The New Rules of Consumer

When intelligence can do everything for us, what is still worth doing ourselves?

For the better part of two decades, consumer technology has been organized around a single promise, which is that it would take the effort out of living. We were handed the one-tap checkout, the infinite feed, the swipe that turned courtship into a reflex, and the playlist that assembled itself while we slept. Each of these was a genuine gift, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise, but somewhere along the way the removal of effort stopped feeling like freedom and started feeling like weightlessness, as though our days were passing through us without leaving a mark.

Now we are entering the era of agents, where software will not only recommend but act on our behalf, booking the flight, drafting the reply, and buying the thing before we have quite finished wanting it. The logical endpoint of convenience culture is a life in which nothing is asked of us at all, and I’ve come to believe this is exactly where the next generation of enduring consumer products will part ways with the last. The rules are being rewritten, and the ones I keep returning to have less to do with what technology can do and more to do with what people still long to do for themselves.

Finding meaning in friction

Something curious happened over the past year, when people started buying iPods again, years after Apple retired the line. According to Axios, eBay searches for the iPod Classic rose 25% and searches for the Nano rose 20% across the first ten months of 2025 compared with the year before. Many of the buyers are young enough that they never owned one the first time, and when they explain themselves they rarely talk about sound quality, speaking instead about relief: a walk without twenty notifications, a device that does exactly one thing, and the slow ritual of choosing which songs are worth carrying with you.

It would be easy to file all of this under nostalgia and move on, but I think nostalgia is doing more serious work than we give it credit for. Joan Didion wrote that we tell ourselves stories in order to live, and nostalgia is one of those stories, a way of holding onto a version of the world that once felt legible when the present feels anything but. One young buyer told Axios that her generation, facing so much uncertainty about what comes next, reaches for the things that once gave them hope, and in that light the iPod is not really a music player at all but a small, rectangular shelter against a future that refuses to come into focus.

The same instinct is surfacing everywhere once you start looking for it, in film cameras and vinyl, in handwritten notes, and even in dating, which the apps reduced to a flick of the thumb and which is now drifting back toward run clubs, supper clubs, and introductions through friends, the places where you have to show up in person and risk being seen. There is work to be done to arrive at something, and that work is what makes the arrival mean something. Researchers Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely gave a version of this a name, the IKEA effect, after finding that people value what they helped build far more than an identical thing handed to them finished, because labor turns an object into a story and a story into something we keep.

I learned this long before I had the language for it, growing up around my family’s jewelry business, where I watched people take their time choosing the pieces that would mark the most important moments of their lives. Nobody wanted that process shortened, because the deliberation was itself part of the gift, and the best thing anyone behind the counter could offer was never speed but a better way of looking.

None of this means that all friction is good, and the distinction matters enormously for anyone building in this moment. There is friction we never chose, the sifting through five hundred things that aren’t us to find the three that are, the anxiety of overpaying, the dead ends and the dark patterns, and that kind deserves to disappear. Then there is friction we choose because it gives us something back, the hunt, the practice, the wait that makes the ending sweet, and that kind deserves to be protected. Alongside it, people are also seeking a quieter kind of respite in experiences that ask nothing of them at all, the song that seems to find you, the gift that arrives unannounced, the small magic of being surprised by something that understood you. Chosen effort and effortless wonder look like opposites, but they are refusals of the same thing, an attention economy that demands everything and returns very little. When agents can do everything for us, what will matter most are the experiences where the extra work feels worth it, and the moments of magic that remind us we are more than the tasks we complete.

Invisible AI

Every technological wave passes through a phase where the technology itself becomes the badge, and we have lived through the dot-com names, the cloud-based everything, and the mobile-first pitch decks, and are now living through the season of “AI-powered” being stamped on products from toothbrushes to greeting cards. I understand the temptation, because it signals relevance to investors and press, but I think wearing AI as a form of clout is a mistake for anyone building something meant to last.

The most transformative technologies tend to vanish into the experience they make possible. Nobody fell in love with Toy Story because of Pixar’s rendering pipeline, even though the pipeline is the reason the story could exist at all, and the audience never had to think about it for a single frame. Nobody describes their favorite discovery playlist in terms of collaborative filtering; they describe the feeling that something knew them. We stopped calling our lamps electric a long time ago, and the day we stop calling our products intelligent will be the day the technology has finally matured into what it was always meant to be.

People do not actually want to use AI, and they never really did. They want to feel understood, to find the thing that is unmistakably theirs, to make something beautiful, and to feel a little less alone in a world that keeps getting louder. AI should be at the core of what you aim to do rather than what you announce, the invisible craft in the background that lets the experience feel effortless and personal. There is a strategic reason for this as well, because a product that leads with its model invites comparison on capability, a race no consumer company will win against the labs, while a product that leads with feeling competes on something that cannot be benchmarked.

In a world where AI becomes invisible, the people who design how it feels will own the future.

Authored, not assigned

AI collapses the distance between an idea and its first draft, but it does not collapse the distance between an idea and its impact, and that remaining distance is where people still reign. What lives there is discernment, the taste and judgment to know what is good, what is relevant, and what is actually worth finishing. In a world of infinite drafts, completion becomes the rare skill, and in a world of infinite content, what cuts through is never simply what gets made but what gets directed with care.

I’ve felt this in my own work over the past year, where AI gave me the gift of momentum, though only after I had done the slower work of getting clear on where I wanted to go. Speed is a wonderful thing to have once you know your direction, and a dangerous one to have before, because it lets you arrive very quickly at places you never meant to be.

Reid Hoffman has spoken about how his background in philosophy shaped his thinking more than any narrowly technical training could have, and I think it points to a deeper truth about this moment, which is that the most powerful education is the one that teaches you how to think and how to express what you see. The advantage now belongs to clarity of thought paired with relentless curiosity, and to integrated creative vision rather than one-track expertise, the kind of person who can move between storytelling, product, and craft because each one sharpens the others. The tools have made it possible to build a multidimensional career that is authored rather than assigned, where this moment becomes a kind of curriculum, and the work we put into the world becomes our application to whatever future we decide to choose.

None of this is about doing too much, but about doing the things that make you more fully who you are, and then letting the world catch up to you.

Less, and better, and yours

Nearly everything the largest labs are building points outward, toward more capability, more scale, and the broadest possible audience, which is exactly as it should be for infrastructure. But in a world of infinite, optimized abundance, the thing that becomes scarce is intimacy, the sense that something has gathered the overwhelming world and handed back only the few things that are truly yours. With the barriers to building collapsing, the scarce resource is no longer the ability to make something but the point of view on what deserves to be made, and point of view is a human inheritance shaped by taste, memory, and the particular way each of us pays attention.

bell hooks believed the function of art is to do more than tell it like it is, but also to imagine what is possible, and I think the best consumer products of the coming decade will carry that same ambition. They will ask something of us that is worth giving, give back something we could not have made ourselves, and keep the machinery so quietly in the background that all we remember is how they made us feel. Perhaps AI is the tool that finally lets us design our lives around joy rather than our jobs around output, and if so, the question worth sitting with is what you are building that only you could build, and how these tools might help you build it faster, truer, and freer than you ever could alone.

Convenience will win the transaction, but meaning is what earns the return.