DEPTH CHARGE
I have rare things -> I have rare thoughts
TL;DR: Deep is the new sexy. We’re a bit out of practise.
Happy new year.
Given that we ended 2025 talking about a rising hunger to think for ourselves in a culture that will not stop trying to think for us, let’s start 2026 talking about depth.
As the year turns, it seems pretty clear that thinking more clearly, more independently, more critically, is 2026’s skill du jour.
The swing away from shallow and towards depth is touching everything.
The re-legitimisation of hard things seems to be in the air right now. You can feel it the stats around longer-form content’s steady march. And in the very long books at the top of Spotify’s 2025 audiobook charts (almost the whole top ten are 400-600 page doorstops with 20-30 hour listening times). And in the personal curriculums and status-TBRs obliterating the new-year-new-you productivity journals and bullet planners of recent yore.
2026 will belong, we’re told, to the intellectual influencer - the actual expert sending dispatches from the actual front line. We can expect further renewed seriousness around reading (as we know, it’s become so damn cool, and hot-off-the-press: James Marriott has a book deal to rapidly expand his blockbuster 2025 post-literate society Substack post into a 2026 book). See also Pinterest’s predicted fountain-penny Poetcore movement. And next month’s Wuthering Heights mania (the Emerald Fennel movie and the charli xcx soundtrack album drop).
You can see it in the cultural significance and wild commercial success (40m+ streams in first 24h, number one in several countries) of Rosalia’s Lux album, released Nov 7th. An album deliberately built in opposition to modern streaming-era wisdom… extended track lengths, non-instant hooks, and a narrative arc that only really makes sense when listened to front-to-back. The kind of emotional and intellectual density that is usually avoided because it reduces algorithmic friendliness.
And you can feel it in the mix of ridicule and shame that brain rot, parasocial relationships, rage bait and slop have been deemed our collective recent words of the year. Or that white - a literal absence of colour - is our colour of the year. Appalling.
When a way of living becomes extreme, counter-movements feel extreme too.
Depth has started feeling so radical and unusual because shallowness has become so very normal.
But while we’re ready for it, we also aren’t.
Because we live in shallow times.
Our days are fully structured around interruption. Our attention’s well trained to move quickly and never settle. And our consumer desire to never, ever be satiated. Or at least not for very long. We’ve learned to find our comfort in quick takes and clean conclusions.
This yearning we’re seeing, and probably feeling, to think more deeply has come exactly at the moment when conditions have become most hostile (which is probably why it’s happening now).
The cultural pendulum is swinging, but the ground underneath it hasn’t shifted yet.
Shallow by design
Our systems aren’t built for this. Our lives aren’t. The entire attention economy runs on shallow processing.
Low-complexity, immediately-understandable content is easy to distribute, easy to react to, easy to measure, optimise and scale. It’s perfect to consume in fragments: on the bus, between meetings, half-distracted while watching the telly or folding the laundry.
It fits the shape of modern life.
Deeper thinking doesn’t fit with any of that.
It demands time, commitment and decisiveness you’re not sure you have. It doesn’t deliver its value in the first few seconds. It won’t work with our partial attention. It’s tough to dip in and out of, frustrating to be interrupted from, and so much harder to monetise.
It’s opposite to the spirit of the age: modern life prevents depth.
(As former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris has argued for years, social platforms are optimised for reaction, not reflection. Ezra Klein has also spoken loudly about social media rewarding immediacy over complexity or intellectual risk. And as Byung-Chul Han writes in In the Swarm, digital culture isn’t about depth, it’s about stimulation).
Up against all that, it seems that thinking more deeply will cost us more than just our time, commitment and decisiveness.
It will also cost a willingness to go against the grain. To maybe be slightly out of sync with people. To be an outsider and trust your own judgement when everything around you seems to want you continually destabilised and doubting yourself (Capitalism is an insecurity machine + Uncertain people buy more stuff). To perform less and think more.
That’s what I mean by depth being a skill, perhaps the skill most covetable in 2026. I def feel like all of this needs honing and training in me. It doesn’t come naturally anymore.
But that’s how depth charges work. They sink beneath the surface, building pressure until the shockwave distorts, disorients, and destroys things.
A couple of years ago I wrote an essay called What comes after the attention economy? In it I said it depends on what we feel the next scarcity will be.
I think I have an answer now: depth.
I think it explains all sorts of things happening now, and what to expect next.
For example I think it explains the cultural significance of two business we should all be watching closely in 2026: A24 and Miu Miu.
A24 built its brand producing films that are the structural and spiritual opposite of our moment’s most commercial blockbuster juggernauts. A24’s are slower, stranger, and more psychologically demanding than the formulaic epidemic of sequels, prequels and spin-offs the big studios pump out. Its success shows us that depth sells - that at least some audiences are willing to trade instant gratification for something a bit more ambiguous or complex. And the establishment is absolutely taking notice - last night Timothee Chalamet won the Critics’ Choice award for Best Actor for his role in A24’s ingeniously-marketed Marty Supreme.
And Miu Miu, the fashion house on a streak that’s confounding the analysts.
In a culture stuck at surface-level, everything Miu Miu does gestures toward depth. The Miu Miu woman is so clearly someone with an inner life. A thinking person. Wearing Miu Miu has become a signal of that (to those, of course, with the cultural capital to decipher the signal). See also one of Jonathan Anderson’s first acts for Dior: sort out the book tote.
There has been so much debate lately about the source of Miu Miu’s magic…its product, its storytelling, its image-making, its distribution, the experiences it creates (like its Literary Club events in Milan and Shanghai, described by Vogue in 2025 as the hottest ticket in town).
For me it’s Miu Miu’s cultural fluency that’s the real reason the business is doing such numbers in an otherwise dismal moment for luxury fashion. Miu Miu’s people have so obviously noticed something that none of their peer brands seem to have clocked about the current dynamics of aspiration: that in a time of such chronic ambient shallowness, depth feels fresh, exciting and intriguing.
A contrast. A relief.
Quite a refreshing thought at the beginning of a new year!
Thanks for reading. See you in the depths.
Beth
Here’s what’s interesting. I opened this newsletter and IMMEDIATELY knew I needed the time to really think and read it. Then there have been a litany of other newsletters that I’ve consumed in the meantime because they are 2-4 minute hits. That, alone, proves the point!! We are not built for depth and yet we thirst for it. You said, it’s never been harder culturally and, maybe, that’s why we are choosing it. I have LOTS of thoughts. Which, as you wrote, is the sign of depth; something we must come back to.
Love this Beth. Better get in training 💪