People who spend their weeks moving pixels across screens and attending alignment meetings are coming home and doing something with their hands. Baking bread with alarming precision. Restoring watches. Building things. Learning things that will never appear on a CV or generate a single dollar. It sounds like a hobby. It feels like something much more urgent than that. So, why is an entire generation throwing itself into physical pursuits with the intensity of a second career, and what are they actually searching for when they do?

- Devin Pike, Copywriter

The Drum reports that Beefeater 0.0 partnered with Jamiroquai to reimagine the iconic 1996 music video on its 30th anniversary, revealing that Jay Kay's outstretched hand was reaching for a bottle of alcohol-free gin all along. The ad opens exactly where the original left off. Then it takes him through nine entirely new rooms full of surreal scenarios and, naturally, more hats.

In a week when every brand on earth is leaning on AI to produce content, the production made a point of doing the opposite. They used no CGI, no AI. Just nine physical rooms built from scratch, with every moment of movement choreographed and performed by Jay Kay himself. In 2026, practical effects are the flex.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk's X has quietly dropped one of the most aggressive legal campaigns ever waged by a social platform against its own advertisers. TechCrunch reports that X has settled its multiyear lawsuit against the World Federation of Advertisers, which it accused of orchestrating a systematic illegal boycott after brands fled the platform following Musk's 2022 takeover. Companies named in the suit included Mars, CVS Health, Shell and LEGO.

The advertisers rejected the allegations throughout, arguing that brands are simply free to choose where they spend their money. The settlement terms were not disclosed. X did not win.

And finally, in the most surprising pivot of the week, TechCrunch reports that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has publicly suggested it may be time to slow down AI development. Speaking on a podcast, Altman said the industry may need to "pace the rate of AI development to give ourselves enough time for society to harden around some of these new capability levels." Both OpenAI and Anthropic employees have since signed a petition asking the US government to help slow down frontier AI development internationally.

This from the man who spent the last three years racing to build AGI, launching four Claude-competing models in two months, and projecting $14 billion in losses to get there faster. The brakes, it turns out, exist. They just took a while to find.

- Devin Pike, Copywriter

We’re going Hobbymaxxing.

We are no longer using or evenings and weekends to simply rest, consume passive media, or disconnect. We are officially throwing ourselves into physical pursuits with a level of dedication that resembles a second full-time career.

And look, I know. You’re tired. I’m tired. Who has the time? You do. I promise you, we have the time. Because that time is ours. And it’s time to take that time back.

Do you ever stop to think why people are learning the intricate chemistry of sourdough fermentation, spending thousands of dollars on long-distance cycling gear, mastering the ancient mechanics of manual watch restoration, or building insane indoor vertical gardens??

And it’s about to become one of the biggest movements of our generation.

To understand why our generation has turned the concept of a hobby into a high-stakes crusade, you have to look past the superficial lifestyle aesthetics and diagnose the profound existential void of the modern workplace.

For the vast majority of professionals, full-time corporate employment has become an abstract exercise in administrative friction.

We spend our days moving pixels across a screen. Updating management dashboards. Sitting in alignment meetings. And optimising automated workflows. It’s not even real. None of it. Like these jobs didn’t even exist ten years ago.

Our actual day jobs have been systematically stripped of tangible human output. And it's leaving us feeling like hollow, anonymous cogs in a synthetic corporate machine.

Hobbymaxxing is the most logical response to this kind of strange alienation.

It’s some sort of clawback of raw human agency.

When you sit down at a workbench to hand-stitch a piece of raw leather just to make yourself a belt, or when you stand in a kitchen calculating the precise hydration percentage of a flour blend, you are engaging with the hard, uncompromising physics of reality.

If you make a mistake, the leather tears or the bread burns, offering an immediate, honest, and unfiltered feedback loop that modern professional life completely denies us.

We aren't throwing what little energy we have left into these pursuits to simply look productive. This is an act of proving to ourselves that we are still capable of causing a direct, physical effect in the universe. When everything else feels so… uncanny. So, unreal.

The beauty of this counter-movement lies in its radical redefinition of value. For the last decade, hustle culture completely poisoned our leisure time. It convinced us that every single interest, talent, or creative impulse needed to be immediately monetised, turned into a side-gig, or broadcast to a public social media feed for external validation.

It takes us back to the way things should be. Spending twenty hours building a technical skill simply because it brings your brain a sense of deep, internal fulfilment is defiance. And it's unapologetic defiance at that. Because it removes the currency of corporate tracking metrics, replacing it with the ultimate luxury asset: self-directed mastery.

This shift represents a massive structural relocation of consumer identity.

Instead, they're anchoring their true identity to their hobbies.

If your brand communication is still trying to appeal to consumers through lazy, generic corporate archetypes or superficial lifestyle status symbols, you are completely missing the cultural mark.

This next wave will belong to the businesses that understand how to validate, equip, and honour the hobbyist’s obsession. Businesses treating their consumer base not as passive spenders, but as dedicated, highly literate creators who respect texture, provenance, and detail.

So as a consumer, stop letting the market convince you that your worth is entirely tied to the efficiency of your digital output or the size of your corporate invoice. Put down the device and pick up a freaking tool.

Go for a run or climb a freaking mountain. Allow yourself the joy of building something real with your own two hands, or feet, entirely on your own terms.

This world is desperately trying to automate our souls. You need to understand that the real display of personal authority will never be climbing a ladder you don't own. It will be having the creative guts to become the master of your own craft.

Even if it means sewing a sh*tty top, or making a belt you could never sell. At least you made it. And at least it’s yours.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

The sound comes from a Nike ad starring Drake and Kevin Durant, launching the KD 19 sneaker. Drake plays the world's most enthusiastic yes man, hyping up Durant's completely ridiculous sneaker/cowboy boot hybrid prototype with complete conviction:

"Okay. Wow. First thought: transcending the game."

Creators are lipsyncing as Drake and adding whatever discovery or realisation had them feeling like they'd just unlocked a completely new level of existence.

Some of my favourite examples:

Film yourself lipsyncing to the sound and add whatever changed your entire perspective as your on-screen text.

A few ideas to get you started:

- Devin Pike, Copywriter

Hey Georgia,

If you've put time into developing a solid strategy based on a human truth your audience can relate to, the idea is probably right. What's more likely failing is the execution. So before you scrap the whole concept, look for small signals that people are resonating with your content first. This might look like comments asking for more, saves, shares, people arguing in the replies. Those all mean something is landing even if the numbers aren't huge yet.

If you've at least got that, start iterating on your concept rather than throwing the whole thing out. Try changing one small thing at a time, a word in your on-screen text, your audio, your framing. Don't change four things at once or you'll never know what worked. And give it more time than feels comfortable. It can take a good 15-20 videos before a new content series takes off.

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

We get it. Creating content that does numbers is harder than it looks. But doing those big numbers is the fastest way to grow your brand. So if you’re tired of throwing sh*t at the wall and seeing what sticks, you’re in luck. Because making our clients go viral is kinda what we do every single day.