Vol.27
3_TRENDS is an interview series with the world's leading cultural researchers and thinkers, sharing their favorite overlooked trends.
Elliot Aronow (EA) is the founder of minor genius, a philosophy that unites art, spiritual growth, style, and entrepreneurship to help men generate wealth and impact by doing what they love. Ex- GQ, The Fader, and RCRD LBL, Elliot is also the editor of the minor genius Substack.
MK: Elliot, what’s on your mind?
Sarapocial Relationships
EA: “We’re A Garage Band / We Come From Garage Land” - The Clash
I’ve watched enough Behind The Music docs to know that the moment when your band really breaks through and is capital F Famous is the moment when it stops being fun.
Why?
Because by the time you’re playing stadiums, you feel like you’re not playing to people - just a bunch of heads.
Over the last few years, I’ve seen a lot of creators, myself included, begin to challenge the prevailing wisdom that the best thing that could happen to you was that millions of people would know you and that you wouldn’t know them.
I believe that we’ve hit peak parasocial relationships and that things are quickly trending in the other direction — brands and communities are now being built around intimate, live, offline focused crews, which blend physical and online spaces together.
As it becomes harder and harder to sell out to legacy media companies, which are no longer hiring, or lifestyle marketing companies, which no longer have 2006 or even 2019 budgets to play with, I think we’re going to see a “back to the garage” approach with people growing their community literally one single person at a time.
I know a lot of small publishers like HARD PACK and FISHO (both former minor genius clients) who are building incredibly engaged fan bases around their IP... literally by mailing out magazines to strangers with a note and invitation to connect.
What if connection is a new currency and knowing your fans is a new unicorn goal?
Time to get back to the garage.
MK: We forget that parasocial relationships cut both ways.
Audiences can (often wrongly) feel as if they know the creators they look up to. Here, audiences give more to the relationship than they’ll ever receive in return...
Hank Green defines the parasocial relationship as,
“[...] when the parts of your brain that are designed to have a social relationship between you and another person are used to just have a relationship with a person who does not know who you are or cannot know who you are.”
But what about the other direction?
Many creators, to your point, and myself notwithstanding, are learning that “audiences as metrics” are just as unfulfilling as audiences attempting to foster a relationship with a celebrity.
“Make number go big,” may not in fact be an effective, fun or sustainable strategy.
John and Hank Green are (brilliantly) calling this the “sarapocial relationship” — the inverse of the parasocial dynamics, where creators are struggling with a scaled relationship with a large cohort of people they don’t know, and that the audience itself may not agree with one another or the creator 100% of the time.
Nowadays when discussing the “Creator Economy,” I always picture the scene in Eyes Wide Shut when Tom Cruise’s character is forced to take off his mask at “the party.”
For those unfamiliar... For context: Cruise is at a masked ball, a place where, ideally, you wouldn’t want your identity to be exposed. Forced to reveal himself, his identity is now known by all, yet the crowd still has their masks on and identities secured.
This is a deeply uncomfortable dynamic.
Everyone knows Cruise, yet he doesn’t know them.
As a creator, this feels like a sarapocial relationship.
Successful creators have tens of thousands — sometimes millions — of masked people staring and judging. The creator is exposed. Yet the audience remains anonymous and safe.
It’s for this reason I once looked up the name of every new email subscription to ZINE. I want to know who’s here.
But how ironic that both sides want the same thing... genuine connection. The only problem is that this doesn’t scale...
And maybe that’s the point.
Senseless Data
EA: “It's getting faster, moving faster now / It's getting out of hand” - Joy Division
No one really understands what’s currently going on because the change we are experiencing transcends logic.
Our limited earthly minds, which got us into this mess in the first place, are not capable of fully grasping what’s happening.
It’s not a moodboard-able “vibe shift.”
It’s magical and mysterious and cannot be bottled into data or market intelligence.
I see people realizing that while logic and data have been ruling the scene, they’re now deeply questioning if the best things in life can be found in KPIs.
MK: Spoiler alert...
EA: No one can really say why stuff “works” in our current media and marketing landscape because it all defies logic — the whole “replicating virility” paradox that advertising has been chasing for 20+ years.
Life right now is “Chocolate Rain” — strange, funny, a little sad, and totally impossible to replicate.
I can see how some people’s inner risk manager would be terrified of this in the context of business but I say, bring it on.
MK: Data helps us keep our employer health insurance.
It’s really that simple.
We’re obsessed with lagging indicator data and safe, trite narratives just because they can’t be disagreed with. It’s much easier to keep your job when you have the data to back you up.
I’ve always disliked the “Data is the new oil” claim because at least oil has inherent value. Organizations have too much data to even know what to do with. When you have so much data that you mismanage it from breaches, can’t separate signal from noise, and can’t even explain the black box of the AI or algorithms which are tasked with making sense of it for you... maybe it’s not as valuable as we think.
With the ubiquity of data, we’ve begun to hide behind it.
How is it even possible to maintain a data-driven approach to a world that simply does not make sense?
This is the future of work skill, which no one wants to talk about: Knowing when to look beyond the data, because only human intuition, leaps of logic, and sense-making can come to ‘an’ answer. (Note: Not ‘the’ answer... that’s another trapping of computer-thinking. There is no “one” answer.)
Successfully traversing a landscape which doesn’t make sense — without relying upon graphs as guides — is our critical task at hand.
In business, our imagination and critical thinking skills have atrophied due to safe and automated dashboard reports.
And in a moment when contradictions are a flight risk and cognitive dissonance is breaking our brains, holding — no, seeking out and embracing — conflicting narratives is the skill of the future.
Boy Talk
EA: “Every day I start out, then I cry my heart out / Lonely is a man without love” - Engelbert Humperdinck
Does the world really want more sensitive men?
Having led men through transformational work for over a decade, I’ve noticed that encouraging men to talk about their feelings and to “open up more” is only getting louder.
On the surface this sounds like an easy antidote to the classic toxic masculinity narrative.
While increasing emotional intelligence for all humans will no doubt result in a better future for us all, I wonder if telling men that talking about their feelings will immediately make them feel better is really the best approach to create happier, healthier, and more enlightened guys.
First, a lot of men unfortunately lack the partners or friends who would be safe containers for their full emotional range. If you tell a man that he must talk so that he can feel better, and his early experiences sharing his feelings are met with indifference, disgust, or worse, it’s going to be very hard to get him to do it again. (This happens more often than many think.)
And second, I’ve also noticed from my own experiences, as well as those of my colleagues and clients, that creating art in the material world is a much faster path to feeling heard and emotionally capable than just talking about your inner darkness.
MK: You surface a critical, unspoken element to our larger “men and mental health” conversation:
“Opening up” is much easier said than done.
I’ve always bristled at the “just talk to someone” strategy. Men would have been doing this from the get-go and we wouldn’t be in this mental health crisis if 1. they had those relationships, 2. those relationships had room for vulnerability, and 3. men could effectively communicate in a cathartic manner.
In Vol.12 of 3_TRENDS from a few years ago, Alex Morris brought up the concept of “Assisted Socializing” for men. A table (unfortunately) must (often) first be set for most men to engage. Hell, it takes weeks for some of my best guy friends to return a simple “What’s the latest?” text.
And to your second part, it’s a shame we’ve overcompensated on STEM the last few decades, neglecting the arts.
Art isn’t as much leisurely entertainment, which it’s often perceived as and therefore cut, but rather, art is an opportunity to embrace ambiguity and hone the crafts of communication and interpretation. Art isn’t just pictures, songs or film, but a tool to self-reflect and express ideas which dialogue can’t always convey.
We don’t have to reinvent the wheel here.
It’s just about kindling the willingness to face the discomfort, whether that be nurturing new friendships or putting oneself out there artistically.
They don’t bite.