WTF Do You Say?

How are you?

It’s a trap. A social grenade disguised as a pleasantry. Because the honest answer in 2025 is a 45-minute unstructured monologue that starts with AI and ends somewhere near your situationship and touches on geopolitical dread in the middle.

So you say great, busy, you know how it is. And they say totally. And both of you know that neither of you are fine and neither of you said anything true and somehow that’s the most connection you’ll have all day.

Welcome to the top of the call.

Let’s just say it out loud.

We are living inside a legitimately disorienting moment. Not “challenging times” disorienting. Not “pivoting to digital” disorienting. Full, actual, what is even happening disorienting — and nobody in any boardroom, any brand strategy session, any creative brief has adequately named it yet.

So allow me.

The news feed is a war zone. Literally.

There are active conflicts playing out in real time on the same app where someone is selling you a $38 candle called “Soft Life.” You scroll past a missile strike and into a linen trouser drop without your thumb breaking rhythm. The algorithm doesn’t flinch. Neither, eventually, do you — and that’s the part that should keep you up at night.

For creative founders specifically, this creates a particular kind of paralysis. Do you post? Do you not post? Is it tone-deaf to launch a campaign right now? Is it irresponsible to stay quiet? The brand strategist brain, which is always running in the background like seventeen open tabs, simply cannot find the right framework for this.

There is no framework. That’s the point.

Meanwhile, AI made something beautiful this morning and it took eleven seconds.

Let’s talk about it. Because we have to.

A tool dropped last week — or was it yesterday, time is a flat circle now — that generates campaign concepts, brand voice guidelines, and a full visual identity in the time it takes you to find your parking validation. Another one writes music. Another one writes screenplays. Another one just needs a mood reference and a vibe check and it will produce something that would have taken your team four weeks and a heated Slack thread.

And the work is good. Sometimes it’s genuinely, irritatingly good.

For creative founders, this is not an abstraction. This is the cost question reframed: not what does it cost to create but what does it cost if a machine creates instead? And more unsettling — what does it mean if nobody can tell the difference?

The people having the most honest conversations about this are not the tech CEOs. They’re the illustrators and the photographers and the art directors and the brand strategists who are watching their rate card slowly become a philosophical debate.

Universal basic income entered the group chat and everyone is pretending they didn’t see it.

The quiet subtext of every AI conversation in creative industries is this: if the tools replace enough of the work, what happens to the people who did the work? UBI is no longer a Bernie Sanders hypothetical. It is the background hum of an industry reckoning it hasn’t fully had yet.

Creative founders are caught in a specific vise: too entrepreneurial to feel protected by institutional conversations, too human to feel safe in an automated future, too stubborn to stop building anyway.

This is us. Hi.

So some of us are digital cleansing.

Logging off. Touching grass. Rebuilding IRL. The irony is that when you actually do it — when you close the apps and go to the farmer’s market or the gallery opening or the dinner party — you find your people. You find the community you were algorithmically approximating online but never quite reaching.

Turns out the timeline was a simulation of connection. The real thing is still available but it requires pants and eye contact and remembering how to listen without composing your response at the same time.

The pendulum is swinging back. Slowly. Chaotically. But it’s swinging.

Having a boyfriend is embarrassing — or so the discourse says — but being lonely is an epidemic.

We are somehow in a cultural moment that simultaneously pathologizes partnership and documents loneliness as a public health crisis. Dating apps are in decline. Friendship is harder to maintain past 30 than anyone prepared us for. And yet the most viral content on the internet is people performing togetherness for strangers.

For millennial creative founders — my demographic, my people, my particular flavor of exhausted — this lands in a specific way. We built careers that required so much of us that some of us looked up one day and the relationships had quietly gotten less. The work took the seat at the table. The work always takes the seat at the table.

And then we wonder why the top of the Zoom call feels so hollow.

Millennial misery has gone mainstream and somehow that’s not comforting.

We were promised a lot. We followed the instructions. We went to school, accumulated the debt, entered the workforce during a recession, survived a pandemic, watched the housing market become a punchline, and are now being asked to stay agile and embrace disruption and bring our authentic selves to a Tuesday standup.

We are tired in a way that doesn’t resolve with a weekend.

So. WTF do you say at the top of the call?

Maybe nothing new. Maybe you say great, busy, you know how it is — and this time you mean it differently. Because busy is how we describe a life that is genuinely, relentlessly full of things we chose and things we didn’t and things that are happening to all of us at the same time whether we opted in or not.

Maybe the honest answer is: I’m in it. I don’t have the framework yet. I’m building anyway.

Maybe the honest answer is that the question itself — how are you — deserves better than a pleasantry. That creative founders, of all people, should be the ones to say actually, let me tell you.

Not because we have the answers.

Because naming the chaos clearly, without flinching, with a little dark humor and a lot of stubbornness —that’s the work.

That’s always been the work.