Want a cupcake delivered to your door? Done. Looking for a new show? Here are 3,705 options. More than any generation before us, we have access to nearly unlimited entertainment, technology, and information. And yet, we’re also more aware than ever of what’s wrong in the world. Human suffering fills our feeds. Anxiety about the future is rampant. The fact that maybe all that access hasn’t made our lives better is a paradox that’ll eat you alive if you let it. But what if there was another way to look at it? One that’s, almost, freeing? [Read more]

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

Meanwhile other brands are going viral every week. Their secret? They're not working harder. They're using a system (and you need one, too).

At this workshop, Stanley Henry (1.4M followers, 1B+ views/year) teaches you that exact system live in just 90 minutes.

You'll learn:

✅The 1 thing you need to never run out of content ideas
✅How the biggest brands go viral on IG (plus what NOT to do)
✅How to create a repeatable content system (that doesn't take hours every day OR a creative team)

Thursday, 5 March | 11am NZDT | 9am AEDT | $79 NZD

Find out exactly how the biggest accounts are blowing up on IG (and how your brand can become one of them) 👇

p.s. Got YAP dollars to cash in? Head here to spend them on this workshop!

I hope you’ve spent the weekend simultaneously unwinding and picking apart the shows at Milan’s fashion week. Both incredible stress relief methods FYI. I had my serious concerns about Gucci after seeing them posting AI slop last week and getting a ton of sh*t for it. But also, it being Denma’s first showcase since becoming CD, the pressure was on. Not only that, but the brand has needed a rescue for a while. Sales are down. The creative direction has felt lost for a while. And luxury fashion in general is in a weird place where hype doesn't translate to purchases the way it used to.

Demna knows how to generate buzz. He's a master of spectacle and controversy. And he understands how to make fashion feel like a cultural event rather than just expensive clothes. But he's also deeply polarising. And his aesthetic at Balenciaga has been about irony, ugliness as luxury, and constantly pushing boundaries in ways that don't always land. The Fall/Winter 2026 show was what I would call a safe play, still managing to draw up critique and praise all over the internet, but not to the usual Denma effect. Hopefully we see some more ballsy moves from the director in the future.

In news that brings the stress right back: the "Sephora teen" phenomenon has regressed. Now, six year olds want makeup. And I don’t mean that cheap plasticky balm/ lipstick we all owned as kids. There’s a whole market emerging around kid-friendly cosmetics, marketed to children who've grown up watching beauty tutorials and skincare routines on TikTok and YouTube. The products are supposedly safe, gentle formulas designed for young skin. But the underlying message is still that looking a certain way matters, that self-presentation is something you need to manage from childhood.

Ah yes, let’s start the insecurity now, before they can even think about being happy. Smh. We’ll add it in to the harm caused by social media and the inescapable doomscroll addiction. What could go wrong.

Speaking of, apparently the soundtrack of the doomscroll generation is "phonk," a genre that's blown up on TikTok and short-form video platforms over the past few years. It's aggressive, hypnotic, repetitive, built around distorted samples and heavy bass. And it pairs perfectly with the kind of content people consume while scrolling through an endless feed. The perfect background music for watching the world fall apart in fifteen-second clips.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

I recently read it on one of my favourite Substacks by Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick. It's not new. Artist Margot DeMarco logged it in what she calls “yuppie dystopia” eleven years ago.

Reddit posts from nine years back wrestle with the same concept. And artist Adriana Mora created NFTs around it in 2021. Every iteration circles back to the same Don Henley quote: "It's a fine line between the American Dream and the American Nightmare."

But the phrase is having a moment right now. For obvious reasons.

Images of human suffering next to tech accelerationism promising utopia. Extreme comforts and even more extreme discomforts. The highest highs and lowest lows, not just coexisting in your timeline, but literally in your hands.

Reminders of your own financial instability and the erosion of democratic norms flood your feed relentlessly, punctuated only by packages containing whatever you impulse-bought at 2am showing up at your door.

We have access to infinite information, infinite entertainment, infinite connection, have more capability, more choice, more access than any generation in human history.

And yet.

I feel more anxious and more isolated. I definitely feel more uncertain about the future. The abundance doesn't fill anything. Neither does the infinite access.

The convenience doesn't even begin to patch the void.

You can do anything. But you are becoming nothing.

The promise was always that more choice equals more freedom, more access equals more opportunity and more connectivity equals more belonging. Makes sense, right? But the reality is that infinite possibility can erode identity. When you can be anything, do anything, buy anything, access anything, what are you actually becoming?

The self fragments. Simultaneously a consumer, a content creator, a brand, a curator, a commenter, a witness to atrocity, a participant in culture, a node in the algorithm. You're optimising, performing, consuming, producing, reacting, sharing, processing - all at once, all the time.

Where is the centre? The coherent narrative? Gone. Replaced with constant input, constant choice, constant possibility. And somehow, in all of that, it feels like I’m disappearing.

Don Henley's line about the fine line between dream and nightmare hits different in 2026. Because we're watching that line dissolve in real-time.

The dream? You can work from anywhere, order anything, access everything, be whoever you want to be. Total freedom. Total possibility.

The nightmare? You're never offline, never settled, never enough, never sure who you actually are underneath all the optimisation and performance. Total fragmentation. Total exhaustion.

The promise of unlimited potential has curdled into the anxiety of unlimited obligation. You can do anything, which means you should be doing everything. And if you're not, you're failing.

But it's hitting mainstream consciousness now because the contradictions have become impossible to ignore.

We're watching billionaires race to Mars while people can't afford rent. We have AI that can create anything while human creativity feels increasingly devalued. And we can connect with anyone globally while loneliness is an epidemic.

We have more convenience than ever while life literally feel harder. The cognitive dissonance is nauseating.

And "you can do anything but you are becoming nothing" captures that perfectly. It names the unnamed feeling of existing in a world of abundance that somehow makes you feel empty.

Let’s say the artists and the bloggers and the modern philosophers are right. Let’s say you can do anything and you're becoming nothing anyway. Maybe that's actually... liberating? 

If the system is designed to fragment you regardless of how well you perform, why keep performing? If the abundance doesn't fill the void, maybe stop chasing the abundance.

You don't have to optimise every choice or monetise every hobby or turn yourself into a brand or a productivity machine or whatever the algorithm is demanding this week.

If becoming "something" in the traditional sense, successful, influential, perfectly curated - still leaves you feeling like nothing, then maybe the goal isn't to become something at all. Maybe it's to just... be like messy, and unoptimised, and present, you know, like… human???

The paradox exists whether you participate or not. And the whiplash happens whether you doom-scroll or touch grass. So, you might as well choose the version of nothing that feels less like erasure and more like freedom, right?

You can do anything. You're (allegedly) becoming nothing. So do the things that make you feel like something, even if they don't look like anything to anyone else. I hope that makes sense, because it might just be the only way through.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

The trend uses audio from motivational king Jocko Willink aggressively repeating "Do you actually wanna do this or not? Do you actually wanna do this or not?". And honestly, the energy is unmatched. 

People are using it to describe those moments when someone asked if you wanted to keep going when you were clearly tapping out, OR when you're the one asking someone else a question where the answer is painfully, hilariously obvious. Your actions already told the whole story, but someone still felt the need to check in like a whole drill sergeant.

My fav examples include:

Use the Jocko Willink trending sound. Throw up your onscreen text describing a moment when someone asked you if you actually wanted to do something after your behaviour made it crystal clear you were checked out, OR when you asked someone else something, knowing damn well what the answer was.

A few ideas to get you started:

-abdel khalil, brand & marketing exec

😂Yap’s funniest home videos: Salt, meet wound
❤How wholesome: All it takes is a positive mindset
😊Soooo satisfying: Acrylic markers so good
🍝What you should make for dinner tonight: Dump & bake

Hey Danielle!

If you’re getting views but not followers, you need to add a follower mechanism to your series. This means you need to incorporate a specific call-to-action or incentive that makes people want to follow you. For example, we had a client getting decent views but not many follows. So they started a series based around the idea of “If I can get this account to 100K followers, my boss will give me $10K.”

Suddenly, people had a reason to follow beyond just watching the content.  For you, this could be a separate series or an evolution of your current one. But the key is making the follow feel like it has a purpose. Give people a reason to buy in and feel like their follow is doing something.

- 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.