On Culture: We could use more of it

Wed Sep 03 2025

What is culture?

Culture is the shared process by which a group assigns meaning to what it does and how it lives.

It isn’t just art, fashion, music or tradition. Culture includes entertainment, the stories we tell ourselves. Our education, the knowledge we learn and transmit to others. Politics as well, the rules and symbols we rally around. And institutions, the rituals and signals of belonging.

In each case, culture is supposed to metabolize appearance (what shows up) through essence (what it really is) into intellect (the stories and structures we build).

When essence is amputated, culture turns into spectacle. We end up mistaking the performance for the thing itself.

Culture shapes what we value and what we ignore. In its natural rhythm, it moves as a triad: Appearance → Essence → Intellect.

When all components of culture are intact it metabolizes meaning. Surfaces are tested against essence, and intellect refines that understanding into stories, wisdom, and art, enriching the culture and starting the next cycle.

Think of it this way: learning to cook a recipe handed down by a grandparent, through years of meals, failure, laughter and memory, that carries essence. Watching a 30-second video of the same recipe on TikTok carries only appearance and intellect. One transforms you, the other passes time.

Culture is, in a sense, the collective’s belief system, the shared stories and assumptions we live inside. As individuals we each carry our own frameworks for making sense of the world, but culture is what happens when those frameworks are pooled and reinforced together. At its best, this collective meaning-making is metabolized through essence, grounding appearances in lived reality before intellect turns them into story. But when essence is cut out, culture loops on itself: appearances validated by intellect, intellect divorced from being. The result is a performance of belief, not the lived reality it was meant to reflect.

So, what’s going on?

In our civilization, the middle pole, essence, has been amputated for generations. What’s left is a binary loop between appearance and intellect. Beautiful vs. ugly. Smart vs. dumb. Popular vs. obscure. Industries rise around both poles, beauty, fashion, academia, media, but the furnace of essence is missing.

Culture becomes performance. A degree becomes a brand, not a sign of depth. A blockbuster becomes a spectacle, not a story that transforms. Identity is curated by surfaces and certified by intellect, with no grounding in experiential being.

Culture without essence is akin to playing dressup. It shouts in images and debates in words, but never metabolizes into depth, letalone experience. When essence is restored, culture becomes more than performance, it becomes experience, which creates coherence.

How does culture work?

I spent too much time thinking about how culture is structured and how it operates but I’ve narrowed it down for myself to the following. Culture feels invisible most of the time but it’s not magic, it has channels. If you want to shift it, you have to understand how it propagates.

At its core, culture spreads through repetition of signals that appear normal. The “obvious” channels are art, media, politics and education but underneath there are other mechanisms.

Narrative loops

Stories are the backbone of culture. They don’t just entertain, they normalize information. A story repeated often enough in textbooks, news, family sayings, even jokes calcifies into truth. “That’s just how things are.” A nation retells its founding myth until it becomes unquestionable. A company repeats its origin story until it feels like destiny. The repetition matters more than accuracy.

If you want to shift culture, you don’t fight the old stories head-on. You seed new ones and let them repeat until they feel inevitable.

Culture is stitched together not from facts, but from loops that circle until they harden.

Rituals

If stories shape the mind, rituals shape the body. Every culture encodes its meaning into repeated actions: prayers, parades, handshakes, graduation gowns, corporate all-hands. These rhythms train belonging and signal “this is what we do here.” They bypass analysis and sink into muscle memory. That’s why rituals are hard to resist because they feel natural even when they’re invented. To shift a culture, you don’t only argue differently, you create new rituals that embody the change.

Change the practice, and people’s sense of normal shifts with it.

Symbols & aesthetics

Symbols are shortcuts. A flag, a logo, a pair of sneakers, a skyline, all of them carry layers of meaning without explanation. Fashion, architecture, music, even memes are aesthetics that say who belongs and who doesn’t. People don’t always notice they’re absorbing them, but they do.

That’s why propaganda starts with symbols, and why subcultures guard theirs so fiercely. To change culture, you can’t only tell better stories; you have to reshape the symbols that carry them.

Subverting or replacing symbols shifts culture faster than essays ever will.

Institutions

Institutions are culture frozen into structure, a snapshot in time that doesn’t bend easily. Schools, courts, parliaments, corporations; they don’t just enforce rules, they teach what matters. Grading systems tell you what counts as success. Legal precedents tell you what counts as harm. Org charts tell you who matters more.

With essence, institutions cultivate experience. Without essence, they become credential machines. Appearances rubber-stamped by intellect.

Institutions are engines of normalization, quietly reinforcing what culture should reward. That’s why reforming institutions is slow but powerful work: shift the way they measure, record, or reward, and culture downstream begins to bend.

Social reward/punishment.

Culture isn’t only top-down; it’s lived daily in micro-gestures of approval and shame. Who gets applause at a party? Who gets mocked? Who gets invited back? Status is assigned in countless tiny exchanges and those signals teach people what to chase and what to avoid. It’s why cultural change can feel so personal: it requires shifting what earns a smile or what gets side-eyed. To alter culture, you need to tilt those feedback loops, honor different virtues, ridicule different vices.

When essence is present, people tend to cheer for what’s real. Honesty, courage, kindness, someone showing up as themselves. When essence is missing, the cheers go to the masks. The cool outfit, the witty line, the number of likes and the person underneath is ignored or even punished.

What the group claps for, the group becomes.

Technology.

Every new medium rewires culture’s defaults. The printing press made private reading normal and spread literacy. Radio and TV centralized mass culture around a few dominant voices. Social media shattered that into a spectacle of surface signals and instant feedback.

Technology doesn’t just carry culture; it sets the stage for what kind of culture can exist. To change culture, you can’t ignore the platforms people use to signal and share.

But today’s platforms don’t just carry culture, they engineer it. Algorithms optimize for attention, which means they systematically reward appearance over essence. Viral clips travel; depth drowns. Platforms amplify loops of surface and intellect, images, takes, credentials, while filtering out the slow metabolization that essence requires. In this sense, technology isn’t just a stage, it’s the parasite’s perfect environment.

The architecture of a medium decides which stories echo, which rituals scale, which symbols spread.

What now?

When you leave essence out of the formula, culture stops metabolizing. What you get instead is a loop: input (appearance) → output (intellect) → back again. It produces signals, products, credentials, spectacles but it doesn’t produce any transformation.

That’s why life feels “pointless” for so many. It’s not that nothing is happening. In fact, there’s too much happening.

Too much content, too much stuff, too much noise. But almost none of it metabolizes into experience that changes you.

You watch a series, and at the end you’ve consumed hours but nothing in you has shifted. You earn a degree, but it’s a credential or a brand more than a transformation of mind. You scroll all night, feeding on appearances that never metabolize into any meaningful in your life.

This is the wrong consumptive cycle: a body of culture producing and consuming without evolving. And since Culture feeds itself it is easily changed if we choose differently.

Like eating without digestion. Calories in, calories out, no nourishment. No transformation.

The restoration of essence in Culture won’t come from one big revolution. It starts small. Personally reclaiming practices that metabolize (slow reading, embodied rituals, conversations that hold paradox). Socially shifting reward structures (valuing depth over likes, coherence over performance). Institutionally redesigning education, art, and politics so they don’t just brand identity but cultivate essence, movement and true action.

Restore essence, and culture feeds again. Not just performing, but metabolizing appearances into collective change. The kind that deepens, develops and enhances. Not the kind that just repeats.

If you choose what you consume, you curate what you will produce. And what you produce becomes what others consume.