser of letter writing that swiftly sent the country into a posting frenzy by reversing the burden of postage from the receiver to the sender and lowering the price to a mere penny.

And it was also Cole who then found himself drowning in Christmas letters as a result. They were penned, in ink and by candlelight, by bankers and bakers, and tight-fisted Uncle Wally from way up north. Which was surprising because he didn’t think he was still kicking around.

The volume was so overwhelming that the prospect of spending Christmas hunched over a desk answering them all individually, again in ink and by candlelight, wasn’t something he was prepared to do. So instead, he commissioned a likeness of his family sitting around a table raising a glass of good cheer with just enough space at the top to write who the tidings were for. And nothing more.

He then had a thousand of these printed as cards, sent the ones that would dutifully satisfy his obligation, and put the rest up for sale at a shilling each.

The advertisement he wrote to promote this modern convenience promised buyers:

A Christmas Congratulation Card: or picture emblematical of Old English Festivity to Perpetuate kind recollections between Dear Friends.

Nietzsche would’ve loved this: To perpetuate kind recollections, although he’d likely debate me on choosing “love” to describe the particular emotion he’d feel.

In Daybreak, he left behind quite specific instructions about where each virtue should be applied.

Be…

…Honest towards ourselves, and whoever else is a friend.

…Brave towards the enemy.

…Magnanimous towards the defeated.

And then he gets to politeness:

…Be polite, always.

So if honesty is for friends, bravery for enemies and magnanimity for the defeated, who exactly is left for always?

Well…everyone else.

And the peculiar thing about politeness is that it makes remarkably few demands on how you actually feel about any of them.

You can be delighted to see someone while being privately annoyed by them. You might give someone an enthusiastic wave after you’ve crossed the street to avoid actual contact.

Which makes it an interesting one to try out at our increasingly crowded dinner party.

Stand up and say, “I think good manners matter. I try to be polite to everyone.”

You’d likely get some version of “Hear, hear… people today are outrageous!!! Where has our civility gone?” paired with some sabre rattling on the fine china.

Now let’s try it in a way our man Nietzsche would’ve put his stamp on:

“I am polite to everyone, because most people are owed nothing more.”

You might get a polite cough.

But even “nothing more” has to be done properly.

What’s Just Enough?

Before we leave our dinner party, we should probably account for the bottle of wine you likely brought for your host, because you knew perfectly well that turning up empty-handed would be wrong.

Spending seven quid on it would have been insulting. Two hundred might have implied an obligation of some sort that you really didn’t intend. Somewhere in between the two is the correct price, and somehow you’re expected to know exactly where it is.

And it turns out there’s rather a lot of money changing hands over this little calculation.

There’s no objectively right price for any of these.

But socially, there is absolutely a wrong one.

Which leaves every buyer trying to work out:

What is the exact price of correct?

The Eternity Problem

Getting the price slightly wrong on a bottle of wine is one thing.

Getting it wrong on an engagement ring is quite another, because buying one asks you to put a price on eternal love without looking cheap.

De Beers had already taken care of the eternal love bit with:

Lovely.

(And extremely good news if you happened to be in the diamond business.)

But forever still had to be paid for, which left any would-be groom trying to work out exactly how much of his salary ought to disappear into the ring.

De Beers had an answer for that too.

Well, that clears that up.

They spent decades helping turn the diamond engagement ring into the done thing, then supplied the rule for how much doing it properly should cost.

All so our groom-to-be could stop wondering whether he’d done enough

The Usual Suspects

Fortunately, you don’t always have to wonder.

You probably recognise one, if not all, of these, and so will whomever you give one to.

That’s the beauty of these brands.

You can arrive with the right bottle, bag or box without having to explain why you chose it, or for that matter, what you actually think or feel about the person you’re giving it to.

Greeting cards have made this easier still by helpfully supplying the words.

Find one that says more or less what the occasion calls for, sign your name, and into the post it goes.

Which brings me back to Henry Cole’s original promise: To Perpetuate kind recollections between Dear Friends.

Perhaps that’s what those dubious Christmas cards I get every year have been doing all along.

We may never quite establish whether we particularly miss one another, or whether any of us has the slightest intention of doing something about it.

But every December, another glittered robin arrives.

And on we go.

Angelique

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Next time: Magnanimity and the virtue of the victor, the graceful winner’s alibi, and why the biggest gifts always flow downhill.

P.S. For everyone keeping track of the private sentences the buyer repeats to themselves on the drive home, here’s where we’ve got to so far:

Insight: I see what others miss. Honesty: I admit what others won’t. Sympathy: I recognise my own kind. Bravery: I stood against my enemy. Courage: I overruled myself. Politeness: I know how things are done.

So that’s six down and two to go. Watch out for those Robins!

This is the sixth edition of the Virtue series,
if you missed the beginning you can catch up here.

In 1988, Nike was losing ground to their biggest competitor, Reebok, until they launched a campaign featuring the most unlikely of characters Walt Stack, an 80 year old who ran the Golden Gate Bridge every morning in my home town, San Francisco.

Walt opens with, “I run 17 miles every morning. People ask me how I keep my teeth from chattering in the wintertime…”

Some home spun feel good music plays as he keeps jogging on, until he delivers the punchline, “…I leave ‘em in my locker.” A few frames later, we see a fade to black and Just do it. appears for the first time looking just like a jump cut to the opening titles of a Woody Allen film.

It was the first time Dan Wieden’s now famous three words, which he later admitted he’d borrowed from a murderer on death row facing his firing squad, showed up for Nike. Over the next decade Nike's revenues grew more than tenfold, to $9.2 billion, which is an extraordinary amount of shoes to sell with three words that say absolutely nothing about shoes.

I think the success of Just Do It comes down to the fact that it was actually selling Walt. The relatable Joe Bloggs who gets up every morning and does their thing with no real or imagined enemy, which means this can’t be the virtue of bravery we met last week.

Nietzsche had another virtue for Walt: Mut, or Courage, because unlike bravery, it doesn’t require anyone else to be there.

The only person Walt has to get past is Walt, or more specifically, the voice in his head arguing from under the duvet, quite reasonably, that, “the fog’s looking pretty thick this morning, so it’s probably very cold outside, let’s put off the seventeen miles until tomorrow”.

We may not all be Walt, but we definitely know that duvet voice.

The Duvet Voice

To see how this works, let’s try the same dinner party test from our first issue. Stand up while the mushy peas are being passed around and announce, “I’m taking a leap of faith and betting on myself this year.”

You’d likely get some version of a “You got this!!!” paired with a story about somebody’s cousin who quit Deloitte and now imports olive oil from a hillside near Siena.

Now let’s try it in a way that our man Nietzsche would’ve hopefully approved of: “I’ve decided I’m not listening to myself anymore.”

You’d definitely get some puzzled looks before someone asked if anyone knows where they can buy that cool new olive oil.

And yet, as strange as it sounds, the second version is much closer to what courage asks of us, and what we must ask of ourselves, as it only truly happens in front of a mirror, and the mirror is optional.

Which, when you think about it, makes Walt a rather worthy patron saint of this virtue, because every morning he hears an entirely reasonable case for staying under the duvet, and yet he runs on.

The Word Wieden Deleted

Which brings me back to our murderer on death row, Gary Gilmore whose actual final words were “Let’s do it.”

Wieden changed the let’s to just, which he later said was partly because he didn’t particularly fancy explaining to Nike that their new slogan had come from a convicted murderer.

But what I think he actually did with his edit was remove everybody else from the equation, and let you keep whatever doing it says about you as entirely your own business.

The Matt Damon Problem

In 2021, Crypto.com launched an ad starring Matt Damon during Thursday Night (American) Football. It takes us on a time travellers’ journey throughout the history of human endeavour. All the tropes are there from the Wright brothers to what appears to be Sir Edmund Hillary conquering Everest and the music soars like it’s something from Space Odyssey while Damon explains that humanity has always faced a choice between those who cower in the corner or look to the horizon.

By the time Damon delivers the Fortune favours the brave tagline, with a (I’m not sure how he managed it) straight face, the spot has already given us the alibi for the purchase: I’m joining the intrepid and putting myself in a lineage that includes the greatest adventurers of all time with no wrestling under the duvet at all.

Give away the alibi like they did (during the NFL’s biggest night of the week) and you’ll likely find yourself starring in the latest meme-fest.

But an alibi is a peculiar thing, it tends to only work when you get to discover it for yourself.

Which fortunately, we’re very good at.

The Purchase Mechanics

Just look at the person who finally buys the podcast microphone they’ve been dreaming about for the last six months. Ask them what they’ve been up to lately and they probably won’t say, “Well, I just bought a microphone.”

They’d likely say something much closer to, “I’m starting a podcast.”

Except they’re not.

They bought a mic.

And yet buying the mic feels like something magical happened.

Yesterday the podcast was an idea. Today there’s a microphone proudly perched on the desk of a home-office turned sound studio.

And apparently that distinction is blurry enough for the person with the microphone to start calling themselves a podcaster before they’ve troubled Spotify with an episode.

The purchase has given them a little advance on the person they intend to become.

Which is where courage starts doing some very strange commercial work.

Because buying the microphone lets them overrule the version of themselves who had a name for their podcast, a guest list, and absolutely no podcast.

Fender has built rather a large business around this particular bit of optimism. Almost half the guitars it sells go to people buying their first one, despite the fact that nine out of ten beginners will give up within a year.

The ten per cent who stick with it are worth something like $10,000 over their lifetime, buying five to seven guitars and the amps to go with them.

Which puts Fender in an interesting business.

The fifth guitar is sold to a guitarist.

The first one has to be sold to somebody who might be.

But perhaps that’s the bit Nike understood all the way back in 1988.

They never told us what doing it would say about us.

They simply understood how badly we wanted to be the person who did.

A Small Confession

A few months ago I bought the complete works of Robert Greene, which is an absurd thing for me to do when I already knew that I absolutely detest his writing.

I bought them because I’ve been thinking about turning all these newsletters on pleasures, sins and virtues into a book, and apparently at some point I decided that owning six of his books (covering everything from power to seduction) was a perfectly reasonable substitute for actually writing one of my own.

They’re sitting on the shelf in my office now.

And no, before you ask, I haven’t even opened them.

I also haven’t written a word of the book yet.

But I am the proud owner of six books I don’t like, so clearly something is underway.

Angelique

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Next time: Politeness, the only virtue on Nietzsche's list granted no conditions, no fine print, and no exceptions ("polite, always"), and why that little word "always" may be the most cynical thing he ever wrote.

P.S. For everyone keeping track of the private sentences the buyer repeats to themselves on the drive home, here’s where we’ve got to so far:

Insight: I see what others miss. Honesty: I admit what others won’t. Sympathy: I recognise my own kind. Bravery: I stood against my enemy. Courage: I overruled myself.

So that’s five down and three to go. Watch out Robert Greene, I’m comin’ for ya!

This is the fifth part of the Virtue series,
if you missed the beginning you can catch up here.

I spent the better part of my Sunday this week going down the rabbit hole trying to figure out who first said, “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”.

It led me back to the 1970s mainframe era, when IBM so thoroughly owned the computer market that the trade press nicknamed them Snow White and their seven flailing rivals the Seven Dwarfs.

It was roughly around the same time that the engineer Gene Amdahl walked out of IBM and built a competitive mainframe that was faster and cheaper only to see buyer after buyer stick with IBM anyway.

Amdahl eventually coined the term FUD for the hidden force he kept losing to: the fear, uncertainty, and doubt an IBM salesman could plant with nothing more than a raised eyebrow and the two most dangerous words of all: “brave choice.”

I never did find out who said it first. But I came back with something better: the origin of the airtight alibi for the unbrave.

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Bravery Needs An Enemy

Which brings me to bravery itself, the virtue the IBM alibi is built to dodge. And for that, I once again turn to Nietzsche who wrote about Tapferkeit, the kind of bravery found in the soldier’s sword turned sharply towards an enemy.

He goes on to argue that bravery can’t ever exist until there’s an enemy standing right in front of you. The enemy might be a person, or a situation, or even an ideology, but it must exist, and even more importantly it must be able to hurt you. Without an enemy, bravery is simply shadow-boxing. You get to practice your footwork but your shadow never punches back.

Which makes our IBM buyer the patron saint of the unbrave. He’s made his enemy the decision that could go pearshaped with his name all over it, and he pays IBM good money to never once look it in the eye.

To see how this works, let’s run the dinner party test from our first issue. Stand up while the starters are being passed around, and announce, “I’m working on being braver and really stepping out of my comfort zone this year.”

You’d likely get some version of a “You go, girl!!!” paired with some fist bumps and devils on horseback.

Now try Nietzsche’s version: “I have an enemy.”

You’d definitely get a very long silence before someone asked you to pass the olives with a side-eye.

And yet, once again, this unsayable pass the olives version, is the only version that operates as a virtue, because it’s something you’d only ever say to yourself.

The Purchase Mechanics

As we’ve gone along in this series, we’ve sharpened each virtue into a private sentence the buyer repeats to themselves on their drive home, so the money they’ve already spent feels like it was the best decision in the world.

Picture each of these sentences as a small medal the buyer pins on their own chest where no one else can see them. Insight’s medal reads I saw what others missed, while Honesty’s says I admit what others won’t and Sympathy’s got I recognise my own kind.

Now Bravery gets: I stood against my enemy.

It can be heard, if you listen very carefully, in what the accountant on a Harley whispers to herself as she rides off the dealer’s lot on her new hog, “life is short, you have to get out there and actually live it”.

The implied enemy in that whisper is the ledger, or the cube farm, or even tax day itself, and while the Harley doesn’t actually defeat any of them it does permit our accountant to tell herself she’s the sort of gal who’ going to do exactly that every Sunday as she heads out for a ride.

The “I stood against my enemy” alibi can pay for all sorts of things like the Krav Maga Self Defense class or the Land Rover Defender with 900 millimetres of wading depth purchased to conquer the tundra.

But the mugger doesn’t have to ever arrive and neither does winter, for that matter.

In fact, it may be better if they don’t.

The Villain on Retainer

Left alone, buyers will likely find their own enemy, the way our accountant on the Harley found hers. But brands have been known to save them the trouble.

Apple had Big Brother. Avis had Hertz.

Craft beer’s been fighting the corporate creators of the Wassup?! Bud Guys since approximately forever, and challenger banks (and the Crypto crew) have all the banks that are too big to fail.

If you decide to put a villain on retainer, the thing to remember is they can never actually be dangerous. Big Brother goes down with a single hammer and Hertz has been losing to Avis for sixty years without landing a blow. They’re there to be faced and not fought, so your customer can square up and walk out a veteran of a war that was never on. Make the fight genuinely dangerous and he’ll retreat to whatever the IBM of your category is. Nobody, after all, ever got fired for that.

Even then, you can only go so far. The enemy belongs to the brand, but the bravery belongs to the buyer. You can hand him the villain, but you can’t tell him that buying your thing makes him brave. That line has to come later, at the till, in his own voice: somebody has to stand up to them, and today it’s me.

This is also why I wouldn’t put Just Do It here, tempting though it is.

There’s nobody else in that sentence.

Just you, standing around in your trainers, apparently refusing to go for a run.

Nietzsche had another word for that and we’ll cover it in the next edition.

A Small Confession

I tell myself that I show up in The Ring every morning at 6am because I’m the sort of person who doesn’t run away.

The Burf, the guy I train with, has been training professional boxers for the better part of 38 years, and when we spar I spend most of my time trying to work out how to get in on him. Occasionally my feet and my brain cooperate and I actually manage it.

The trouble is that The Burf tends to respond with a lightning fast right hook, at which point I do exactly the thing I’ve spent years telling myself I don’t do.

I flinch and back away.

Apparently this has had no effect whatsoever on the story I tell myself afterwards.

That’s the virtue of Bravery.

Angelique

Next time: The Virtue of Courage, the inward twin of Bravery, that needs no enemy and the alibi that signs for the strangest purchases of all: the ones we make against our own better judgment, on purpose.

Then a University of Texas marching band came blaring down the aisles, and she launched its successor.

And surprise, surprise, it was yet another trend report.

This kind of extremist fanfare, despite the enviable showmanship, triggers me into something that’s the closest I ever get to a raging lunatic, because these kind of death of… notices are, more often than not, always some sort of clickbait designed to hijack our attention.

So when Eugene Healey, a brand strategist and cultural commentator I normally agree with, published an essay announcing the death of something that had barely been born, my involuntary eyebrow ballet started right on cue.

The Analogue Revival, he argued, never took place. In it, we were ‘promised’ a rejection of living our lives online. And in its place we’d all turn towards a slower and tactile mode of living filled with private rituals that make being offline feel like the New Luxury.

It’s a trend that I’ve been tracking since 2019 and shows up in thirty-three different ways according to my analysis of more than two hundred trend reports in 2026.

So he obviously got my attention.

Healey’s verdict was that the Analog Revival was really just a performative simulation or a costume worn for the feed.

His essay travelled the way a confident verdict tends to, earning a thousand likes and hundreds of restacks.

But what got me really excited was buried in the comments.

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The first comment that made me slow my scroll went something like…

“People are writing each other letters, making scrapbooks, tending community gardens, and going on weekend rides that never become Strava screenshots.”

Then blunt guy…

“You won’t find the people who have unplugged by searching the platforms they walked away from.”

Then millennial mom (playing very true to type by letting us know)…

“I’ve got a house full of records, journals, printed albums, and the CD players my kids asked for. No one would know I had any of these things unless they came round for tea.”

Healey’s main argument went something like this. A friend’s sister spent a small fortune on film for her analog camera, but when she gets it developed, she leaves the negatives at the lab and only asks for the digital files to be emailed to her.

His conclusion from that was that she’d only kept the version she could post which was then extrapolated to everyone now performing the offline life for an online audience and that we’ll all still be on social media in 2026 (and beyond), despite what the trend reports promised us in January.

For those of you that know me, I have a life long love of boxing which is probably why I stuck around to read all 94 comments, because this was a pretty decent fight, with both corners landing more than a few good blows.

In the red corner, bringing the receipts in their cottagecore boxers, we have Team Slow. And in the blue corner, we have Team Skeptic, known for throwing jabs with the speed of screenshots.

I was hooked and by the final bell, the score almost felt beside the point.

I got this sense that both sides were describing the same weather from different windows and the climate for this exchange is what actually interested me most.

The Climate of Slow

Slowness is a timeless appetite. It’s the visceral hunger to stop and do one thing so fully and completely, and with all the unhurried attention the thing deserves that it reminds us of what it means to feel alive.

It surfaces with real force every time the world speeds up, and it eases only when the pressure does.

Trend pundits put names to it all the time. But they didn’t invent it, and an essay (no matter how well argued) can’t end it. The latest edition may come with fresh props and catchy lingo but the appetite underneath has worn a hundred names before this one, in languages and centuries the trend reports never check.

Which is exactly the point the whole bout misses. You can’t settle whether the pull towards slower living is real by counting analogue sightings on a feed, any more than you can predict the climate trajectory by glancing at today’s forecast. Even Muhammad Ali had a long celebrated career without winning all his fights.

You have to take the long view. And once you do, the same thing happens so reliably, across so many centuries, that calling it a trend actually sounds absurd.

Two Thousand Years, Eighteen Months

One of the things I love most about doing what I do is going down rabbit holes. And when I first got hooked by slowness, back in 2019, this particular hole took me pretty far back.

And what I noticed was that long before we could buy slowness, it was a practice starting with what the Daoists called wu wei (the art of acting without force) more than two thousand years ago.

I then followed the rabbit to Dordogne, France and found myself in a small tower room where Montaigne retired to think at his own pace and just like that, the very first known personal essay was penned (how very substack of him).

While reading Montaigne, I was reminded of my trips to Japan during the Starbucks days and the first time I came across wabi-sabi and the practice of finding beauty in the impermanence of things worn with time. This turned up recently at the Barbican, in an exhibition of garments buried in a London garden until the soil had its say, filed under Entropism, naturally.

The rabbit then led me north to Denmark and hygge, a word for the kind of attention a nation of champion candle-burners (almost six kilos a head a year, double the next country in Europe) sitting in the dark for the better part of the year needs to switch on.

Collectively, I call these the climate of slow. And look at what they all have in common. They’re all something people did under pressure, which is what a climate produces, and every one of them is for sale now.

Just look at hygge, which started with a BBC article in 2015, which caught the eye of some London publishers, who launched nine books inside eighteen months, by which point it was up for Oxford's Word of the Year (sadly losing to post-truth).

And, to me, that's the surest tell of all. Because the appetite for slow is always in the climate until the world speeds up enough to kick it into weather. And the second there's weather, somebody rushes out to name the storm.

A Short History on the Rebellion Against Fast

The first big named storm came when the factories arrived. Model T Fords rolled off the line every ninety-three minutes, when it previously took a full twelve and a half hours to build.

But the resistance had started decades earlier with William Morris and his Acanthus wallpaper taking the better part of four weeks to make because each colour had to be applied and dried separately. Meanwhile a mill down the road was running off miles of the stuff before lunch. That was the whole of the Arts and Crafts movement, really: a defiance of speed through the defence of the made thing and the maker's hours.

In the same soot-and-gaslight streets, the flâneur appeared with his deliberately slow walk through the arcade. He was even occasionally spotted (and I promise this is real) with a pet turtle on a leash to set the pace.

The second storm blew in after the Second World War and came straight for the dinner table. When Swanson first packed their unsold Thanksgiving turkeys into aluminium trays with a scoop of peas and christened the result a "TV dinner," they sold over ten million in the first year. Fast had come for the meal and dinner became something you heated and ate off TV trays, facing the electric blue glow of a screen instead of each other (sound familiar?).

A few decades later, McDonald’s announced they were bringing fast food to Rome with a new restaurant planned to open near the Spanish Steps in 1986. Outraged by the gall, an Italian named Carlo Petrini protested with his well argued case for Slow Food which came with a snail on his banner and a stubborn insistence that a meal is worth the time it asks for.

Then came Broadband. And after that a phone in every pocket. The age of always-on connection became the default condition of modern life. And the collective cases for slow started to, counterintuitively, speed up.

In Praise of Slow, by Carl Honoré, became a best seller. Meditation became mainstream. Norway even started a Slow TV movement by live streaming a seven hours and four minute train journey and 1.2 million people tuned in.

And just like that, remedies for the always-on life became an entire market for the price of a Calm subscription.

So when the pandemic arrived, we were all primed for what came next. And of course the internet went soft and pastoral with cottagecore, cosy gaming, and Animal Crossing. Is there no better way to celebrate the resistance to fast than voting Goblin Mode word of the year? Or practicing cosy-maxxing and bed rotting as new life scripts?

All of which brings us to where we are now, living in the automation age where machines can think and do for us anything that we can possibly imagine. They can even hallucinate for us.

And right on cue, here’s Healey, standing in the middle of the latest storm telling us the rebellion is dead. But what if the fight in the comments is the rebellion? I think it turned up bang-on schedule, the same way it did for Morris or Petrini, and he simply can’t read the timetable from where he’s standing.

Which brings me to the question every leader needs to wrestle with: where do you stand? Are you for the experiences that grab attention and travel well on the feed? Or for the slower experiences that are deeply felt?

My take is it will become increasingly difficult to stand for both.

Today’s piece was inspired by the large number of signals of Zenjoyment, the Pleasure Code for the want of calm and shelter when the world refuses to sit still.

Your Field Guide Awaits

Everything you’ve just read is the story.

What follows is the field guide.

Inside you’ll find 65 signals that show how this Pleasure Code is currently showing up:

Plus you’ll get five creative Wild Cards designed to help you turn what you’ve spotted into something original for your brand:

Happy exploring.

Read more

Welcome to the fourth part of the Virtue series,
if you missed the beginning, catch up here.

The United Kingdom, where I live, has a thing for donkeys.

But it didn’t always. Back in the 1980s, the British charity sector’s reigning playbook featured an impoverished child on the dirt floor of a hut with a distended belly. And, in the genre’s signature shot there was always a fly walking undisturbed across a pleading eyeball. All of it came scored to music engineered to make you feel like a war criminal for owning a kettle.

Today this exact set up, featuring what I’m pretty sure is exactly the same fly, stars a donkey.

It works.

The donkey sanctuaries are making an absolute mint. And the fly-on-the-eyeball economy is a going concern.

But when these ads play the last thing on earth I want to do is put my hand in my pocket. What I want to actually do is leave the room.

And I like donkeys.

Both of these things are true at once: the loving of donkeys and the leaving of the room. And the reason for this has nothing to do with a virtue. But with guilt.

Gossage’s Warning

Howard Gossage, the most quotable ad man ever despite the fact that he’s probably the least known, warned that guilt is not a virtue, because you really can’t build anything durable on it.

Someone you’ve guilt-tripped into something becomes someone who eventually learns to avoid you. It usually starts small with something like an impulse to change the channel or cross cross the street when they see you and then grows into the uncontrollable urge to look anywhere else but at the donkey.

So while the guilt appeal can harvest the small, flinching minority who couldn’t look away in time, it eventually pays for that harvest by teaching everyone else to flee.

The whole job, Gossage understood, is not to make people feel guilty but to feel good about themselves. Which raises the obvious question: what, precisely, is the good feeling that makes a person give? What is the virtue that permits the gift?

In a single word, sympathy.

And the man who explained why is, once again, Friedrich Nietzsche.

Feeling With, Not Sorry For

In Beyond Good and Evil, sympathy is named as one of the four virtues Nietzsche says must be kept under strict self-control. And I think his word for it matters: Mitgefühl, a kind of feeling-with. Which is very different than feeling sorry for.

Sympathy, for Nietzsche, is a current that runs between equals. Pity is what you hand to someone beneath you.

To see how this works, run the dinner party test from our first issue. Stand up, while the mains are being served, and announce, “I feel such pity for those poor creatures.”

You’d likely get some version of an “Awww! Yes, I know, the whole situation is so diabolical,” paired with “oooh, you’re such a lovely person” and a nice Chianti.

Now try Nietzsche’s version: “I reserve my sympathy for my equals.”

You’d definitely get a very long silence before someone asked you to pass the gravy.

And yet, once again, this unsayable gravy boat version, is the only version that operates as a virtue, because your true compassion, whether you’d put it this way or not, has a membership policy. And the reason for this is that you can only feel-with the people you recognise as your kind of people. You feel sorry for everyone else, and only one of these feelings has ever reliably opened a wallet twice.

The Purchase Mechanics

Listen to sympathy work at the till in the justification of the Kickstarter backer, who recognises the founder and maybe even envies her a little while reaching into their wallet saying, She’s doing her thing, just like me, and my forty quid investment is a handshake between equals. I believe in what she’s doing.

Who’s the subject here? It’s most certainly not the founder and there’s not even a whiff of pity or guilt. That last sentence really says: I’m the kind of person who recognises quality people, and they’re the kind of people who are a lot like me.

Note the alibis we’ve now collected for our medal cabinet, so you can tell the virtues apart as the series goes on.

Insight says: I see what others miss. Honesty says: I admit what others won’t. Sympathy says: I recognise my own kind and the Kickstarter patron looks lovingly in the mirror, because patronage has always been the rich man’s way of buying a mirror.

Which brings us back to the donkey and the strategic error underneath the fly.

What the Beggar Gets Wrong

The problem with using the guilt playbook is that it positions the cause beneath the donor.

It always somehow finds a way to make you look at the diabolically wretched from the rather fortunate position of a comfy sofa that suddenly stops feeling so comfortable.

And once you feel the distance between wretched and fortunate, you pay to make it stop.

The best-funded causes in the world actually do something quite different. They throw away the guilt playbook and compete for attention the way brands do: glossily, confidently, aspirationally, and no one demonstrates this better than charity: water.

Their photography and music are a masterful blend of realism and hope more often found in films like Field of Dreams or The Straight Story than in charity advertising. And their messages? Always sympathetic, in the true Nietzschean sense, and utterly hopeful. You’ll also be relieved to learn that they stick to a strictly no-fly zone policy.

Their July campaign (timed to launch on America’s big 250th bash) opened with the country’s greatest achievements and closed with an invitation: Let's make clean water one of humanity's greatest achievements... together.

charity: water refuses the beggar's position and speaks with the confidence of an organisation doing extraordinary work and the invite you to stand alongside them to do the impossible.

That is carefully engineered Mitgefühl where the donation becomes a gift between equals rather than a fine paid to a fly.

The Uncomfortable Part

I get that all of this might sound pretty brutal. But I refuse to soften it up, because the fact is people give to identities they wish to belong to.

The charity sector’s fiction is that the act of giving flows toward need, when it really flows toward kinship. You might find my argument cold-blooded, but I’d only ask you to hold fire on any complaints until you check it against which appeals you answered this year, and which you deleted, and how quickly, and what the ones you answered had in common with you.

I think that once you do, you might just realise that Nietzsche’s only cold-blooded move had nothing to do with inventing all of this. He simply happened to be the first person, that I know of, who wrote it down.

A Small Confession

I have an independent magazine fetish that goes to such extremes that I even fangirl crush on zine authors to the point of asking for a selfie.

I’ve told myself for years that I’m proud to support independent publishing.

But if I’m honest with myself , I don’t really buy the struggling magazines that need a life jacket. I buy the beautiful, already thriving ones edited by people whose taste I see reflected in my mirror.

In other words, I am feeling-with and Nietzsche would have likely found me entirely unremarkable.

Hopefully, he would still be sympathetic toward me though.

Angelique

Next up: the Virtue of Bravery

In 1881, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, in Daybreak, what he called the good four virtues, and the first of them goes like this: “honest towards ourselves, and whoever else is a friend.”

Towards ourselves, and whoever else is a friend.

And everyone else?

Nietzsche declines to say. His honesty is a virtue that comes with fine print, and the fine print is a magnificent scandal: you owe the truth to yourself and to your friends, and to no one else on earth.

Now, run the dinner party test from our first issue of this series. Stand up at a party and announce, “I am trying to be more honest.” You’d likely get applause with warm murmurs, and someone calling you enormously brave. Now stand up and say the whole thing: “I am trying to be more honest to myself and to my friends. The rest of you can look after yourselves.”

You’d definitely get silence with a few uncomfortable coughs and someone remembering they need to call their babysitter.

The first version is Franklin’s honesty: a virtue for display. The second is a virtue you’d only ever say to yourself. Which, as this series insists, is exactly what makes it commercially real. Because to yourself is where all the justifying of doing things and buying things happens.

The Confession Is the Fee

So how does a human being use this kind of Nietzschean honesty to permit a purchase?

Dig underneath anyone of these:

It’s my one guilty pleasure…

I know I shouldn’t, but...

I never normally do this…

And you'll hear the same tell: a person paying for an indulgence with a confession.

And to Nietzsche, this candour is a virtue.

Notice what the phrase guilty pleasure actually accomplishes. While it sounds like an admission of guilt it does quite the opposite by settling the guilt before you have time to feel it for real. Saying I know I shouldn’t but… is the payment, made moments before consumption, in the currency of self-awareness. Once made, you can unapologetically dive into that cheesecake. Or Love Island. Or TikTok. Whatever you’ve decided is on today’s ‘research’ menu.

This is why nobody who admits a guilty pleasure ever feels the slightest bit of guilt. The confession has served its role as a cover charge for permission. And it’s the cheapest one ever invented, because you pay it to yourself.

The Most Honest Ads Ever Made

You already know these ads. You can probably quote a few.

Volkswagen, in the Think Small campaign, photographs its own Beetle and prints one word beneath it: Lemon.

Avis admits their inferiority with “We’re No. 2. We try harder.”

Buckley’s cough syrup promises “It tastes awful. And it works.”

And Domino’s, in more recent living memory, bought national airtime to confess that its own pizza had, by common consensus, become terrible.

Every one is a confession addressed, in Nietzsche’s sense, to friends: the company owning up to its own kind, which is to say its buyers.

The standard reason we tell ourselves is that they worked because honesty built trust.

The brand admitted a flaw and the consumer believed the rest.

OK sure, that’s fine and true.

But it’s also insufficient. Because trust explains why the customer believed the ads. But it doesn’t explain why they love these ads. There’s an unmistakable pleasure in the way people respond to these campaigns and quote them for decades after they run. Nobody feels pleasure at merely finding a vendor credible.

Here’s what I think was actually sold.

The Avis ad hands its reader a very particular sentence to say to themself: I buy from the people who tell the truth. Sit with that sentence a moment. Who is its subject? Not Avis. The sentence is about the buyer. It says:

I’m the sort of person who values honesty.

I reward candour.

I can’t be flattered, but I can be levelled with.

The ad confesses so that the consumer can feel honest by association. The company performs the virtue. The buyer pockets it.

And note the distinction from Insight, because Honesty and Insight run close together and the difference matters.

Insight says: I saw what others missed and the Mac buyer congratulates herself on thinking differently.

Honesty says: I admit what others won’t and the Avis renter congratulates himself on his candour.

Where Honesty Belongs (And Where It Curdles)

Every one of those campaigns obeys the rule we established in the first issue: the virtue appears at the bottom of the funnel, in what are, when you strip away the craft, direct-response arguments.

Lemon is a quality-control proof point. We try harder is a service promise. It tastes awful, and it works is an efficacy promise with gags that would kill on an open mic night at the Comedy Store.

I know people consider these brand-building campaigns, but they’re not. And that’s what makes them genius because they sold a lot of cars while building the brand at the same time. The virtue of honesty shows up in the closing argument, where its job is to hand the customer their alibi, and then get out of the way.

Which is fine as long as the honesty never becomes the brand because the moment ‘radical transparency’ turns into positioning, or the moment honesty appears in the tagline, or the manifesto, or the About page with the founder gazing candidly into the middle distance, something seriously curdles. The confession stops being a confession and becomes a performance of confessing, and the consumer, who can smell this the way one smells milk gone slightly off, withdraws because a performed virtue is worse than no virtue at all.

The least the hypocrite can do is be graceful about it, and the honesty brand, by definition, cannot be graceful, because it has put the confession on a billboard, and a confession on a billboard is a boast.

But there is a second reason honesty-as-branding fails, and it lives in Nietzsche’s fine print.

Honesty is owed to ourselves and to our friends. It’s an in-group virtue. The confession only works between friends. Between strangers, it’s oversharing. And from a corporation? Well, that’s a sales technique dressed in a power suit. Which is why the honesty campaigns that work always construct the friendship. First with the wit (the shared joke, the wink) and only then confess. Buckley’s is a friend making you laugh. A terrible tasting friend, but a friend nonetheless. The transparency-honesty manifesto, by contrast, is a stranger telling you about his therapy.

The Confession You’ve Been Paying Me With

I’ve been handing you the Virtue of Honesty from the inception of The Pleasure Codes.

What I hope brings you back each week is the pleasure of looking behind the curtain and into the human machinery beneath marketing. Your consumers’ drives called by their oldest and least flattering names. The sins and their itches. The desires and their scratches. The refusal to dress those timeless motivations up in Maslow’s good manners or Jung’s Instagrammable archetypes.

I wonder what reading along has let you tell yourself.

… … …

Whatever sentence just surfaced, that is the Virtue of Honesty and I’d be careful with it.

The Virtue of Honesty has a peculiar habit of disguising itself as the absence of self-deception. Which is usually the moment the self-deception begins.

Honest towards ourselves, and whoever else is a friend.

— Angelique

Next up: the Virtue of Sympathy

If you haven’t seen a Defender lately, it’s a car styled to look like it has somewhere serious to be with its spare tyre bolted to the back and its boxy silhouette that looks like something the Ministry might issue before an expedition. It’s even got a drive mode with a little stick you can slap sideways, like a proper bush vehicle, even though the transmission is automatic and knows it.

When you step into that car in Los Angeles, you step into, psychologically speaking, somewhere in the Outback. Readers of this newsletter will recognise the Code immediately: WonderWorlds, the pleasure of being transported into another world entirely. My colleague bought a portal, with cupholders.

But if you ask him why he bought it, he’ll tell you (as he told me), without a flicker of hesitation: it’s an incredible tax write-off. In the US, commercial vehicles over 6,000 pounds for business use (he bought the car through his company) are subject to accelerated depreciation.

But here’s what I need you to understand: he’s not lying. The write-off is real. But the write-off would have been equally satisfied by a pickup truck or any number of large, deductible, charmless machines. The tax code got him through the door, but the idea of conquering the Outback while sitting in Los Angeles traffic got him to the desk where you sign things. The write-off wasn’t the actual reason for the purchase or why he thought of a Land Rover to begin with. But it is the reason, or virtuous alibi, that justified the purchase in his mind.

Welcome to the Virtue of Insight: the first stop on our tour of the eight virtues introduced last week and one of the most flattering things a human being can believe about themselves.

What The Insight Virtue Is

As I mentioned last week, the eight virtues are the alibis we tell ourselves about why we buy what we buy, and I borrowed them from Nietzsche because, unlike Franklin’s virtues, they are intensely private and less about appearing virtuous to others and more about the stories we tell ourselves.

Insight appears in Nietzsche’s later list of virtues in Beyond Good and Evil, where he says these virtues should be kept under strict self-control lest they master us rather than the other way around.

For Nietzsche, Insight was the rare ability to see through the comforting illusions of the herd.

Once you know to look for it, you’ll notice this virtue everywhere.

Translated out of nineteenth-century Europe and into the boardroom, the virtue sounds like this:

I see what others miss.

I am not following a trend. I understood something first. While everyone else pays the sticker price of reality, I found the loophole. The herd buys the badge. I bought the depreciation schedule.

It’s the preferred justification of choice for the modern educated consumer, who’s been raised on documentaries about advertising and considers themself, therefore, unadvertisable. Everyone believes they are the exception. Watch how people talk about AI on social media right now: every single person using it will tell you that other people’s use of it is detectable slop, while their own use is discerning and precise.

Very few people take pride in considering themselves part of a herd. Which is exactly why the herd is composed entirely of people who are not in it.

The People Who Are Actually Immune (Almost)

There’s a legend in marketing, and like the better class of legend, it’s somewhat true, that ten percent of the population is immune to advertising. This 10% are purely rational buyers. The people who read Consumer Reports for pleasure. And for decades, the industry’s advice about these people was simple: don’t waste your money on them.

Toyota Camry owners are famously this tribe. Back when Toyota was in trouble, getting out-Camry-ed by the Honda Accord, researchers set out to do some interviews1, presumably expecting to find the emotional life of a filing cabinet. What they found instead is one of the most useful discoveries in the history of consumer research:

These people do get emotional. And what they get emotional about is their own rationality.

At one point during an interview, a male Camry owner leaned forward, and the researchers noted the lean (the lean is everything). He dropped his voice to a whisper, though nothing about the moment asked for one, and said:

“Do you know what my neighbour pays every year to maintain that Jaguar? Thousands of dollars. Do you know what I paid? One oil change.”

He landed that last line like it was the punchline to his go-to dinner party joke in the hushed voice that’s the surest tell-tale sign of a man who’d found his one true love: self-wisdom.

Because Look how smart I am is a feeling and the Camry delivered it more reliably than the Jaguar delivered whatever it was the Jaguar promised.

Which is why the Camry fan is such a useful creature. Most buyers take the pleasure first and go looking for a reason afterwards. He works the other way round. The receipts are where his pleasure lives, and he drove off the lot knowing the figure to the penny.

So if they’re your buyer, sell them the feeling of being clever and let the car come along for the ride.

Every big brand’s segmentation deck has these people in it, by the way. They’re usually called some variation of “the Savvies,” and the deck usually recommends ignoring them because “they just want the deal.” But I think this is a mistake. They want the pleasure of being the person who “found the deal”, which is a different thing entirely, and one you can absolutely sell them, just never from the centre of your brand.

Two Campaigns, One Company

Now watch how the most studied brand of our time handled all of this, because Apple ran the whole playbook, in order.

Think Different was a WonderWorlds campaign. It sold no computers, and I will go further than the campaign’s pundits usually dare. It wasn’t supposed to.

It was a category-defining piece of world-building, saying: Here’s our universe, populated by Einstein and Dylan and Picasso, and buying our machine is the visa.

It also did something at least as important inside the building when it told a demoralised company, mid-turnaround, that it was still permitted to think of itself as significant. A surprising amount of great advertising is written for an audience of employees, but that’s a subject for another newsletter.

Then, years later, came the Apple Get a Mac campaign. “I’m a Mac. I’m a PC.” And this, despite the awards and the charm, was not really a brand campaign at all. It was a direct-response campaign wearing a very good cardigan. Feature, comparison, objection, rebuttal. Episode after episode after episode. It was the bottom of the funnel, produced beautifully.

And what was it selling, down there at the bottom of the funnel? What virtue did it want everyone to feel to justify buying a Mac?

Insight.

The Mac fellow is relaxed, unimpressed by convention, visibly not of the herd. The PC fellow is the herd, in a beige suit. The ads handed every wavering buyer the exact sentence he would need later: I’m not paying more for a logo. I just see what most people don’t.

To understand how the Virtues work in the Pleasure Codes, the sequence is an important lesson to notice here.

WonderWorlds, in this particular era of Apple, scratches the itch of consumer pride with Think Different to create the desire of being a genius like Einstein, Dylan or Picasso. Insight is the alibi that arrives after the sentence Get a Mac gave every wavering buyer to repeat on the drive home.

But it shouldn’t ever directly appear in the brand. Apple never once put “for people smart enough to see through the PC” on a billboard, and yet millions of customers walked out of those stores privately congratulating themselves on their clarity.

Their competitor, incidentally, could have counterattacked with the very same virtue “if you really knew what you were doing, you’d buy the PC; here is the price-performance table” and never did, except years later with a half-assed “I’m a PC” campaign. Instead, they answered a Virtue campaign with a feature list.

Which is like answering a compliment with a receipt.

The Uncomfortable Part

Here’s where I must complicate the story, because there is a version of this newsletter that lets you believe the Virtue of Insight is only for tax write-offs and maintenance costs and that the alibi is always a practical alibi.

It’s not. And the Apple case plays this out it.

Ask the creative professional why she bought the Mac, and she will tell you: it makes me more creative. Now, does it? From a placebo effect, perhaps it does. But you can edit film on both machines equally well. So the evidence isn’t really there. What I want you to focus on here is that “It will make me more creative” is not a rational claim. It’s an emotional hope wearing the grammar of reason.

And this is the thing Franklin’s virtues could never accommodate, and the reason we built this framework on Nietzsche instead: a justification doesn’t have to be rational in order to function as reason. The act of reasoning is the virtue, the ceremony of explaining yourself to yourself, regardless of what the reasoning contains. The Camry man reasons with maintenance costs. The film editor reasons with her own future creativity. My colleague reasons with the tax code. That’s three alibis based on one virtue, but not one of the three purchases was decided by the contents of the alibi.

The decision doesn't need to be rational, it simply needs to be explained. And the explanation is the product's final feature the consumer installs themselves.

A Disclosure, As Promised

I did promise last week that I'd implicate myself along the way.

So here’s one of my own alibis.

I wear a tracker and monitor my sleep, my recovery, my heart-rate variability. For years I've told myself this makes me unusually insightful about my own body. I see what others miss. Others merely feel tired, whereas I know my HRV.

Lately, I’ve begun to suspect that what I’ve actually made a part of my biology isn’t insight at all. It’s more of an anxiety dashboard that’s never once told me anything my tiredness wasn’t already telling me for free. I also notice that I haven’t cancelled my subscription, but have explained it instead.

You see how this works.

Now you won’t be able to unsee it.

That’s the virtue.

— Angelique

Next up: The Virtue of Honesty

There’s a question that’s been put to the consumer, in one form or another, since the first market researcher picked up the very first clipboard, and it goes like this:

Why did you buy it?

No one has ever answered it truthfully.

Not the woman in the focus group, not the man in the Gallup poll, not the respondent ticking the box marked “quality,” not you, and, I want this on the record before we go any further, not even me. I have answered this question hundreds of times in my life, and on every single occasion I’ve been sincere, articulate, and wrong.

This isn’t because we’re liars, but because of something considerably more interesting: we really don’t know. The decision is made in one room of the mind, and the explanation is drafted in another, and the two rooms don’t share a door. What the researcher collects, what the survey tabulates, what the brand tracker faithfully reports up the chain to the CMO, is rarely the reason for the purchase.

It’s the alibi.

But it’s a very important alibi.

And the worst thing a brand can do is dismiss it.

This edition (and the eight that follow) will be all about why.

Where We’ve Been

For those who’ve joined us recently - a map.

We spent the better part of a year in this newsletter talking about pleasure: the $13.4 trillion economy of it, the Codes that organise it, the scratch, as we came to call it.

Then, for eight issues, we explored the sins. We took Chris Paik’s venture capital thesis, that every attractive investment opportunity appeals to at least one of the seven deadly sins, and we walked through them one at a time: lust and envy and gluttony and sloth and wrath and greed and pride, plus the eighth one (fear) my boxing coach insisted we had left out, and he was right.

And the argument, in case you missed it, was that the sins are the better, more honest way to talk about the human drives. Better than Maslow, who took the same drives and made them presentable. Better than the purpose-driven manifesto, which takes the same drives and pretends they’re not in the building. And this is because the sins are the drives called by their oldest, least flattering names, and their honesty is precisely this utility. The itch is the sin. The scratch is the Pleasure Code. And the brand is the back scratcher.

I stand by every word of it. But it also doesn’t tell the whole story

The Whole Story

Human motivation, commercially speaking, comes in three parts, and so far we have only named two of them.

The motivation is the sin. Primal, involuntary, unchosen. The itch.

The desire is the pleasure. The aesthetic design and satisfaction delivered in emotional and sensorial form, or the scratch.

And then, after the itching and after the scratching, arriving always slightly late (like your weird aunt or uncle) and always impeccably dressed (also like your weird aunt and uncle) comes the third thing.

The reason.

The reason is what the consumer says to the researcher, the spouse, or the colleague who raises an eyebrow at the new car, to justify the purchase (or any decision) in their mind to others. But mostly, and this is the part that matters, to themselves.

In other words, the reason is the story a person tells the self so that the emotional decision they’ve already made can be refiled, after the fact, under sound judgment.

Advertising, to its credit, confessed all this a century ago and then forgot it had done so. The oldest term of art in the business is “reason-why copy,” which is, as its name implies, copy that supplies the reason why someone should buy something. Notice the honesty buried in the jargon (copywriters back then were battling the Barnumesque copy and tended to view honesty as a copywriting technique). Nobody ever called it “reason copy.” It was always reason-why: a reason attached, after the fact, to a why that was already there. The industry has always known that its real job was not to give people reasons to buy but to give people reasons for having bought, even if they haven’t yet.

Today it simply prefers not to say so in the case studies.

So the question becomes: if the sins have a map, and the desires have a map, where’s the catalogue of the things people tell themselves to sell themselves?

Nobody, as far as I can tell, has ever drawn one.

So, naturally, that’s what I’m turning my pen to next.

Why I Call These Alibis Virtues

If the sins are the timeless human motivations, then the reasons, the justifications, the stories, the alibis, are the virtues. A virtue is a quality a person credits the self with, and a justification is an act of crediting oneself with a quality. Which makes every “I bought it because…” that’s not linked directly to a sin or a pleasure is a small private ceremony in which the buyer pins a medal on their own chest.

So, like I did with the eight sins, the first thing I did was audit the existing lists of virtues, of which Western civilisation has produced a suspicious number.

The Church has its cardinal virtues, assembled as the official opposition to the cardinal sins. But those were too moralistic and evangelical. Benjamin Franklin, never a man to leave a list undrafted, famously produced thirteen of his own as well as a system to master them: temperance, frugality, industry, and so on down the ledger.

There’s nothing wrong with these lists.

They’re worthy and altruistic. But they’re also, and I have not been able to improve on the word since it came up in the room where we built this framework, puritanical. They are virtues designed to be displayed as a means of overcoming human nature and therefore come with no real risk to them.

To understand what I mean, try this test: stand up at a dinner party and announce that you’re working on being more temperate or more industrious. What happens? A fist bump or someone tops up your glass. There’s no risk in any of it. And where there’s no risk there’s no honesty, and where there is no honesty there’s nothing that a human being would actually whisper as the self-justification while handing over a credit card for a Patek Philippe watch.

“I’m merely holding on to it for the next generation, I swear.”

Which is how I ended up with the virtues listed by a less obvious choice when one thinks of virtues.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nietzsche’s Eight

Nietzsche made his lists of virtues twice, and, as you'd expect from Nietzsche, they look like no one else's, even when the words are exactly the same.

In Daybreak, he lists four: honesty, bravery (Tapferkeit), generosity & politeness.

In Beyond Good and Evil, four more, which he said must be kept under strict self-control: courage (Muth / Mut), insight, sympathy, solitude.

I know that courage and bravery sound the same, but for Nietzsche they were not (and we’ll get to that in those issues).

Taken together, they make eight.

And what makes them different from Franklin’s thirteen is the same thing that made Paik’s sins different from Maslow’s hierarchy: the simple fact that they have not been cleaned up for company.

For example: Nietzsche’s honesty is not “be honest.” It is: honest towards ourselves and whoever else is a friend. Read that again and notice what it leaves out. It leaves out everyone else. It’s a virtue with fine print. These are the things you’d never say at a dinner party, which is exactly why you might actually say them to yourself.

Which brings me to the commercial point, and I will state it as plainly as I can, because it is the hinge on which this entire series turns.

Two Rules (Please Tattoo Them Somewhere Discreet)

Rule 1: After the itch of a sin is scratched by a pleasure, people will only buy from brands that let them justify the purchase to themselves, with one of eight virtues.

The virtue never causes the purchase. The pleasure does. The virtue is just the thing that permits it and even later justifies it. The Pleasure Codes seduces, but the virtue signs the paperwork. And this is important to understand because a brand that scratches the itch but withholds the alibi will lose the sale, at the last possible moment, to a brand that scratches the same itch and hands the consumer a story they can live with.

And from this follows Rule 2: If you find your brand positioned on a virtue, you are doing it wrong.

The virtues aren’t for other people. That’s their whole point. They are the private ceremony, and a brand that performs the consumer’s private ceremony in public is like a stranger reading your diary back to you in a warm, encouraging voice. (This, incidentally, is what Howard Gossage understood when he warned that one of the worst things a non-profit brand can do is make people feel guilty which reads as an accusation.)

There’s exactly one place in the marketing canon where a virtue may appear, and that is at the bottom of the funnel in the direct-response ad, or the closing argument and final nudge where your job is only to hand the already-seduced the sentence they’ll repeat to themselves on the drive home. We’ll watch this happen in detail in the next issue on Insight.

A Confession Before We Begin

It would be poor form, in a series about the stories people tell themselves, not to disclose mine.

I have told myself that we are building this map because the industry needs it, because nobody has done it, and because the third layer completes the framework of the itch, the scratch and the alibi. All of this is true. But underneath these reasons, is the only honest one: it is enormously pleasurable to see what everyone else has missed, which, you will notice when you read the next issue, is that Insight is in and of itself one of the eight.

Essentially, I am inside the machine I am describing and so are you. That is not a flaw in the framework. That is the evidence for it.

— Angelique

Next up: The Virtue of Insight

A few weeks ago a man I’ve never met sent me a question about his brand that I won’t repeat here, partly to protect him and partly because you wouldn’t believe me. It arrived the way these things now arrive, with no introduction or context. Not even a Dear Angelique. Just the question itself, dropped into my DMs like a palm thrust across a card table.

He wanted to know whether the thing he was about to do was a good idea. He wanted, in a word, permission.

I, of course, answered him at length, with great enthusiasm. And when I’d finished, I sat back from the keyboard with the warm, spreading, faintly disreputable satisfaction of a woman who has just been consulted.

That’s the confession. Not that I answered this man. Answering questions is virtuous enough work. The confession is that I enjoyed it in precisely the wrong way.

Because there’s a particular pleasure in being treated as an oracle, but if I’m being honest with myself and with you, it’s the pleasure of being necessary, which is a far more dangerous thing than being useful. The supplicant kneels, the priestess pronounces, and both parties leave the temple confirmed in their roles. He in his uncertainty. She in her indispensability.

All in all, it’s a lovely arrangement for the priestess. And this is the problem. I have begun to notice how lovely, which is usually the moment to become suspicious of oneself.

The Code Trap

This happens, I am told, to anyone who builds a system of codes.

Once you’ve named the machinery behind why people buy what they buy and love what they love, people begin to suspect you can see things they can’t, and they begin to bring you things, the way villagers once brought chickens to the woman at the edge of town.

Half in earnest, at the suggestion of a friend who is a professional stuntman in the old-fashioned Barnum style, I am considering setting up a gypsy style booth at Cannes next year. Complete with a headscarf, a crystal ball, and a small hand-lettered sign that reads: BRAND READINGS, $25 Or A Glass of Rosé.

In between sessions, I would have Mr Green entertain the crowd with one of his new animatronic AI inventions. I have no doubt that we would either make a fortune or get properly sotted.

That’s not the part of this idea that worries me, though. The worrying part is that anyone who sat down at the table would leave satisfied, and almost none of them would leave any smarter, which, if you think about it, is the entire business model of fortune telling. The fortune seeker must never learn to read the cards. The moment he or she does, the booth closes.

Most advice in my industry is built on the fortune teller’s model with slicker tailoring. At the end of the day, isn’t that what a consultant’s deck, or a guru’s framework, or an agency’s proprietary process is trying to tell you? Each one is a temple designed so that the answers live inside and you must keep coming back through the door. Admittedly, I’ve sat inside some of the world’s largest temples and have, if I’m being completely candid, helped decorate one or two.

So here’s what I’ve decided to do about it, and I’ll let you judge whether it’s a correction or merely a more elaborate booth.

Know Thyself

The inscription on top of the temple where the Oracle at Delphi prophesied said: “Know Thyself.” This is why Socrates was both thrilled and disturbed when the Oracle told someone that he was the wisest person on earth. He immediately set out on a tour to try and prove the Oracle wrong.

To do so, he started asking his friends and anyone he could meet question after question after question in search of the truth. What he soon discovered was that nobody seemed to know anything about anything. Including himself. But at least he knew that he didn’t know anything. And that’s what the Oracle must have meant when it said he was the wisest person of all.

I know that this is a strange way to announce something, but this is why I have decided to start a new series on LinkedIn called The Green Light.

The reason is to address these questions people send me about their brands. The strange ones. The sincere ones. The questions they wouldn’t dare to ask in a meeting with their own agency in the room. And I’ll answer them in public, using the Pleasure Codes, showing every card as I turn it.

The name is a small act of misdirection.

It’s partly named after me, partly named after the hopeful Green Light in The Great Gatsby, and partly referring to the concept of approving something to move forward. Only, in the spirit of knowing thyself, it is not about me actually giving anyone the Green Light.

That would imply that I sit somewhere in judgment, switching a light from red to green while brand leaders idle at the intersection. But this is not my aim, and if it ever comes across that way I hope one of you will write in and say so.

What I hope will happen is what I’ve seen happen, over and over, to the people who learn the codes. It’s something quite strange and particularly useful: they begin to see them everywhere. In the airport or supermarket or even in the headline news. And a person who can see the machinery no longer needs the mechanic’s permission. So the purpose of answering the question in public is less about issuing my verdict and more about making you gradually, irreversibly capable of your own. At which point the light was never mine to switch. You had your hand on it the whole time. I simply charge the admission of a subscribe button to point it out.

Whether that puts me out of the oracle business or makes me more like Socrates is a question I have decided not to examine too closely, on the grounds that a woman shouldn’t perform surgery on the goose while it is laying.

The first issue goes out tomorrow and it concerns a letter I received from a gentleman who was at great pains to assure me he is not Sam Altman. He wanted to know why people are afraid of his miracle. It’s a better question than he knows, and I intend to answer it more thoroughly than he would like.

You can subscribe here.

And if you have a question of your own, the weirder the better, send it my way. I'll endeavour to answer it as honestly as I know how. But the most interesting part probably won't be my answer. It'll be the fact that you asked.

Because people don't usually make the journey to the woman at the edge of town until some part of them already suspects where the truth lives.

— Angelique

PS: Look out for my latest Trend Safari this Thursday and a new series on the Eight Virtues is coming shortly after that.

In the spring of 1890, a Parisian girl of fifteen handed her copy of an English party game to a friend of the family, an awkward and asthmatic young man of eighteen named Marcel. The game was called Confessions: An Album to Record Thoughts, Feelings, &c. It was a small bound book with a list of thirty-five questions inside, the kind of parlour amusement upper-middle-class Europeans used to fill the hours between dinner and bed. The questions weren’t particularly deep.

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

What is your favourite occupation?

Where would you like to live?

What is your motto?

The young man, who would later write a seven-volume novel and receive a great deal of literary criticism but who at this point had written almost nothing, filled it out with the kind of seriousness most of us reserve for tax returns.

His answer to what is your idea of perfect happiness: To live in close contact with those I love, with the beauties of nature, with a quantity of books and music, and to have, within easy distance, a French theatre.

His answer to your favourite occupation: Loving.

His answer to the natural talent you’d like to be gifted with: Will-power, and irresistibility.

The young man, Marcel Proust, went on to spend the next thirty years writing what is, in some real sense, an extended version of the Confessions, a seven-volume excavation of the self conducted at the pace of an unhurried afternoon, with particular attention to madeleines, asparagus, the colour of certain church windows in Combray, and the precise way in which his mother used to kiss him good-night. In the end, he’d penned roughly 1.2 million words and none of them were in a hurry.

Proust’s Questionnaire eventually became the most famous personality assessment in twentieth-century literature.

After Proust, it passed from salon curiosity into literary ritual: Bernard Pivot used a leaner, ten-question version to close his French talk shows, first Apostrophes and later Bouillon de culture, where writers and artists were asked, among other things, for their favourite word, their least favourite word, and the sound they loved most. James Lipton then borrowed Pivot’s version for Inside the Actors Studio, adding “What’s your favourite curse word?” to the ceremonial final act of each episode. In 1993, Vanity Fair brought the fuller Proust Questionnaire to its back page, where it became a recurring altar to taste, neurosis, and self-disclosure. Every literary blog now has its version, and every podcast that wants to seem cultured bows to the format.

This is the founding document of the Pleasure Code called Zenjoyment and it’s the personal-brand pleasure code most catastrophically undersupplied in our current cultural moment.

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• 🧭 All 8 Pleasure Codes: the strategic guides for brand leaders building craveable brands based on the pleasures nobody says out loud

• 📡 Pleasure Codes Plus, my brand innovation intelligence platform with thousands of worked examples, cultural signals and strategic openings, updated weekly

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What Zenjoyment Actually Is

Zenjoyment is the plush pleasure of moving through life softly, slowly, and with the volume turned exactly where you like it.

It is the high-hedonist, high-me territory of the pleasure-codes map.

It sits directly next to OptiMe, the two codes share the same axis of self-directed attention, but the direction of travel could not be more opposed.

OptiMe is the restless project of becoming.

Zenjoyment is the settled project of being.

OptiMe says I am not yet finished.

Zenjoyment says I am here, and here is enough, and here is, in some specific way, rather lovely.

When you’re around someone whose personal brand lives in Zenjoyment, the experience is atmospheric. You feel, quite literally, slowed down. Your shoulders drop. You stop reaching for your phone, and notice, with a small private surprise, that the room has acquired texture you hadn’t noticed when you walked in.

This sense of ease has been shaped by a few surprisingly firm choices.

The first is the cultivation of preferences. Zenjoyment figures have taste, and they’ve spent a long time arriving at it. They know which coffee they prefer and which they don’t. They know which chair in the house they sit in to read. They know which film they want to watch on a rainy Sunday and which they want to watch when a friend is visiting. This sounds trivial. It is, in fact, the most demanding discipline on this list, because almost no-one in the modern attention economy is being asked, or paid, to slow down enough to know what they actually like.

The second is the visible defence of pace. Zenjoyment brands move slowly on purpose, and they let the pace be seen. They write the letter by hand. They take the long lunch. They leave the message unanswered until morning. They decline the invitation that would make the week belong to everyone but them. Their slowness is a deliberate, repeated, publicly defended choice.

The third is the refusal of the upgrade. The Zenjoyment brand doesn’t treat newness as a mandate. They keep the phone until the phone actually dies. They reach for the vinyl, the paperback with the cracked spine, the notebook with the coffee ring on page twelve. They print the photograph, repair the coat, return to the same café table, write with the same pen, and let ordinary objects gather memory instead of replacing them the moment a newer version appears. Their lack of churn is part of the offer.

The fourth, and the most subtle, is the lightness about it all. The genuine Zenjoyment brand isn’t pious about their pace. They don’t lecture or imply you should slow down too. They simply, observably, live like this. And the visible evidence of their calm and unhurried life does the persuading.

When all four choices come together, you get something that almost no contemporary personal-brand strategist will tell you to build, because it doesn’t look productive enough on a dashboard. You get a person who, in a culture screaming for more, has settled the question of enough.

Why Proust Is the Real Poster Child

Proust’s case is worth lingering on, because he illustrates the principle with unusual clarity and because most people who reference him have not actually read him.

The standard caricature is that Proust was a sickly aristocrat who wallowed in nostalgia. There is a grain of truth to this. He was, in fact, persistently asthmatic, and he did write at length about his childhood. But the caricature misses what Proust was actually doing. He was conducting, on the page, the most sustained empirical investigation in modern literature of what it feels like to be alive in a particular moment.

The famous madeleine remembrance is a hundred-page argument that involuntary memory, the kind triggered by a taste, a smell, a glimpse of light through a particular window, is the closest a human being ever gets to actually possessing their own life. The rest of experience, Proust argued, slides past us in a kind of low-resolution blur. The madeleine moments are the rare instances when reality is rendered in its actual, almost unbearable, detail.

To pursue this argument, he did something that almost no contemporary personal brand would consider. He withdrew.

In the last twelve years of his life, Proust lived almost entirely in a single Paris apartment whose walls he had lined with cork to keep out the sound of the city. He worked through the night, slept through the morning, ate one meal a day, dictated to a series of housekeepers, and corresponded voluminously with a small group of friends he saw mostly at his bedside. The famous, much-romanticised cork-lined room was the physical infrastructure of a Zenjoyment personal brand operating at its absolute extreme. He had concluded that the world’s volume was too loud for the work he wanted to do, and he had, with some seriousness, turned it down.

And this is the central paradox of the Zenjoyment personal brand.

The output is slower than the modern algorithm finds tolerable, and the cumulative effect is larger than any algorithm can measure.

Proust published the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu at his own expense, in 1913, because no publisher would take it. By the time the last volume appeared posthumously in 1927, the literary world had reorganised itself around what he had done. He is one of the most influential novelists of the twentieth century and he achieved this by being slower than everyone else.

The further lesson Proust offers, and the one almost every modern personal brand attempting this register misses, is that slowness has to be filled with attention. Logging off is not the same thing as noticing. Proust was slow because he was taking inventory. The thirty-five-question parlour game he filled out at eighteen was, in retrospect, the first draft of his life’s method. He had decided, that early, the answerable questions about a life were the small ones…

What is your favourite virtue?

Where would you like to live?

What is your favourite name?

…and that the slow accumulation of honest answers to such questions was the actual project of being a person.

This is the missing organ of every contemporary Zenjoyment imitator.

They have slowness without attention. The lit candle, the bath, the linen pyjamas, the photographed empty room, these are the costume of the code. The attention to particulars, applied with literary seriousness to one’s own life, is the substance. And very soon you begin to realise that the costume is nothing and that the emperor has no clothes.

The Modern Business Case: Warren Buffett

A century and a half after Proust’s birth, the purest modern example of a Zenjoyment personal brand is probably a ninety-five-year-old man who still lives in the house he bought in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1958.

Warren Buffett paid $31,500 for the house.

And despite being one of the richest people in the world, he has not moved. He drives himself to work most days, often through the McDonald’s drive-through for a breakfast that costs less than four dollars and varies by the day of the week according to a small rotation he established for himself decades ago. He drinks five cans of Cherry Coke a day. The Berkshire Hathaway website looks as if it has been politely refusing a redesign since the dial-up era. He writes the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder letter himself, by hand, in the room above the garage. He does not have a meaningful personal presence on social media. And I use the word personal on purpose to imply that he doesn’t have an account. He is, of course, all over social media. But not by his own doing (which, if you ask me, is the ultimate goal of a Zenjoyment personal brand). He has been giving away his fortune at a steady pace for two decades and intends, on his death, to give away nearly all of it.

He is, by most reasonable measures, one of the most consequential capitalists of our time. He is also, by personal practice, the most public living example of the Zenjoyment personal brand at scale.

What makes Buffett a Zenjoyment brand and not, say, a Wellthy Living brand (which is what most people would casually file him as) is the precise quality of his unhurriedness. He is not optimising himself. His McDonald’s breakfasts and Cherry Coke consumption means he is not in pursuit of a calm body and a clear mind in the wellness sense. But what he is doing is something rather different.

He has, over seventy years, cultivated his preferences to such a degree that he no longer feels the temptation of alternatives.

He likes the house. He likes the Cherry Coke. He likes the McDonald’s breakfast. He likes handwriting the annual letter. He likes the small group of people he reads, lunches with, and learns from. The Berkshire annual meeting is, in some real sense, the world’s most successful Zenjoyment salon, a once-a-year gathering of fifty thousand people in Omaha.

Buffett’s investment philosophy, taken on its own terms, is an explicitly Zenjoyment philosophy applied to capital.

“Our favorite holding period is forever,” he has written. “The stock market is designed to transfer money from the active to the patient.” He is, in operational terms, refusing to do what the algorithm wants him to do, and he’s refused to do it for so long that his refusal has become his entire competitive advantage.

So the lesson for any personal brand considering Zenjoyment is exacting.

You can’t decorate your way into this code. Lighting candles does not make you a Zenjoyment brand. Neither does taking a bath or posting about cozy-maxxing on TikTok. At least not right away. Because a Zenjoyment personal brand has to be built on actual, sustained, decades-long preferences that you genuinely hold, and that you are willing to defend in public even when (perhaps especially when) they’re no longer fashionable. Buffett has held the same house since the Eisenhower administration. He will not be moving to optimise tax efficiency.

It’s worth noting one other thing about Mr Buffett: despite trying not to, Zenjoyment can scale, and it can be enormously commercial. This is the irony. But it can only do this if the brand is authentic to begin with. Buffett’s brand is worth, in pure attention terms, more than almost any other corporate communications operation on earth. He achieves this with one annual letter, one annual meeting, and a small handful of public appearances per year. The leverage of slowness, properly executed, is staggering.

Several Flavours of Zenjoyment (Because the Code Is Not Monolithic)

Zenjoyment, more than any other pleasure code, comes in distinct flavours. It’s worth naming a few, because they sit very differently in the market, and you almost certainly belong in one of them rather than all of them.

The Sensual Noticer. This is the Proust register. The brand operator who has trained themselves, over years, to attend to taste, smell, texture, light, and the small specifics of physical pleasure. Nigella Lawson is the contemporary patron saint of this version: an after-dark Julia Child, with more butter and better eyeliner. Sade is the cooler, more restrained edge of the same code: sensuality without fuss, pleasure at a lower volume, the kind of presence that lets the room come to her. Their brand promise is that ordinary domestic life, taken seriously enough, is a continuous source of small daily joy. The risk is that this flavour can tip, in less careful hands, into mere food-and-candles aestheticism.

The Unhurried Strategist. This is the Buffett school. The brand operator who has decided that the most valuable thing they can do in their field is move slower than the people around them. Charlie Munger was a member of this club, as was the late Daniel Kahneman who authored Thinking, Fast and Slow, and as is the writer Maria Popova, who has been running her own slow-reading literary newsletter, The Marginalian, for more than twenty years without missing a week. Their brand promise is that depth, in any field, requires the refusal of speed.

The Curious Wanderer. This is the Anthony Bourdain appetite. The brand operator whose pace is set by their willingness to follow a conversation, a meal, or a stranger’s recommendation wherever it goes. Bourdain was, on the surface, a Euphoriaville figure (which we have discussed in earlier issues); but the actual texture of his personal brand when he was on No Reservations and Parts Unknown was Zenjoyment in motion, long meals, conversations that wandered for hours, the willingness to sit somewhere uncomfortable until the place revealed itself. Their brand promise is that the world is more interesting if you let it set the pace.

The Commanded Stillness. This is the Brian Cox temperament (the actor, not the physicist) with James Earl Jones as its patron saint of the pause. The brand operator whose pace is so devastatingly slow that others in the room have to organise around them. There’s a quality of unhurried gravitas here that almost no younger person possesses, because it takes decades to acquire. Their brand promise is authority through refusal.

The Graceful Acceptor. This is the Marie Kondo release, especially in her recent evolution. Kondo built her original brand on the perfectionist version of Zenjoyment (the spark-joy method, the tidied drawer, the photographed minimal living room). Then she had a third child, and the perfectionism cracked. Rather than pretending it hadn’t, she published a book introducing the Japanese concept of kurashi: a philosophy of making peace with things as they are, rather than as they should be. This is, in some ways, the most mature flavour of Zenjoyment, and the one most relevant to anyone considering this code in mid-career. Their brand promise is that grace is more attractive than tidiness, and that the visible willingness to release an earlier version of your own ideal is its own kind of authority.

So if you are setting out to build a Zenjoyment personal brand, the strategic question is not whether you can be slow. It’s what kind of slow you actually are. The market does not need another Buffett disciple, and it certainly does not need another food-and-candles performance.

It might, however, very much need yours.

The Crowded-Space Problem (in Reverse)

Last week’s piece on OptiMe spent considerable time on the fact that OptiMe is the most saturated pleasure code in the personal-brand market, with its echo chamber of identical productivity gurus hawking the same morning routine as revelation.

Zenjoyment has the opposite problem.

There are almost no honest Zenjoyment personal brands in the contemporary market. The aesthetic of slowness is everywhere: the linen pyjamas, the breakfast photographed in the slant of morning light, the cottage in the countryside. The practice of slowness, conducted with literary seriousness and sustained for decades, is almost nowhere.

This leaves the market wildly undersupplied in the very place modern attention is most depleted. Audiences are exhausted. They are looking, in a way they have not looked for thirty years, for a voice that does not arrive already panting for engagement. The personal brand willing to do the unfashionable work of being genuinely unhurried in public, with substance behind the pace, has a structural advantage in 2026 that almost no-one is currently exploiting.

The promise of speed and efficiency coming out of AI guru-dom and modern marketing only intensifies the hunger. One exception is Dr Sam Illingworth’s Slow AI newsletter, which I strongly recommend everyone start reading.

The catch, of course, is that you can’t fake this one.

The OptiMe market is so crowded because OptiMe can be performed. You can post the morning routine without doing the morning routine. Zenjoyment is less forgiving. The slowness has to be real, the preferences have to be cultivated, and the absence of churn has to be sustained over years. The market reward is large because the entry cost, in pure patience, is very high.

One Last Thought

There is a passage in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time that I think contains, in a single sentence, the entire instruction set for anyone considering this register seriously.

He is describing what happens when the narrator, an adult by then, takes a sip of tea with a small French cake in it and is suddenly, without warning, returned to the world of his childhood. He writes:

“The smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”

I want to pull one sentence out from that:

“The vast structure of recollection. Borne in the tiny and almost impalpable drop. Waiting and hoping for their moment.”

That, for me, is the entire Zenjoyment Pleasure Code, rendered in one sentence by a man who truly lived it. The argument is that the small specifics are the vast structure of a life. The taste. The smell. The morning light through a particular window. Most people move too quickly to let them register. The Zenjoyment brand is built by the person who notices them, returns to them, and lets that attention accumulate over time.

Last week’s newsletter argued for the OptiMe brand, the visible, candid practice of becoming. This week’s newsletter argues for its opposite, the visible, settled practice of being.

Both can support a serious personal brand.

But if you ask me, the second one, in our particular moment, is the more countercultural move, the more strategically underexploited position, and (I suspect) the more durable choice for the next decade.

As AI makes speed cheaper, easier, and more abundant, the market will start placing a different kind of value on the person willing to be visibly unhurried in public, with substance behind the pace.

That person may end up with a considerable body of work, but they’re almost certainly not building a content engine in the conventional sense. They are building, with Proustian seriousness, the small accumulating record of their own attention to a life lived softly, slowly, and with the volume turned exactly where they like it.

And then, occasionally, once a week, once a month, once a year, they publish what they have noticed.

— Angelique

The Shadow Side: When Slowness Hardens Into Control

The shadow of Zenjoyment is, of all the Pleasure Code shadows, the one most easily misread as a virtue and the one most damaging to the people around it.

The shadow is…

Read more

He proposed to work through them one by one, week by week, scoring himself daily in a small marbled-paper book. Why? Because by systematic attention, he believed, he could improve his character in a manner as orderly and verifiable as a merchant’s ledger.

It didn’t work as planned, which, it turned out, was entirely the point because six years later, he made a second decision that turned out to matter even more than the first.

He started publishing an almanac.

Poor Richard’s Almanac, which Benjamin Franklin wrote and printed annually from 1732 to 1758, was nominally a calendar with weather forecasts and astronomical tables. But scattered in the margins between the moon phases was the first great work of mass-market self-improvement in the English language.

“Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

"A penny sav'd is a penny got."

“Lost time is never found again.”

“Diligence is the mother of good luck.”

“Well done is better than well said.”

“He that lies down with dogs shall rise up with fleas.”

These sayings sold roughly ten thousand copies each year for twenty-five years. By the standards of the colonial book market, that is a phenomenon. Franklin himself estimated that Poor Richard outsold the Bible in many colonial households. And the reason was almost embarrassingly simple. Franklin had taken a vast, intimidating body of moral philosophy, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, the Puritan divines, the British essayists, and rendered it into sentences a tired colonial farmer could remember while walking behind a plow.

Mr. Franklin is one of the sole figures behind many of America’s founding documents. But the Almanac, along with his virtue tracker, was the founding document of every self-improvement movement in the Anglo-American tradition. Every productivity guru with a tracking system traces back to the virtues. The Twelve Steps trace back to it. Stephen Covey traces back to it. James Clear traces back to it. Tim Ferriss and Naval Ravikant trace back to it. And every productivity guru with a punchy one-liner traces back to the almanac.

It’s also the founding text of the Pleasure Code called OptiMe.

Which, when studied carefully, is also the reason almost every modern personal brand in this territory is doing it wrong.

What An OptiMe Personal Brand Actually Is

OptiMe is the exacting pleasure of tuning yourself into someone more capable than the version who showed up yesterday.

It is the high-me territory of the pleasure-codes map, adjacent to Wellthy Living, but with a critical difference.

Wellthy Living seeks ataraxia, the calm of having arrived. OptiMe seeks becoming, the more restless pleasure of being on the way. When you’re around someone whose personal brand lives in Wellthy Living, you feel that they have settled. When you are around someone whose brand lives in OptiMe, you feel that they are perpetually and slightly amusedly always under construction.

The drivers of an OptiMe personal brand are fairly consistent.

The first is the visible practice.

“An investment in knowledge,” Franklin wrote in the almanac, “pays the best interest.”

OptiMe people are usually working on many things, but they’re also not shy about what they’re working on. They’ll publish the system, the schedule, and even their own personal score. They don’t, in other words, just like to do the work. They like to show other people how they can do it too.

The second is first-principles thinking.

OptiMe figures, when faced with a problem, don’t default to the consensus answer. They strip the problem to its components and reason up from the floor. This is, when properly done, exhausting; which is why almost no-one actually does it, and almost everyone who pretends to is faking.

The third, and most counter-intuitive, is the cheerful relationship with one’s own failures.

“He that falls in love with himself,” Franklin wrote, “will have no rivals.” The line is funny because it’s honest, and it’s honest because Franklin recognised the temptation in himself.

The genuine OptiMe brand is funny about the parts of themselves they can’t or are trying to fix. They never pretend to have arrived. Because, when you think about it, once “arrived” they would cease to be an OptiMe brand. So they don’t pretend the next protocol will get them there.

The fourth is the refusal of the destination.

This is the part that separates the genuine OptiMe brand from the imposter, and it’s where almost every modern attempt at this code falls apart. The OptiMe brand doesn’t believe in finishing. They believe in continuing. The point isn’t to become optimised; the point is the daily, visible, slightly absurd practice of trying to.

When all four engines run together, you get something that is, in our current cultural moment, almost shockingly rare.

A person who is publicly trying to be better and who is, somehow, not exhausting to be around.

Why Ben Franklin Is the Real Poster Child

The standard misreading of Franklin’s virtue project is that it was about achieving the thirteen virtues. The schedule and the daily scoring are taken as evidence of a man on a serious and successful programme of self-perfection.

And while it may have started that way, Franklin soon turned it to a completely different purpose. The daily and weekly scoring, he came to realise, was really a way of practising the virtues in public, with a degree of honesty about the gap between aspiration and behaviour that almost no modern personal-development figure can stomach.

“In reality there is, perhaps, no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride,” he wrote. “Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will every now and then peep out and show itself.”

Consider, for a moment, what it took for one of the most accomplished men of the eighteenth century, diplomat, scientist, inventor, and founding father, to write, in plain English, that he had failed.

This is why, in our era of polished personal brands, there is almost no equivalent. You can’t find a modern productivity guru willing to publish, on their main feed, an admission as candid as Franklin’s: that the central virtue on their own published list is one they have never managed to acquire and probably never will.

And even if one of them did, Franklin got there first. He had already named the trap waiting on the far side of the confession. “Even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it,” he wrote, “I should probably be proud of my humility.”

Franklin’s brilliance was that he understood the admission was the brand.

He also understood something his modern imitators almost universally miss: the system alone does not travel well.

A list of thirteen virtues in a private notebook helps no one. Thirteen virtues paired with twenty-five years of pithy, memorable, slightly funny one-liners scattered through a yearly almanac, on the other hand, get repeated at the dinner table for centuries.

Something like Franklin’s Almanac is the genuinely missing element in modern OptiMe practice. Instead, today’s self-improvement brands publish frameworks. And while frameworks are admired, a framework, no matter how clever, dies in the social post where it was born. A saying, on the other hand, leaks into the language and never leaves.

The Modern Business Cases: Elon Musk and Lewis Hamilton

The modern OptiMe brand comes in two distinct registers.

Elon Musk is a complicated case, and I want to handle him carefully.

Set aside, for the next few minutes, whatever you may feel about his politics, platform, and public conduct, or the more controversial aspects of his recent years. The question we’re examining is narrower. As a personal-brand operator working in the OptiMe register, what has Musk actually been doing for two decades?

The answer, at his best, is first-principles thinking conducted in public.

First off, Musk talks about first principle thinking a lot. And not just in terms of what it is. But also, how it can improve almost everything you do.

There’s a video clip that I think captures this better than any biography. A YouTube vlogger who covers space launches was given a tour of SpaceX. At one point, walking past some component of a rocket, the vlogger asks, hesitantly, whether a particular door arrangement might be done differently. The question is small, almost throwaway. Musk stops. He thinks. He says something like, that’s probably a better way; I’ll bring it up with the team. The vlogger moves on. The tour ends.

Months later, the vlogger returns for another tour. Within the first few minutes, Musk says, with no particular fanfare, We changed it. And then he describes the change in technical detail.

You can disagree with everything else Musk has done in the past five years. But you can’t easily dismiss what this scene shows. It shows a person who will accept a suggestion from a YouTuber on the same terms as a suggestion from a Nobel laureate, provided the suggestion is correct, and who will act on it, and who will remember to follow up. That’s what first-principles thinking looks like when it is real rather than performed.

It’s worth noting that Musk has also developed his own set of repeatable sayings, in the Franklinian sense. But instead of an Almanac, Musk has X.

“The best part is no part; the best process is no process; if you’re not failing, you’re not innovating enough; if a schedule is long, it’s wrong.”

Whatever else one says about him, he’s understood the almanac principle. His sayings travel. Engineers across his companies repeat them. And some of his phrases, like this one about DOGE coin, have become, for better and worse, part of the operating vernacular of an entire crypto industry that Musk admires.

“Fate loves irony. “Arguably the most entertaining outcome, the most ironic outcome, would be that Dogecoin becomes the currency of Earth in the future.”

The lesson for any personal brand considering OptiMe is clear. Pick what you are actually optimising, be honest about it, and find the phrases that compress what you have learned. Musk is not selling his lifestyle. In fact, he’s very vocal about people not trying to be completely like him. But what he is selling is a cognitive method, and he has packaged it in lines matched with actions that are short enough to be remembered.

Lewis Hamilton is, in some ways, the cleaner case, and the one I think most readers of this newsletter will find more useful.

Hamilton is a working-class kid from Stevenage in Hertfordshire who, by improbable degrees of personal discipline and family sacrifice, became one of the most successful Formula One drivers in history. By the conventional logic of his sport, he ought to have retired some years ago, on top, with all the records intact, to a comfortable life of brand partnerships and golf.

He has done, characteristically, something quite different. At an age when most drivers are easing toward the door, he switched teams, moved to Ferrari, and effectively chose to start a new chapter on the hardest possible setting: a fresh team, a new culture, a new car, a steeper learning curve, and a non-trivial possibility of public failure. He did this, on his own telling, because he was bored with comfort, and because he believed he had more in him.

This is OptiMe at its purest. It isn’t optimisation conducted from anxiety, the way most contemporary self-improvement culture is. It’s optimisation conducted from a settled refusal of the easy ending. Hamilton has nothing left to prove. He’s proving things anyway, because the practice of proving things is what he’s all about.

He’s also, importantly, a style icon, a vocal advocate for diversity in his sport, and a vegan. The OptiMe brand at its best is not narrow. It has its core practice (in his case, driving faster) and it has its concentric circles of related care (the body, the politics, the clothes, the team). The whole is integrated. The brand is the man, not a single curated facet of him.

The Crowded-Space Problem (and How to Solve It)

OptiMe is, by a comfortable margin, the most crowded personal-brand pleasure code on the New York Times best sellers list, on LinkedIn, on Substack, and on every platform where personal brands attempt to make a living. When people make fun of thought leaders, it’s usually OptiMe brands they’re making fun of.

Every productivity guru, every podcast host, every coach, every founder-with-a-newsletter, every fitness influencer, every cognitive-enhancement-stack-broadcaster, they are all, structurally, attempting the OptiMe move. The result is a market so saturated that almost every voice in it sounds identical to almost every other voice.

You can hear the echo chamber of the same five frameworks, morning routines, protein targets, supplement subscriptions, and minimalist motivational desk photographs from across the globe. The same conviction that the speaker has cracked something the rest of us have not.

So unless you are capable of becoming the next Ben Franklin, the only reliable way to stand out in a crowded OptiMe market is to bring a second pleasure code with you.

Tim Ferriss is OptiMe braided with WonderWorlds. The optimisation is real; the frame is an exploration of strange and exotic worlds you would not otherwise have entered. The kettlebell story, the Argentine tango world championship, the experiments in Fiji. The OptiMe content is delivered through a WonderWorlds doorway, and that combination is what made him distinctive in a category that already had a hundred better-credentialed authors.

So if you are setting out to do OptiMe as a personal brand today, this is the most important strategic decision you will make.

Which second pleasure code is yours?

• OptiMe: Ben Franklin did it pure, before anyone needed a second code.

• Zenjoyment: Jade Bonacolta sells the quiet mind to a noisy feed.

• EuphoriaVille: The Rock films the cheat day like a sacrament.

• WonderWorlds: Tim Ferriss disguises self-improvement as exotic adventure.

• WeTopia: Adam Grant makes ambition look like generosity.

• Regeneration Nation: Rich Roll rebrands rock bottom as a starting line.

• Joyning: Arnold Schwarzenegger hosts the Pump Club like a salon.

• Wellthy Living: Andrew Huberman prescribes perpetual self-tuning as wellbeing.

If you can’t answer that question, you will be one of ten thousand productivity newsletters, and the market has stopped rewarding ten thousand productivity newsletters. If you can answer it, you have a chance of being heard.

There is a secondary discipline, equally important, that almost no modern OptiMe brand bothers with.

You need an almanac.

The frameworks and protocols aren’t enough. The thing that actually travels is the sentence short enough to be quoted, true enough to be remembered, and useful enough to be repeated. If you have been publishing for two years and you cannot point to three or four sentences of your own that other people quote back to you, you have a content engine, but you don’t yet have an almanac.

One Last Thought

There is a passage in Franklin’s Autobiography that I think contains, in a single sentence, the entire instruction set for anyone considering this register seriously.

He’s describing his thirteen-virtue project, the visible failures, the years of partial progress, and the way the whole apparatus turned out, in retrospect, to have shaped his life. He writes: “On the whole, though I never arrived at the perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet I was, by the endeavour, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been.”

I never arrived. I fell far short. I was, by the endeavour, better and happier.

That is the entire OptiMe pleasure code in fifteen words.

The arrival is never the point. The endeavour is the prize.

Now consider, in light of everything we have just walked through, what Franklin actually built.

He built the system. He built the daily scoring book. He admitted, in print, that he couldn’t master humility and probably never would. He built the OptiMe version of Joyning’s Salon, which he called “The Junto,” the small circle of fellow improvers who met weekly for forty years. He also compressed everything he learned into one-line aphorisms and put them into an almanac that an ordinary family could afford, and he kept it going for a quarter of a century.

But he didn’t, by his own admission, ever arrive.

And yet, the contemporary personal-brand market is, structurally, almost incapable of saying what he said. The whole empire of productivity content depends on the promise that there is, somewhere, a final destination that will, if followed, deliver you to the other side of your current self. Almost none of this is true. The people who have done the most actual self-improvement work, almost without exception, will tell you so plainly when asked.

The OptiMe brand, at its best, is the person who tells you this from the inside. Who shows (not tells) you the system, the schedule, and the score. Who shows you the failures. Who refuses the language of arrival. Who braids in their second pleasure code so they sound like themselves rather than the algorithm. Who has built, painstakingly over years, an almanac of their own, a small library of sentences short enough to be remembered, true enough to be quoted, and useful enough to outlast them.

And who, after years of visible, candid, slightly amused practice, has become, by the endeavour, a better and happier version of themselves than they otherwise should have been.

You, too, can build a personal brand around OptiMe.

But you have to be willing to accept that you will probably fail.

If you can’t bring yourself to admit this, then this is the wrong pleasure code for you, and I would gently steer you elsewhere on the map.

But if you can, the door is open.

The market is crowded, but the genuinely candid practitioners are still rare and much needed.

— Angelique

PS: Get your Madeleines ready. Next week is Proust and the art of Zenjoyment.

The Shadow Side: The Self-Optimisation Trap

The shadow of OptiMe is, of all the pleasure-code shadows, the one most likely to be praised as a virtue while it’s happening, and the one most reliably damaging when it does. It is also, in the year 2026, almost certainly the version of OptiMe you have spent the most time around.

The shadow is…

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For two thousand years, the word epicurean has been used to describe the sensualist luxuriator and wine-soaked dinner host of extravagant appetites.

If you describe a meal as epicurean today, you mean something close to decadent. The word, in modern English, is more or less a synonym for hedonist and religious Jews use the word apikores to define a heretic.

This is almost impressively backwards. Epicurus himself was about as far from the wine-soaked dinner host as it is possible to get.

Epicurus, the Greek philosopher who lent the word his name, lived a life that, by the standards of contemporary wellness influencers, would look almost punitively spare. He dined on bread and water and only added a piece of cheese on feast days. He lived, deliberately, on the outskirts of Athens, in a property he called The Garden, with a small community of friends who shared meals, work, and resources in a manner so radical that contemporaries were scandalised. Women and enslaved people were admitted on equal terms, which was, in 306 BCE, the philosophical equivalent of starting a cult. He was, by all accounts, in considerable physical pain for most of his adult life from a chronic stone-related illness.

And yet, on the last day of his life, dying in considerable agony at the age of seventy-two, he wrote a letter to a friend describing the day as a truly happy one.

The thing that’s been forgotten in the modern misuse of his name is that Epicurus didn’t equate pleasure with indulgence. He equated pleasure with the absence of disturbance in the mind and body, what he called ataraxia. And he understood, with a clarity most modern wellness culture has lost, that this state is most reliably produced by the difficult, ordinary, daily practice of living well and within your means.

This is Wellthy Living and it’s easily the most subversive of all the personal brand Pleasure Codes.

What Wellthy Living Actually Is

Wellthy Living is the pleasure of body, mind, and spirit tuned to a single clear frequency. It’s the territory of high eudaimonia fused with the deeply individual, and slightly stubborn project of living so well that the visible state of your life becomes its own argument.

The trick of the name is the deliberate confusion of two ideas that have, in our culture, almost merged. Wellness, in the modern sense, has become a status symbol. The right supplements. The right water bottle. The right wearable.

Wealth, meanwhile, has become a strange and exhausting performance, in which the actual texture of a wealthy life (the freedom, the time, the calm) has been almost entirely supplanted by its decorations.

Like the right Erewhon smoothie photographed in the right light.

Put together, Wellthy Living is the (somewhat impertinent) suggestion that these two ideas have got tangled, and that it is time to untangle them.

When you’re around someone whose personal brand lives in Wellthy Living, the experience is unmistakable, and pretty hard to fake because you feel that you’re with a person who has done the work. Their body looks like it has been built rather than purchased. Their attention is unhurried. Their answers to questions are short, useful, and slightly unflattering to whichever fashionable thing you just praised. They are, in some specific way, more there than the rest of us, and they have a way of making sure that you know that this “thereness” is the by-product of a thousand boring decisions made in the same direction over many years.

The drivers of a Wellthy Living personal brand are, I think, reasonably consistent.

The first is coherence between body and life.

Wellthy Living people look like the lives they actually lead. They do not have the bodies of people who have hired specialists to manufacture them. They have the hardened bodies of people who have, daily, for decades, chosen the harder thing.

The second is the discipline that never announces itself.

They’re, almost universally, not preachy. They’ve made peace with the fact that other people are not going to make their choices, and they’ve stopped needing them to. Which makes them, paradoxically (and they know this), far more contagious than the people who try to recruit you.

The third is the refusal of the shortcut.

The Wellthy Living personal brand sells, as its central proposition, the unfashionable observation that there is no hack. They are, in a culture saturated with a five-step cheat code, willing to be the person in the room who says, no, you actually have to do it for ten years.

The fourth, and most telling, is the genuine, slightly bewildered happiness.

But don’t mistake this for joy or exuberance. It’s more like the observable and settled sense of happiness of a person who has worked out a way to be at home in their own skin. And this is the thing that people attracted to Wellthy Living personal brands actually want. It’s also the thing that no amount of money can buy you in advance.

When all four engines run together, you get a personal brand that, in our current cultural moment, is wildly undersupplied and almost criminally underpriced.

You get a person who is, simply, well.

Why Epicurus Is the Real Poster Child

It is worth lingering on Epicurus, because his case shows the principle with unusual clarity, and because we have spent two thousand years getting him almost exactly wrong.

As I mentioned earlier, he founded The Garden in 306 BCE. Unlike Plato’s Academy, Aristotle’s Lyceum or Pythagoras’ cult, the Garden wasn’t set up as a school. It was more like an intentional community. The closest modern analogue is, perhaps surprisingly, an Israeli kibbutz where members who share a similar philosophy live together, share meals, keep a vegetable plot, and support one another’s work. The diet was simple bordering on austere. The conversation was philosophical but not pompous. Epicurus believed firmly that the purpose of philosophy was more practical (the relief of anxiety, the cultivation of friendship, the calm-eyed acceptance of mortality) than performative.

The trick he pulled, and the trick that defines every successful Wellthy Living personal brand since, is that he lived the philosophy in such visible and unhurried detail that it became its own marketing. His followers didn’t follow him because he had the most persuasive theory of pleasure. They followed him because, when they showed up at The Garden, the man and his small community looked like proof. Not rich. Not famous. Not lavish. Just, well. Which, in a city as politically frantic and emotionally volatile as Athens in the period after Alexander the Great, was a devastatingly convincing piece of evidence.

This is the central paradox of Wellthy Living as a personal-brand strategy. The work is invisible, but the result is unmissable. You can’t simply perform this kind of brand. Your personal brand and your actual way of living have to become almost identical. You live it every day, for long enough that other people begin to notice something is different. And when they ask, you tell them what you have been doing. Then they choose to believe you, or they don’t.

There is no shortcut around this part. Which is, in fact, the philosophy.

The Modern Business Case: Joe De Sena and the Mission to Get the World Off the Couch

Two and a half thousand years after Epicurus, the clearest modern example of a Wellthy Living personal brand is probably a Vermont-based former Wall Street commodities trader who founded an obstacle-course race because he was, by his own description, irritated.

Joe De Sena is the founder of Spartan Race, and depending on the day, a walking lawsuit, a cult leader, and one of the most consequential figures in contemporary fitness culture. He runs his life and his company from a working farm in Pittsfield, Vermont, where employees and guests are routinely required to wake at five, do burpees in the snow, chop wood, and, in one notorious office story, watch as De Sena walks across the room and throws away a box of doughnuts someone had brought in for a colleague’s birthday.

He is, in person, simultaneously charming and slightly terrifying.

Importantly, he doesn’t train apart from the people around him. He could, of course. He’s an extraordinary athlete with the resources to do anything he wants. But when he shows up at a race, he’s not there simply to manage the event or cheer from the sidelines. He runs it with the participants. He doesn’t just make you do burpees in the middle of a meeting. He gets down on the floor and does them with you.

What makes De Sena a Wellthy Living personal brand (and not a fitness influencer of the more familiar shouty variety) is the part most people miss. His favourite Spartan Race participants, he’s said many times, are the visibly unprepared people who turn up for the first time and walk the entire course. He admires them. He singles them out. He gives them (and not the elite athletes who finish first) his attention. The whole apparatus of Spartan Race exists to give those people the experience of having done something they did not believe they could do.

His stated mission is, characteristically grandiose: get a hundred million people off the couch.

This is the Epicurus move in modern dress.

And just like an Epicurus philosophy, there is no shortcut. Spartan races are expensive because Joe believes you should feel the sting as motivation. The work is hard but the result is visible. The brand is built on the proposition that ordinary humans, doing the unfashionable, repetitive, often-painful basics, will produce in themselves a quality of life that no amount of money can otherwise buy.

It’s worth noting that the Spartan Race brand itself is not a Wellthy Living brand. It is an OptiMe company brand. And the distinction between the personal brand of the founder and the company brand is instructive. The company sells optimisation. The man sells something deeper. And it is the two things together that make the experience for the audience so powerful. But it’s also an important reminder that your personal brand and your company brand do not have to live in the same Pleasure Code, and in cases like this one they very productively don’t.

To put it in Spartan terms (the Greek city-state not the rave), the world is full of people selling the sizzle and downgrading the state. The Wellthy Living personal brand is the rare figure who refuses to do this. They are, like the ancient Spartans, sometimes irritatingly, committed to selling you the state.

Wellthy Living vs. the Wellness-Industrial Complex

Wellthy Living is not the same thing as the wellness industry.

The wellness industry, in its current form, has become an extraordinarily efficient machine for selling the image of being well to people who feel unwell. The Goop candle. The Erewhon smoothie. The $500 weekly delivery of vegetables that could have been grown in a small back garden for free. The supplement subscription. The wearable that tracks the sleep you are anxious about because you can see how badly you are sleeping. The recovery boots. The infrared sauna. The cold plunge timed by an app notification.

None of these things is inherently bad. Some are genuinely useful. But the brand of wellness that has emerged around them is doing something rather different from what Epicurus or Joe De Sena are doing. It’s selling the status of wellness as a product. It’s the costume without the practice. Or to put it in De Sena terms, it is the sizzle being marketed while the steak is downgraded.

This makes the test, for any personal brand considering Wellthy Living, brutally simple: is your audience walking away healthier, or just better decorated?

Take Gwyneth Paltrow, for example. Her company Goop is a superficial Wellthy Living brand and remarkably successful merchant of decorations.

It offers the candles, the gummies, the serums, the total lifestyle, packaged. But after a while, the effect isn’t necessarily greater wellbeing. It can be more monitoring, more purchasing, more anxiety about whether your body, home, pantry, skin, hormones, and sleep are optimised enough. The personal brand at the centre is selling the visible signs of wellbeing rather than the substance.

Stanley Tucci, by contrast, is operating much closer to genuine Wellthy Living. After cancer, recovery, and a period in which food itself became difficult, his public life now appears organised around restored appetite: travelling through Italy, talking to farmers, cooks, families, and producers, and treating a properly grown tomato as something worth paying attention to. He looks like a man whose life has recently been measured in days rather than years, and who is now spending the recovered time on things that actually contain pleasure.

The honest version of this requires that you publish the substance, not the signal. Which is, I should warn you, considerably harder than running a Goop. But it’s also considerably more durable, because the audience cannot, eventually, be fooled.

That’s the ultimate litmus test of a Wellthy Living personal brand. Are you doing the hard work and despite doing the hard work are you happy? If the answer is yes, then you are a personal brand in the space of Wellthy Living. If, however, you’re not doing the hard work but happy or doing the hard work and not happy then you are something else.

One Last Thought

When Epicurus was dying, in serious pain from the illness he had carried for years, he wrote a letter to his friend Idomeneus. The letter was short. It describes the day as blessed, despite the agony. It thanks him for their friendship and asks him to look after another friend’s children.

That’s the entire letter.

There’s no self-promotion. No advice. No system for how to die well.

And there’s a detail hiding in his name. Epicurus comes from the Greek epikouros: ally, or comrade. We turned it into a byword for private indulgence. His last letter, spent entirely on his friends, shows which meaning he actually lived.

Epicurus had spent forty years building a personal brand around the idea that a life properly arranged could produce calm even at the worst moment, and he had (in the worst moment of all) calmly verified the claim.

That’s the whole discipline. You build the life. You let the result show, in small ways, as you go. Eventually the texture of it becomes its own argument, and people start to ask. You tell them. Some try. A few stay.

The sizzle, in our culture, is everywhere. The steak is rare. The Wellthy Living brand is simply the visible commitment to being, against all current incentives, an example of the latter.

Which is why it may be the bravest of all the Pleasure Codes. And it is, I suspect, the one our particular moment in history is most hungry for.

— Angelique

PS: If you’re ready to go deeper, here’s the Wellthy Living Playbook.

The main edition told you what Wellthy Living is and why it worked for Epicurus and Joe De Sena. It did not tell you how to live it. Understanding it and living it are different problems, and living it is the one that asks for ten years before it shows.

The mistake almost everyone makes is assuming the how is a matter of intensity. Train harder. Buy the better supplement. Find the cleaner protocol. It is the opposite. You already know there is no hack, but living it means doing the boring thing for the ten-thousandth time when no one is watching.

This playbook is about how you actually live it. It comes down to six principles, and the first is …

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In the spring of 1922, a young American newspaperman named Ernest Hemingway, recently arrived in Paris with a wife, a notebook, and almost no money, climbed two flights of stairs to a small apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus in the sixth arrondissement and knocked on the door.

The door was opened by a middle-aged American woman with a Roman emperor’s haircut and the look of a person who had been expecting him.

For the next decade and a half, that apartment was the most important room in twentieth-century literature.

It was where Hemingway would learn (or, more accurately, where Gertrude Stein would tell him) that his early attempts at prose were “inaccrochable” (unsellable) and needed to start over. It was where Pablo Picasso painted the woman seated in front of him, across some 80 sittings, into a portrait that now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and where Matisse argued with Stein’s brother about colour. It was also where F. Scott Fitzgerald appeared, more than once, drunk and full of questions. And where Sherwood Anderson sent his young protégés, Ezra Pound came to fight, and Alice B. Toklas served the cakes.

Stein wrote almost nothing in those years that anyone now reads. Her novels were, by general consent, almost unreadable; her poetry tested the patience of even her closest friends. And yet, by the time she died in 1946, she had become the single most consequential figure in modern American letters, on the strength of who came to her door and what they took home with them. Her own pages were almost beside the point.

This is what the Pleasure Code Joyning looks like in personal form, and it is, in a curious way, the most subtly powerful of all the personal-brand pleasure codes (and the one most easily mistaken for something else).

What Joyning Actually Is

The Pleasure Code of Joyning is the pleasure of belonging. It is the high-eudaimonia territory that sits between me and we, the place where the loneliness paradox of our age (everyone connected, no-one connected) gets resolved by people rather than technology.

When you’re around someone whose personal brand lives in Joyning, the experience is unmistakable. You feel, in some specific and slightly uncomfortable way, that you are in their light. You want to be there. You want them to know your name. You leave the room slightly elevated, and you find yourself, later, thinking about how to get back into the room.

Its nearest neighbour is WonderWorlds, and the line between them is worth understanding: with a WonderWorlds brand you step into a world someone built, while with a Joyning brand the person is the world.

The drivers of a Joyning personal brand are reasonably consistent.

The first is the glow.

Joyning figures emit something. It is not exactly charisma, in the showbiz sense. Some of them are quite ordinary-looking; even retiring. It’s closer to a kind of focused presence, a quality of attention so total that whoever is in front of them feels (correctly) that nothing else in the room matters quite as much.

The second is the entourage.

This is the cleanest litmus test we have. Joyning personal brands always have an entourage, but don’t mistake this for a fan base (that’s for celebrities) or an audience (that’s for broadcasters). An entourage. The recognisable, identifiable, somewhat-jealous group of people who are visibly part of this person’s orbit and who would happily name themselves as such. If a person doesn’t have an entourage, they don’t have a Joyning personal brand.

The third is the belief system.

The bond between the Joyning figure and their entourage is creedal. You belong because you believe the things they believe (about food, about advertising, about literature, about how a life should be lived). The entourage is held together by a shared set of convictions that the central figure articulates better than anyone else on the planet.

The fourth, and the most telling, is what I have come to call the continuity test.

The Joyning personal brand is the one without whom the whole enterprise immediately wobbles.

Succession, the HBO series, spent four seasons examining exactly this terror: what does the company do when the founder dies? The answer, in the case of a true Joyning brand, is that it can’t do anything, at least not the same thing. Apple, fifteen years after Steve Jobs’s death, still asks (sometimes openly) what he would have thought. That is the signature of Joyning. When the founder is gone, the orbit collapses.

When all four engines run together, you get something that the algorithm can’t manufacture and the average personal-branding consultant can’t teach. You get a person who other people want to belong to.

Why Stein is the Poster Child

It’s tempting to assume Stein became the centre of Paris because she was the best writer in the room, but Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Joyce were there too, and they were considerably more talented. Or because she threw the best parties, but Natalie Barney, across town, threw absurdly more entertaining ones. Or because she was simply more charismatic, but by most accounts she was actually quite abrupt, monumentally stubborn, and not given to small talk.

What she had, that almost no-one else in Paris had, was a vision of what literature was about to become, and the conviction (which she expressed without apology, repeatedly, for thirty years) that she alone had identified it. “Picasso is doing in painting what I am doing in prose,” she once told a guest, with the kind of seriousness that made the sentence land. It was a preposterous claim. It was also, in some real sense, true, and people kept coming back to her apartment to be told things just like it.

This is the central paradox of the Joyning personal brand. The price of entry to Stein’s circle was that you accepted, at least for the evening, her view of where the world was going. In return, you got access to a way of seeing things that you could not have arrived at by yourself. Hemingway later wrote about her with a complicated mixture of debt and resentment that is the giveaway of every entourage member who has eventually left: I wish I could have stayed angry at her, but I couldn’t, because I owed her too much.

That is what it sounds like to have once belonged.

The further lesson Stein offers, and the one that matters for any modern personal brand attempting this register, is that her apartment ran as a practice. Saturday evenings. Every week. For three decades. The salon was open whether anyone came or not. The pictures on the wall stayed up. The cakes were prepared. Belonging is built by the patient, almost stubborn and unglamorous repetition of being available to be belonged to.

The Modern Business Case: Bill Bernbach (and Why His Children Are Still Talking About Him)

Stein had her business equivalent in advertising, and his story is, for our purposes, the truest contemporary case we have.

Bill Bernbach founded the agency Doyle Dane Bernbach in 1949. He never, in his entire career, wrote a book. He gave essentially the same speech, with minor variations, for thirty years. He wouldn’t even appear on talk shows. And yet, in the small and competitive world of mid-century New York advertising, Bernbach achieved something that no number of books or speeches could have matched.

He became someone people belonged to.

Mary Wells (later the most powerful woman in American advertising) was Bernbach’s child. George Lois (the brutal, brilliant Esquire cover designer) was Bernbach’s child. Helmut Krone, who designed the Volkswagen “Think Small” advertisement that effectively launched the creative revolution, was Bernbach’s child. Phyllis Robinson, the first woman copy chief at a major agency, was Bernbach’s child. Whole creative departments of agencies that came after (Wells Rich Greene, Carl Ally, every shop George Lois ever started) were, in some real sense, downstream of Bill.

What did Bernbach do to deserve this?

On paper, surprisingly little. He shared his beliefs about advertising (that it should respect the reader, that it should make the reader smile, that an honest product simply explained would outperform a dishonest product cleverly disguised). He hired people who shared those beliefs and he defended their work, sometimes against clients, often against more senior colleagues. He paid attention. He repeated himself patiently. He kept the lights on at DDB and let the people inside it become, in their own minds, Bernbach people.

That last phrase is the entire principle in microcosm. Bernbach people. The phrase outlasted him by fifty years. It still appears in industry obituaries today. When a Bernbach veteran dies, half the appreciations still describe them, decades after they left DDB, as having been one of his. That is what it looks like to have built a Joyning personal brand of real durability.

The lesson, if you are running anything that depends on creative people choosing to associate with you, is severe. You cannot demand that people be yours. You can only become someone they want to belong to, and then keep the lights on long enough for them to declare it.

The Crucial Distinction: Joyning vs. WonderWorlds (and Why Taylor Swift Is Not in This Category)

I want to draw a distinction here that took me some time to sharpen, because it is the place where most people who try to play in this register go sideways.

Taylor Swift, who we looked at in the WonderWorlds piece, has tens of millions of devoted fans who would, by any casual standard, look like an entourage. They wear the costumes. They quote the lyrics. They argue with strangers about her on the internet. They turn up to stadiums in identical homemade outfits. Surely, you would think, this is the largest Joyning brand currently operating in popular culture.

It isn’t. And the reason it’s not is worth understanding.

The Swifties are decoding the world Swift has built. They are inside the universe of the albums, the eras, the Easter eggs, the recurring colour codes. They are, in the precise WonderWorlds sense, in another world. The relationship is between the fan and the work. Swift herself is the architect of that world, but the fan’s experience is of inhabiting the world, not of belonging to Swift personally. A Swiftie is loyal to the project. A Bernbach person was loyal to the man.

You can test this by asking what happens when the central figure is gone. If Swift retired tomorrow, the Swifties would continue, indefinitely, decoding the existing catalog. The WonderWorld she has built would persist. By contrast, the moment Bernbach stopped showing up at DDB, the agency immediately and visibly began to change. The thing he had built was him, distributed through other people.

This is The Continuity Test in action. If the orbit can survive the founder’s absence, it was a world. If the orbit collapses, it was Joyning. (And to be clear, I mean belonging in the older, more generous sense; the personal devotion of a student to a teacher, a craftsman to a master, a follower to a leader whose followers were genuinely improved by the association.)

This distinction matters for anyone considering whether they belong in this Pleasure Code at all, because the Joyning personal brand makes a much more demanding promise than the WonderWorlds one. You’re not building a world that will outlast you. You’re inviting people to belong to you, in real time, for as long as you can sustain it. The pressure of that promise is what causes a lot of people who try this register to crack.

Joyning is, in the end, a vow.

The Current Proof

Lest this all sound antique, the Joyning personal brand is alive, well, and (in the right hands) generating eight- and nine-figure revenues in 2026.

Consider Dan Martell, the Canadian founder and serial entrepreneur whose coaching business, about helping entrepreneurs Buy Back Your Time, has become one of the most secretly powerful operations in North American small-business circles. A colleague of mine told me how he sent Martell a thank-you note recently because so many of the people he works with today first found him through the Martell orbit. That’s the entourage effect in action. Martell doesn’t need to sell to those people directly; his existing community refers them frequently and unprompted because they consider themselves Dan’s people and my colleague part of Dan’s extended orbit. My colleague even hired an assistant from an organisation that helps people hire assistants based on Dan’s principles.

What does Martell actually do to maintain this? He shows up. He answers messages personally for far longer than the size of his audience would suggest he reasonably could. He repeats his beliefs (about systems, about scaling, about hiring) until people can finish his sentences. He keeps the apartment lit, in the Stein sense, week after week after week.

Tony Robbins, at a much larger scale, runs the same operation with louder lighting and more vibration. The crowds at his events behave less like an audience and more like Tony's people. They come to be in his orbit for a few days at a time, and they go home identifying themselves as such for years afterward.

One Last Thought (and a Confession)

I should end this one with a confession, because it would be slightly dishonest to write a piece this long about Joyning personal brands without admitting that the question has been following me around for months.

I think the Pleasure Codes may be becoming one.

When I started writing about pleasure as a brand strategy a few years ago, I was creating a method. I was, in the strictest sense, a consultant with a model. What has happened since (and I genuinely did not plan for this part) is that a small and increasingly identifiable group of people has begun to gather around the work. They quote it back to me in their own decks. They argue, on my behalf, with their CMOs. They send me photographs of magazines in their pockets and books on their nightstands with little notes saying this made me think of you. They have started, occasionally, to refer to themselves as Pleasure Codes people, which is exactly the phrase I was just describing as the giveaway of a Joyning brand built without quite meaning to.

So I’ve been thinking, with some seriousness, about whether to lean into it.

The newsletter would stay the newsletter. But around it, perhaps, something else. A community. A members-only place where the people who already gather could gather a little more visibly. Workshops. Letters. The occasional in-person evening. The unfashionable, low-tech version of belonging, conducted on a schedule, for as long as I have the stamina to keep the lights on.

And then there’s the rather more romantic version, which I have been turning over privately for a while and only recently said out loud. And that is the idea of hosting my very own salon. Properly. In the Stein sense. Hosted by me and Mr Green (the engineer, technologist, and rather more rigorously skeptical half of the partnership) in our actual home, with actual cakes, and a small, carefully assembled rotating cast of the kind of people you do not normally find in the same room. The brand strategist, sitting next to the AI researcher, next to the chef, sitting next to the philosopher. The point of which would not be content or networking or any of the other tedious modern reasons people invent to make their gatherings feel productive. The point would simply be the gathering itself. The thing the salons were always for.

I have not decided yet. I am, frankly, still working out whether I have the temperament for it; whether I want the responsibility, in the sense this newsletter just spent two thousand words describing, of becoming someone other people have decided to belong to. It is, as I said, a vow.

But I notice that I am writing the question in public now rather than thinking it in private, and that itself is probably an answer of some kind.

In the meantime, the work continues and the newsletter is, in its own way, the apartment with the lights on. This is the salon, currently. And if any of the more ambitious versions ever do come into being, the people who were going to find their way there will, I expect, have found their way there.

The salon is open whether anyone comes or not.

— Angelique

The main edition told you what Joyning is and why it worked for Stein and Bernbach. It did not tell you how to run it. Understanding it and running it are different problems, and running it is the one that breaks some people.

The mistake almost everyone makes is assuming the how is a matter of magnetism. Be warmer. Be more charismatic. Throw a better party. It’s not. You now know an entourage accretes around a kept light, but running it means being the person still there in the month nobody comes. You know the bond is creedal, but running it means saying the belief out loud for the four hundredth time so it still lands.

This playbook gets into how you actually run it and it starts with three pitfalls. Most people fail the first without noticing.

The first is…

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In October of 1907, the President of the United States interrupted a swing through Louisiana to step off his train, change into hunting clothes, and disappear into a swamp for two weeks. He emerged sunburnt, mosquito-bitten, exuberant, and (to the bewilderment of his political handlers) immediately announced that he had decided to designate the marshland behind him as a federal bird sanctuary.

By the time Theodore Roosevelt left office sixteen months later, he had placed roughly two hundred and thirty million acres of American land under permanent federal protection.

To put that number in perspective: it’s an area larger than France and Italy combined. He created the United States Forest Service, doubled the number of national parks, signed the Antiquities Act and then, with the casual brio that defined him, used it to declare the Grand Canyon a national monument before Congress could organise a coherent objection.

And he almost never moralised about any of it.

What he did was way more cunning.

He turned wilderness into desire. Conservation, in his hands, felt like vigour, adventure, appetite, and life. He loved wild places so visibly, so contagiously, so ridiculously physically, that a generation of Americans wanted to follow him out the door.

This is the heart of the Pleasure Code I call Regeneration Nation, and it’s the reason a Regeneration Nation personal brand is, properly understood, the trickiest of all the Pleasure Codes to pull off.

What Regeneration Nation Actually Is

Regeneration Nation is the pleasure of living well without taking too much: of restoring our relationship with the planet so that human life and the living world can flourish together.

It’s the taste of something grown properly, the relief of repair, and the satisfaction of leaving a place, a person, a system, or a patch of earth more alive than you found it. Philosophers call this eudaimonia: not happiness in the thin, scented-candle sense, but the joy of flourishing. A life made better because it is less at war with everything around it.

As a personal brand territory, it runs on coherence. The sense that a person’s care has evidence: in what they choose, what they refuse, what they repair, what they waste less of, and what they make more alive by their presence.

The fears it speaks to are worth naming because they sit just beneath the surface of modern life. The fear of environmental collapse. The guilt of knowing we’re consuming too much, and continuing anyway. The exhaustion of being sold green virtue by companies whose supply chains tell a different story. The suspicion that almost everyone, including ourselves, is implicated in systems we don’t know how to repair. And beneath all of it, the growing dread that the way we live may be incompatible with the way life flourishes.

A Regeneration Nation brand does not make people drown in that knowledge. Nor does it ask them to pretend not to know. At its best, it offers a more bearable and beautiful third option: start somewhere, choose better, waste less, repair something, and discover that a less extractive life may also be a more pleasurable one. The feeling that you can live well without leaving so much damage behind, and that the future might still be worth wanting.

You may recognise the pull of Regeneration Nation if:

• You want your work to make people feel capable of choosing something better.

• You believe the future should be more than survivable. It should taste better, feel better, and make people want to come back for seconds.

• You can’t walk past a perfectly salvageable chair, a neglected garden, or an unnecessary bit of plastic without mentally staging a small intervention.

Why Roosevelt is the Poster Child

Roosevelt was not built for restraint. He was built for more. More hunting, more fighting, more reading, more writing, more travelling, more living. He shot lions in Africa, charged up San Juan Hill, wrote thirty-five books, raised six children, ran the country, boxed for sport into middle age, and lost the use of an eye to a punch he refused to acknowledge. When he camped with John Muir in Yosemite for three nights in 1903, the resulting newspaper coverage made conservation, for the first time in American history, look like something a red-blooded American might want to do.

This was the trick, and it’s the foundational move of every Regeneration Nation personal brand worth studying. He didn’t soften himself to fit the cause. He brought the cause into the orbit of his own enormously vivid life and let it absorb some of his colour.

The result was that Americans who would never in a thousand years have read a Sierra Club pamphlet found themselves, by the end of his presidency, agreeing with its philosophy. Not because they had been shamed into it. Because Roosevelt’s life had suggested that people who cared about wild places were people worth becoming.

There is a phrase Rory Sutherland uses that captures the principle precisely: sometimes it is perfectly acceptable to get people to do the right thing for the wrong reason. Roosevelt’s countrymen protected the wilderness because they admired Roosevelt. The wilderness did not particularly mind their motives.

The Modern Business Case: Elon Musk and Alice Waters

Two contemporary figures show how the Roosevelt move travels into the present, and they could not be more different in temperament.

I want to mention Elon Musk now, and I would ask you to set aside, whatever you may feel about his political activities, his personal conduct online, or his managerial habits. I want to set them aside not because they don’t matter (they obviously do), but because the question we are examining is a narrower and stranger one.

The question is this: who has done more than almost anyone else, in the past twenty years, to make electric cars desirable?

The answer, by a comfortable margin, is Elon Musk. And he’s done this, like Roosevelt before him, almost entirely without lecturing anyone.

Look at how Tesla has been marketed, and you’ll find a striking absence. Musk does not, on the whole, talk about carbon emissions or deliver sermons on the urgency of the climate crisis. He talks instead about Mars, and rockets, and the future, and (in his more whimsical moments) the question of whether reality is a simulation.

What he’s done, with brilliant precision, is the Roosevelt move in modern dress. He made the electric car look cool. The Tesla is fast and beautiful. Even the model names, arranged into the not-quite-subtle joke S, 3, X, Y, had a kind of adolescent glee no traditional environmental marketer could possibly have approved. And yet, by making the right choice the most desirable one, he put millions of electric cars on the road without ever appearing to ask anyone to give anything up.

The result is that Tesla owners frequently tell themselves and their friends that they bought the car to help the environment. This is, almost certainly, not why they bought it. They bought it because it was sexy. The post-purchase justification is sincere. The pre-purchase motive was something else entirely. And the gap between the two is exactly where Regeneration Nation does its best work.

Now consider, in deliberate counterpoint, Alice Waters.

If Musk’s Regeneration Nation is loud, fast, and on more than several occasions, absurd, the Waters version is patient, sensual, and subtly tenacious. She is the cleanest current case we have of someone who built an entire personal brand on Regeneration Nation principles and positively influenced the food supply chain of an entire country in the process, without ever once making anyone feel guilty for what they ate.

In 1971, Waters opened a small restaurant called Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, with the slightly mad idea that a tomato should taste like a tomato. This was harder than it sounds. The American tomato of 1971, picked green and gassed into red, didn’t taste like much of anything. The supply chain that fed American restaurants was built for shelf life, and flavour came in a long way behind.

So Waters went looking. She drove out to the small farms scattered around the Bay Area. She knocked on doors. She asked questions. And eating a tomato straight off the vine (as one does, when you have just opened a restaurant and discovered the ingredients have no flavour), she discovered that a tomato in its proper soil, in its proper season, is one of the more remarkable things human beings can eat.

She then spent fifty-five years building, season by season, a supply chain to deliver that experience reliably to other people.

The Bay Area farmers’ market system that exists today is largely her doing. The Edible Schoolyard programme, which now has children in schools across America planting seeds, tending crops, harvesting their own vegetables and cooking with them, is her doing. Her most famous dish (a baked goat cheese on spring lettuce salad, deceptively simple, almost impossible to do badly enough to ruin) is now copied, in some form, in roughly half the bistros on earth. The roster of artists, dancers, writers, and architects who passed through Chez Panisse in its first decade reads like the index of a cultural history of late twentieth-century America.

And here’s the part I find even more admirable.

In all of those fifty-five years of public life, Alice Waters has never (so far as anyone has been able to find) shamed a single person for what they ate.

This is the line that I think every aspiring Regeneration Nation personal brand should write on the inside of their notebook. Legacy systems are her enemy. People never are. Her ferocity (and she is genuinely ferocious; one does not change a national food supply chain by being mild) is reserved for industrial agriculture, processed-food marketing, school cafeterias designed by accountants, the reduction of the tomato to a transportation problem. Her tenderness is reserved for the people living inside those systems, who didn’t design them and can’t, on their own, fix them.

That combination is what makes her unanswerable as a personal brand. You can’t get cross with Alice Waters. There’s nothing to push back against. She’s not blaming you. She’s just handing you a tomato.

You taste the tomato and you are changed.

The Cast of Characters: Six Ways to Carry the Cause

But not everyone has to be Roosevelt, Musk, or Waters. Regeneration Nation is large enough to contain a number of different temperaments. Seeing them clearly helps explain the many ways this territory can become irresistible.

The temperaments break down into six: the conscience, the strategy, the proof, the soul, the seduction, and the appetite.

Early Greta Thunberg is the conscience. She is the figure whose function is to refuse forgetfulness. Every regenerative movement needs someone willing to keep the stakes visible when everyone else would rather look away, change the subject, or comfort themselves with a slightly improved shopping habit. Done badly, the conscience can harden into accusation. Done well, it is genuinely necessary, because someone has to keep the score honest.

The ad legend Howard Gossage is the strategy. He was the mid-century San Francisco advertising man who, almost single-handedly, taught the environmental movement how to get its message past the average human’s defences. We’ll come back to him in a moment, because his story shows the mechanics of this territory with unusual clarity.

Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, is the proof. He’s what the work looks like when someone runs an actual company on actual regenerative principles for actual decades, and lets the results speak. He’s not particularly charismatic or prone to public sermonising. He’s just visibly, persistently doing the thing, and his clothing company has somehow become a global brand on the back of it.

David Attenborough is the soul. After roughly seventy years of broadcasting, the man has spent more screen time with non-human life than perhaps any human in history, and his entire instrument is love. He has this uncanny way of showing you a hummingbird that makes you understand, however briefly, what’s at stake. Last week, on his hundredth birthday, the BBC filled the Royal Albert Hall for a live celebration of his life’s work, while King Charles sent a birthday message in a short film carried, relay-style, by British wildlife. Even the tribute knew the assignment. Attenborough’s gift has always been the same: gentle wonder, deployed as activism.

Stella McCartney is the seduction. She has spent her career proving that fashion, perhaps the most extractive, image-driven industry on the planet, can be done without leather, without fur, without the worst of its supply chain, and that the result can still be desirable enough for celebrities to wear it on red carpets. The seduction is the strategy. People put on the dress because the dress is beautiful. The values come along inside the seam.

Alice Waters is the appetite. We've already met her. She’s the living proof that you can change a national supply chain without ever once making anyone feel guilty for what they ate.

The Gossage Lesson

There’s a story almost no one outside the advertising world tells, and it gets to the heart of the problem: how do you make people care without putting them on trial?

In the mid-1960s, an environmentalist named David Brower (then the executive director of the Sierra Club) walked into the San Francisco offices of the advertising man Howard Gossage with a problem. They were going to dam the Grand Canyon. He had a draft of a newspaper advertisement protesting the dam. Could Gossage help get it into print?

Gossage looked at the ad and said something close to: no, this is not going to work.

What he then proceeded to do, in collaboration with Brower, was to write one of the most famous advertisements in American history. Its now-legendary headline: “Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?” Below it were coupons to send to the President, the Secretary of the Interior, the relevant senators, and (if you fancied it) the Sierra Club itself. The reader did not have to feel guilty. The reader had something to do.

The government responded by having the IRS revoke the Sierra Club’s non-profit status. That caused an even bigger uproar, and the dam was defeated within a week. Membership in the Sierra Club doubled in the two years that followed, then doubled again. The modern environmental movement, in something close to its current form, was born.

But here’s the part that really matters.

Brower changed.

Working with Gossage taught him, in a way that no amount of internal Sierra Club debate ever had, that you can’t make people care about the redwoods, or even the Grand Canyon, by lecturing them. You make them care by giving them photographs of the redwoods so beautiful that the protection of those trees becomes the only emotionally coherent response. You make them care by giving them something to do that doesn’t require them to dismantle their existing lives. You make them care by treating them as accomplices in a conspiracy of beauty rather than defendants in a moral trial.

After a while, the Sierra Club’s old guard found Brower’s new tone frivolous, and insufficiently serious and they pushed him out. Gossage, in characteristic generosity, lent him the basement of a converted firehouse to start something new from scratch. What are we going to call it? Brower asked. Why don’t you call it Friends of the Earth? Gossage replied.

Stop, for a moment, on the names. The Sierra Club is a club, with members, presumably with rules and dues and the implicit possibility of expulsion. Friends of the Earth is, well, friendship that’s open to anyone and premised on affection.

That single name change is, in microcosm, the move Regeneration Nation has to make: from suspicion to affection, from moral trial to shared invitation.

The Accomplice and the Convert

It’s worth pausing on a distinction that trips up most people who enter this territory and end up sounding awful.

The Regeneration Nation personal brand seeks accomplices. The lesser version, which I will call the Conversion Brand, seeks converts. The difference matters.

The accomplice is being let in on something fun. The convert is being told they have been doing it wrong. The accomplice walks away feeling clever, included, slightly more interesting than they were ten minutes ago. The convert walks away feeling guilty, lectured, and privately resentful. The accomplice tells their friends about you. The convert blocks you on social media at three o’clock in the morning.

There’s a useful old joke that captures this exactly. How do you know someone is vegan? Don’t worry, they will tell you. The line is funny because it’s, painfully, true. The worst version of any cause is the version that announces itself before the first course has arrived. The best version sits down at a meat-eater's table, eats the salad, makes no comment about anyone else's plate and is so enjoyable to be around that, three months later, the meat-eater has begun buying better tomatoes without quite announcing why.

That, in one image, is the Regeneration Nation personal brand at full power.

The test, applied to your own work, is reasonably honest. When people interact with you, do they feel inspired to change something, or do they feel slightly worse about themselves? If it is the latter, you are running an Examination of Conscience and very few people willingly subscribe to one of those.

One Last Thought

There is a line of Roosevelt’s that’s quoted so often it has lost most of its force, but I think it actually contains the whole method we have been circling around.

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”

The usual reading is that this is a piece of can-do American spirit, suitable for inspirational posters in dental waiting rooms.

I think it’s something considerably sharper.

What Roosevelt understood, I think, is that the work of restoration is made appealing by the visibility of the doing. You don’t need to save the planet. You need to save something. You need to do it in the open. And while doing it, you need to look like a person whose life is more interesting because of the work, not less.

The question Regeneration Nation puts to anyone drawn to this work is whether the way you care is one anyone else will want to copy.

Most ways of caring, it turns out, are not.

— Angelique

The mistake most people make with Regeneration Nation is assuming the work begins with the cause. The carefully worded indictment of how the rest of the room has been doing it wrong. The sense, however quiet, that the audience should be slightly ashamed of itself before the brand will let them in.

All of these come from genuine care. They are simply running the wrong play.

Regeneration Nation does not work that way.

It works when care arrives dressed as appetite. As pleasure. As something the audience wants to copy. Roosevelt’s wilderness and Waters’s tomato were never arguments for the cause. They were the cause walking in dressed as desire, and the audience following.

This is where most people get it wrong. They start with the cause and assume the desire will follow. It almost never does. The cause has to walk in behind the pleasure, subtly enough that the audience hears it as their own idea.

Having watched this game played well and (more often) badly, a few principles seem to recur among those who manage it without becoming insufferable.

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In the autumn of 1961, Eve Arnold came home from a Nation of Islam rally in Harlem, removed her sweater, and found the back freckled with cigarette burns. Men in the crowd had pressed lit cigarettes into the fabric while she worked. She had been so focused on the photographs that she hadn’t noticed.

She was the first woman ever admitted to Magnum, the legendary photo agency, and she was on assignment from LIFE to document a thirty-six-year-old minister named Malcolm X. She would later write that what struck her most about him was the unspoken collaboration he conducted with her camera.

He understood, with a precision Arnold found rare even among professional politicians, how much weight an image could carry. When she needed light, he turned. When she needed quiet, he gave it. When the head of the American Nazi Party, attending a Nation of Islam rally at Washington's Uline Arena, hissed at her that he would make a bar of soap out of her, she hissed back, as long as it isn’t a lampshade, and Malcolm watched the whole exchange with the small private smile of a man who had recognised a fellow craftsman of self-presentation.

This is the one part of Malcolm X that most people miss. We remember the speeches that dragged America’s argument about race far beyond where the establishment wanted to keep it. We remember the autobiography that turned one life into a curriculum on self-reliance. We remember the assassination of a man who was thirty-nine and nowhere near finished.

But what almost never makes the list is that he was also one of the twentieth century’s most deliberate architects of public selfhood. He went, by careful design, from Malcolm Little to Detroit Red to Malcolm X. And then, in the final year of his life, to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. Each transformation photographed, narrated, and widely distributed, because he knew exactly what he was building.

He would not have called it this, of course. But what Malcolm X built around himself was a WeTopia: the kind of personal brand that serves a higher calling with enough conviction to act on it no matter the cost.

Most of us, if we’re honest, long to leave a fingerprint somewhere it actually counts. A life made entirely of competent execution is not, in the end, the life we came here to build.

If that sounds like you, then Malcolm X is the figure to study.

But first, a warning.

A WeTopia personal brand is a public commitment to a position that may cost you.

Malcolm X built his public self knowing his kind of visibility carried a price. And for him, that price would be mortal.

What WeTopia Actually Is

WeTopia is the deep pleasure of building better systems, communities, and futures together when the institutions meant to protect us no longer feel worthy of our trust.

And by pleasure, I don’t mean the tiny dopamine fizz of being liked online.

I mean the older, harder kind of pleasure: the satisfaction of feeling your life gather around something that matters. The pleasure of being useful. Of being claimed by a purpose. Of looking around a room and realising that the thing you thought you were carrying alone is now being carried by other people too.

WeTopia is not soft or sentimental. And it’s absolutely not “community” in the corporate sense, with its inclusive stock photography and suspiciously clean picnic blankets.

It is high togetherness fused with moral seriousness.

The togetherness is urgent, sometimes uncomfortable, and often inconvenient. It belongs to people who have decided that something specific is broken, and have decided, equally specifically, that they are done politely sighing about it over dinner.

When you’re around someone whose personal brand lives in WeTopia, the experience is unmistakable. You feel, almost against your will, that you’re being recruited into a cause that’s bigger than both of you. They are in many ways Eric Hoffer’s perfect true believer. When they enter a room, the room reorganises itself around one question:

What could be different, and what are we prepared to do about it?

The drivers of a WeTopia personal brand tend to be consistent.

Trust, restored after institutional failure. Dignity, extended to people the prevailing system has overlooked. Solidarity with those who cannot easily defend themselves. Collective agency instead of heroic individualism. Accountability, or what former Congressman John Lewis so marvellously called “good trouble.” And shared ownership of the future being built.

But there’s one quality that distinguishes the genuine WeTopia personal brand from the dozens of imitations, and it’s the quality that almost everyone skips.

The Litmus Test: A Stance That Costs You Something

A genuine WeTopia personal brand is willing to alienate people.

Read that again, because it’s unusual advice. Almost every other piece of branding or personal branding guidance ever written tells you the opposite. Find the niche. Avoid controversy. Don’t post about politics. Don’t try to be likeable to as many people as possible. But don’t try to alienate people either. In other words, optimise for reach.

The WeTopia brand laughs at this, and not in a friendly way.

The WeTopia brand says: I have decided that something is wrong. I am willing to take a position that may cost me invitations, customers, friendships, and possibly my career. I am willing to be wrong in public. I am willing to be unpopular. And the people who join me are joining because of this, not in spite of it.

This is what separates a WeTopia personal brand from a merely helpful one.

Take José Andrés, the chef who flies into disaster zones with World Central Kitchen. He’s one of the most admirable men currently alive. He puts his safety, his time, and his money on the line in ways most of us never will. But here’s the awkward truth. Every time he does it, he becomes more popular. There’s nothing in his stance that anyone disagrees with. The food gets to people. The children eat. The world applauds.

This isn’t a criticism of Andrés. He’s doing the repair work that has to happen after the fight is over. Hungry people need feeding regardless of who started the war or what destroyed the harvest. He is, in the Pleasure Codes vernacular, a Regeneration Nation brand operating at the highest level of grace, and the world needs a great many more like him.

The WeTopia brand is doing the work that comes before the repair. It’s built around the willingness to ask why the harm exists, and to keep asking in rooms that would rather not hear the question.

The WeTopia litmus test is more than does this cost you something? It is does this cost you your popularity, your career, or even your life?

By that test, Malcolm X is an obvious yes. Harvey Milk is an obvious yes. John Lewis, refusing to leave the bridge at Selma, is an obvious yes. Ai Weiwei, knowing perfectly well he would be detained, is an obvious yes.

And by that same test, a great many people who put “purpose-driven leader” in their LinkedIn bio are, regrettably, an obvious no.

The Crucial Distinction: Helping vs. Standing

It is worth pausing here, because this is the place most aspiring WeTopia personal brands get wrong.

Helping someone is not the same as standing for something. A person who flies to disaster zones and feeds the displaced is helping. A person who writes large cheques to good causes is helping. A person who volunteers, mentors, donates, contributes, is helping. All of this is genuinely admirable, and the world would be poorer without it.

But helping alone does not make a WeTopia brand. Standing does.

Standing means publicly attaching your name to a position that may make significant numbers of people refuse to associate with you. It means losing the dinner invitation. It means having clients quietly stop responding to your emails. It means being uninvited from the conference. It means, sometimes, being attacked in print. Most WeTopia people emphatically do not enjoy any of this. But they take the position anyway, because keeping silent would cost them more than speaking does.

This is the test, and it is worth applying to yourself with some honesty. Is there any position you currently hold that would meaningfully damage your career if you stated it loudly and repeatedly in public? If the answer is no, you may belong somewhere else on the pleasure-codes map. If the answer is yes, but you have so far chosen not to say it, you have a decision to make.

WeTopia is not for everyone, and there is no shame in this. But it belongs to the people who have chosen, eyes open, to pay the bill.

The Reason Purpose-Driven Marketing Mostly Fails

This is perhaps the right moment to address the elephant in the conference room.

Since the early 2000s, marketing leaders have been fervently attempting to copy the WeTopia playbook without paying its cost. The result has been the thing we now call purpose-driven marketing, and it is, with a few honourable exceptions, a category of work that has done more damage to brands than almost any other practice of the modern era.

The reason is straightforward.

A genuine WeTopia stance is meaningful precisely because it might be wrong, might be unpopular, and might even end the career of the person taking it on.

When a candy company decides to take a position on a controversial social issue that has nothing whatever to do with confectionery, the audience can tell, more or less instantly, that no one inside the building was actually willing to lose their job over it. The position, in other words, is a costume with the tag still on. The cause is borrowed and the risk has been carefully calibrated, by a brand-strategy team, to appear brave while being, in fact, exhaustively focus-grouped.

Audiences are extraordinarily good at sensing this distinction. The Bud Light boycott of 2023 was not a story about which side of a culture-war debate the company was on. It was a story about a brand that had wandered into WeTopia without earning the right to be there, and was punished, savagely, by an audience that could smell the borrowed costume.

The same dynamic plays out at the personal-brand level, and it plays out faster. A professional audience can smell a borrowed stance even more efficiently than a consumer audience, because a person's history is more visible than a corporation's. The LinkedIn post about the cause you’ve never previously mentioned, written the very week that the cause is trending, is the personal-brand equivalent of Pepsi-at-the-protest advert.

You do not get to play in WeTopia unless you are willing to bleed for the position you have taken.

The Modern Business Case: Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield

The most instructive contemporary case in business is one that begins with a careful distinction.

The question of whether Ben & Jerry’s the company is currently a WeTopia brand is, at this point, genuinely debatable. The company was sold to Unilever in 2000. The famous social-justice limited-edition pints still appear on the shelves, but they appear there with the slightly forced quality of a corporate marriage in which both parties are still smiling for the cameras while arguing through their lawyers offstage. When Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield were effectively pushed out of meaningful involvement with the brand they founded, the brand became a thing without them.

The men have become something more interesting.

Cohen and Greenfield walked away from the corporate version of their own life’s work because they refused to stop using the company’s voice on the issues they care about. In other words, they lost the company. And they’re not living the comfortable retirement that other founders of nine-figure businesses tend to live. They’re, in their mid-seventies, still showing up at protests, still being arrested, still saying things in public that other people their age have long since stopped saying.

This is a clean case of the WeTopia litmus test in action. Their personal brand cost them their company. They are paying for it, in front of everyone, and they are still going.

You can disagree with every position they have ever taken. The point isn’t whether they’re right or wrong. The point is that they have demonstrated, in the most visible possible way, that the position is not a marketing exercise.

The Expensive Refusal: Dario Amodei

Not every WeTopia personal brand needs to be on a picket line. There’s a different version, most relevant to people who actually run companies, where the costly stance is taken from inside the corner office.

Dario Amodei runs Anthropic, an AI laboratory currently valued at roughly $380 billion. By the conventional logic of his industry, he ought to be taking every dollar that walks through the door, and the defence and intelligence communities have rather a lot of dollars to walk in with. But for years, he’s been quietly refusing specific categories of that work on stated ethical grounds, in some cases at a cost of several hundred million dollars at a time.

For most of those years, none of us knew about it.

That changed this past February when Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth asked Amodei to drop two clauses in his Pentagon contract that prevented Claude from being used for the mass surveillance of American citizens, and for the operation of autonomous weapons. Amodei said no. The administration’s response was, even by present standards, baroque. They labelled Anthropic a “supply-chain risk,” a designation previously reserved for companies serving foreign adversaries. Then they threatened to invoke the Defense Production Act, on the grounds that Claude was essential to national security. Two contradictory things at once. The $200 million Pentagon contract went to OpenAI by sundown.

Amodei didn’t whisper about any of it.

“We cannot in good conscience accede to their request,” he wrote, publicly. And, separately: “Disagreeing with the government is the most American thing in the world.”

What happened next is the part anyone trying to build a personal brand on conviction should pay attention to.

Within forty-eight hours, Claude had taken the top spot on the US Apple App Store, displacing a rival many times its size. A “QuitGPT” campaign on Reddit was claiming over a million participants. Sam Altman, watching all of this unfold, conceded publicly that the OpenAI deal had looked “opportunistic and sloppy,” and went back to renegotiate the contract he had just signed.

This is the inverse of the Bud Light story.

Bud Light tried to wear the costume of a costly stance and was punished by an audience that could smell the absence of cost. Amodei paid an actual cost, in front of everyone, and was rewarded by an audience that could smell the conviction.

The lesson is clean. When a personal brand earns its position by paying for it, the audience does more than notice. It moves.

One Last Thought

There is a line widely credited to Malcolm X that gets quoted so often it’s almost become wallpaper, but I think it bears its weight here. “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.”

The usual reading is that this is an instruction in moral consistency. I think it’s actually an instruction in personal-brand architecture.

What I think he was saying is that without a genuine willingness to stand somewhere specific, and to bear the cost of that specificity, you will eventually be pulled into the orbit of whoever is currently making the loudest demands on your attention. You will, in the language of marketing, become whatever the algorithm wants you to be. You will, in the language of life, become whoever the room around you happens to want you to be at any given moment.

The WeTopia personal brand is the refusal of this drift.

It is the brand (and the life) built on the conviction that the most generous thing you can offer is the visible proof of someone who has decided to make your corner of the world more just, and is willing to keep paying for the decision.

I have a hunch that there’s a stance you keep returning to in private, but saying it in public, with your name attached, would cost you something.

The question is whether your silence is costing you more than the speaking would.

— Angelique