The Turning: When a Culture Decides It Has Had Enough
There comes a moment in every society usually not marked by fireworks or headlines, usually not even remarked upon at first when people quietly decide they’ve had enough. Enough speed. Enough noise. Enough sameness. Enough “productivity.” Enough of being herded through life by devices designed to anticipate their needs before they’ve had the chance to feel them.
Contrary to media opinion, cultures don’t pivot loudly, they pivot in whispers. A grandmother returning to the butcher because the supermarket beef has no memory. A young couple saving for furniture that won’t collapse into pulp. An office worker learning to mend their own clothes instead of replacing them every season. A teenager choosing a fountain pen over a phone note.
A founder abandoning features in favour of design with dignity. A family swapping a shopping centre for a farm shop on a Sunday morning.
Tiny decisions. Millions of them. Each one barely noticeable on its own but together, they form a tremor the early rumble of cultural change. That tremor is here.
We are living at the beginning of a turning, a moment when people across economies, ages and continents are beginning to question the underlying assumptions of the last 50 years the assumptions that convenience is always good, that speed is always progress, that more is always better.
The craft revival is not a quaint aesthetic trend, it is the first visible symptom of a deeper shift,
a society remembering itself and its values.
For decades, we were sold a story, that technology would give us ease, automation would give us freedom and mass production would give us abundance and at first, it felt true. Life became smoother. Tasks quickened. Barriers fell. The future arrived with the pleasant hum of a dishwasher but somewhere along the way the promise soured.
The ease became emptiness. The abundance became clutter. The speed became anxiety. The automation became alienation. The convenience became dependence.
We saved time, yes but we never used it well. We gained choice but lost discernment. We gained efficiency but lost intimacy. In solving the practical problems of life, we ushered in a new kind of poverty, a poverty of feeling. What the modern world gave us in abundance, it quietly stole back in depth.
The signs of cultural awakening rarely look dramatic. They look domestic, humble, almost embarrassingly ordinary.
A family buys vegetables from a farm because they taste like childhood. A tired businessman learns to sharpen a knife and finds unexpected peace in the rhythm. A young woman starts buying clothes that last because she can no longer stomach the landfill guilt of fast fashion.
A couple redesign their home, removing everything that feels temporary. A group of friends begins meeting around meals cooked from scratch rather than delivered in boxes.
These aren’t retreats from modernity they’re reclamations. People aren’t rejecting the 21st century, they’re correcting it and in that correction lies the first great movement of Part Two.
The concept of “enough” is strangely radical in a world engineered for “more.”
More screen time.
More notifications.
More content.
More features.
More products.
More output.
More expectations.
More noise.
The craft revival introduces something older and wiser, the notion that life improves not when we add things but when we choose them.
Enough is the boundary that gives meaning to desire.
Enough is the point where quality begins.
Enough is the moment you move from accumulation to intention.
The psychology of “enough” is not minimalist; it’s mature. It’s the emotional adulthood of a culture rediscovering proportion.
Mass production didn’t just give us too many things it gave us the wrong relationship with them. Objects became temporary. Homes became storage. Value became transactional. Possessions became performative.
The anti–mass-production ethos of Part One was the diagnosis. Part Two is the reckoning, the realisation that mindless consumption doesn’t just clutter homes it clutters lives.
People are waking up in homes that feel like strangers. They sit in rooms full of objects they don’t love. They wear clothes chosen by algorithms, not desire. They work on devices that distract more than they empower. Almost without noticing, society has begun clearing the fog not by throwing everything away but by shifting the emotional contract we have with the things we keep.
The question is no longer “Do I want it?” but “Does it deserve me?”
Meaning is the new currency. Not the sentimental, Instagram-friendly kind but the grounded sense that the things you choose your clothes, your tools, your home, your food reflect your values, not your impulses.
People are beginning to want, objects with stories, homes with soul, food with provenance,
work with purpose, tools with longevity, clothes with honesty.
They want things that stand behind them, not things that collapse under the slightest moral breeze. When a society begins to reorganise itself around meaning, everything changes,
markets, expectations, education, industry, even identity.
This is where the shift begins to deepen.
In Part One we saw the cultural rebellion against algorithms, the revolt against being flattened into predictable patterns. In Part Two, the rebellion becomes personal. People are building their identities not from what is recommended to them but from what resonates with them.
The shift is subtle but seismic. You see it in the young founder who deletes social apps on weekdays, the father who cooks for his family instead of ordering in, the teenager who rejects fast fashion out of principle, the designer who refuses to build products that manipulate attention,
the farmer who sells boxes directly to families because supermarkets have lost their souls.
Algorithms may predict behaviour but they cannot predict awakening.
Once a person rediscovers taste, the spell breaks. They stop living as a demographic and begin living as themselves.
This transformation does not stay neatly within the realm of home and consumption. It bleeds into work, because work is the place where values collide with reality. People increasingly want work that resembles craft work that requires skill, produces something of consequence, feels grounded in integrity, respects time rather than violating it and prioritises depth over volume.
Burnout is not exhaustion, it is meaninglessness. All the rest is solvable.
As workers, creators and founders rediscover the craft ideal, companies face a profound question, “Are we building tools humans thrive with or tools humans survive despite?”
Part Two will explore this tension more deeply because it is the crucible where the cultural shift either takes root or collapses. Across cities, villages and rural towns, homes are changing. Not through grand transformations but through quiet ones.
People are rethinking, how they cook, how they buy, how they decorate, how they raise children,
how they spend weekends, how they relate to food, how they measure time.
A single handmade bowl can shift the mood of a kitchen. A handmade table can transform how families eat. A well-made tool turns chores into rituals. A home filled with intention becomes a sanctuary rather than a storage unit. This intentional home becomes the laboratory of Part Two the place where new values manifest physically, day after day.
Cultural change always begins with aesthetics fashion, taste, preference but true transformation reaches much deeper. The craft revival has graduated from taste to principle, from principle to behaviour and now from behaviour to identity.
Identity is where change becomes irreversible.
People who rediscover intention do not drift back to disposability.
People who rediscover craft do not return to clutter.
People who rediscover flavour do not settle for industrial food.
People who rediscover slowness do not long for speed.
People who rediscover meaning do not tolerate noise.
Once a culture remembers what it has lost, nostalgia does not bring it back determination does.
Part Two is the story of that determination.
If Part One was the rediscovery of craft,
Part Two is the restructuring of life.
Chapter One marks the hinge the turning point.
From here we will explore:
the economics of meaning
the rewiring of desire
the rise of the intentional class
why small teams outperform large ones
the emotional architecture of homes
the return of apprenticeship
and how craft principles reshape work, business, food and identity
The world is not rejecting modernity.
It is refining it. This is the moment the culture steps off the conveyor belt and back into its own hands. this is where Part Two truly begins.
The Economics of Meaning: Why Quality Outperforms Quantity
The great secret of modern capitalism the one whispered behind the polished glass of boardrooms, muttered in factories and privately acknowledged by executives who would never dare say it aloud is this: the numbers no longer add up.
Not the financial ones; those are meticulously arranged. The emotional ones.
For decades, the economy was built on a simple assumption: if people bought more, the system grew. If they bought faster, it grew faster and if they could be persuaded to replace something before it had even broken, the system became unstoppable. It was, for a time, the closest thing capitalism ever had to a perpetual motion machine.
However, it came with a flaw, a flaw so deep, so beautifully disguised, that it took half a century for anyone to notice, humans don’t want infinite things. They want meaningful ones.
Meaning once dismissed as a poetic afterthought is now a market force.
Silent.
Powerful.
Undeniable.
This rewriting the economics of everything.
There was a time, not long ago, when quantity was the dream. Factories churned out goods like a mechanical heartbeat. Retailers measured success in cubic metres. Homes became miniature warehouses stuffed with the spoils of productivity. Even advertising spoke in the language of abundance “more,” “bigger,” “extra,” “unlimited.”
But the appetite for more has turned.
Not angrily.
Not dramatically.
Simply… inevitably.
People are full. Not metaphorically materially. The modern home is burdened with possessions, many of which inspire a quiet, awkward shame rather than satisfaction. Cupboards groan. Wardrobes overflow. Garages have become mausoleums for regretted purchases and broken promises. Quantity was supposed to make us happy but it made us heavy.
A heavy society becomes a slow one not in the graceful, intentional way but in a lethargic, jammed, emotionally fogged sort of way. Productivity slows. Curiosity dims. The mind clogs.
A culture cannot thrive under the weight of its own possessions and so, as inevitably as a tide changing direction, people are returning to the one principle the old craftsmen never forgot, better beats more.
It seems counterintuitive offensive, even to the logic of mass production, that durability can be more profitable than disposability.
Yet that is exactly what is happening. Brands that invest in longevity boots that last a decade, coats that become heirlooms, watches that endure generations, software that doesn’t break with every update are quietly outperforming the churn-and-burn giants whose business models depend on constant replacement cycles.
Why? Because longevity creates loyalty and loyalty is the only currency in the modern marketplace that cannot be faked.
A customer who buys a product that lasts does something extraordinary: they trust. They return. They recommend. They defend. They become part of a story rather than a statistic. Craft brands understand what mass producers forgot, people don’t want new things they want the right things.
Once they find them, they don’t leave.
There is a new class of consumer emerging not wealthy, not elite, not urban or rural specifically but psychologically distinct. They are not impulsive. They are not passive. They do not buy for spectacle. They buy for pedigree, story, integrity, longevity, provenance and alignment.
This intentional consumer is not dazzled by logos or enamoured with marketing. They want to know who made the object, how it was made, why it was made that way and whether the maker cared. They are choosing art over noise, craft over convenience, essence over excess.
In financial terms, they turn markets upside down. In cultural terms, they restore sanity. They behave like investors rather than consumers, slow to buy, loyal to keep, proud to own. This is economic behaviour with emotional calculus.
For several years now, households have been waking up to a peculiar, unsettling truth: cheap things make life more expensive.
The cheap sofa that needs replacing every few years.
The cheap clothes that sag and fray.
The cheap tools that break under pressure.
The cheap shoes that collapse at the heel.
The cheap appliances that die inconveniently and expensively.
There comes a moment of reckoning usually during a bank statement review, often accompanied by a deep sigh when a person realises the sum of all their “savings” has quietly cost them far more than buying one good thing would have. Cheap has become the enemy of value. This realisation is spreading across societies with the quiet efficiency of a weather front. It shifts spending patterns, alters expectations and gently closes the chapter on the disposable age.
Quality is becoming not just desirable but economically rational. Economists rarely speak of emotion, which is odd, really, given that it governs most buying decisions. However, the new economy of craft operates on an emotional return on investment.
That return comes from the pleasure of holding something well-made, the pride of owning less but better, the relief of reducing clutter, the satisfaction of trusting your possessions, the calm of a home that reflects intention, the comfort of choosing objects that endure.
This emotional return is what drives repeat purchase, brand loyalty and long-term value creation. It is also what mass production cannot manufacture. Craft is not merely a product category.
It is an emotional architecture and emotion, it turns out, is one of the most powerful economic forces in the world.
One of the most underestimated consequences of the craft revival is its impact on how businesses organise themselves. Small teams whether making boots, writing software, roasting coffee or tailoring suits increasingly outperform large ones, not despite their size but because of it.
Small teams can care more, see more, react faster, refuse bad compromises, preserve integrity
and build identity.
Mass companies optimise for scale, craft companies optimise for attention.
Attention, precise, human attention is the one resource AI cannot generate and large organisations cannot replicate. It is the invisible ingredient in quality and the market now rewards it.
Luxury used to mean price. Then it meant scarcity. Then it meant status. Now it means intimacy.
The new luxury is buying something made by someone who can tell you why they made it. It is meat from a farmer who knows the name of the field. It is a coat from a tailor who cuts for your shoulder slope. It is software from a team who speak to you like a person, not a data point.
It is bread from a baker who can tell you the hydration ratio. It is a wooden table built by someone whose fingerprints live beneath the finish.
Luxury is no longer performative. It is personal.
Personal things deeply, sincerely personal create economic value that far outstrips their material cost. We are entering an era where the highest-priced goods will not be the flashiest but the most intimately made.
In finance, almost everything loses value. Homes must be maintained. Cars fail gracefully then catastrophically. Electronics die young. Fashion ages into embarrassment.
Meaning though? Meaning does not depreciate.
A handmade bowl becomes more precious after years of use.
A tailored coat becomes more yours with every season.
A wooden table becomes a family archive.
A farm’s produce becomes memory as much as food.
A tool that serves faithfully gathers myth.
Meaning compounds. Compound meaning creates heritage. Heritage creates value.
This is the economic miracle of craft: it appreciates in the only currency that truly matters human connection. For decades, consumers have been treated as though they cannot handle nuance only price tags and convenience. But the cultural mood is shifting. People are willing to pay more for, integrity, traceability, longevity, purpose, craftsmanship, trust.
Not because they are wealthy many are not but because they are tired of throwing money, time and emotion into the void of disposability. The craft revival is the first economic movement in modern history driven not by aspiration but by exhaustion. People are done with the waste.
Done with the noise. Done with the churn. They want solidity. They want story. They want sense and they will pay for it gratefully.
This is where the emotional logic becomes the economic logic.
It is the point where desire becomes value and value becomes behaviour.
The Rise of the Intentional Class
Every generation invents a new kind of status.
The Victorians prized propriety.
The 1920s prized glamour.
The post-war years prized convenience.
The 1980s prized abundance.
The early 2000s prized speed.
The 2010s prized visibility.
However, now the 2020s quietly, without fanfare, almost without language have begun to prize something far less flamboyant and far more profound, intention.
From that single shift has emerged a new kind of identity a cultural group with no uniforms, no slogans, no obvious badges but a distinctive way of moving through the world, “the intentional class”.
They are not defined by income. They are not defined by geography. They are not defined by taste in the superficial sense. They are defined by how they choose and by what they refuse.
This chapter explores who they are, why they matter and why they may become the quiet architects of the coming decade.
Who Are the Intentional Class?
You can recognise them long before you can describe them.
They read labels not for calories but for provenance.
They care less about brands and more about the hands behind them.
They buy less frequently but keep things longer.
They seek fluency in the things they consume: bread, coffee, wool, grain, code, tools, wood.
They prefer one good thing to ten mediocre ones.
They wear clothes that fit, not clothes that flex.
They decorate homes that feel grounded rather than performative.
They favour teams over corporations, makers over manufacturers, relationships over transactions
These individuals have become groups and they are spreading. Not as a movement but as a sensibility.
An emerging tribe not united by wealth but by discernment. Their motto, if they had one, would be simple:
“Choose with care. Live with purpose.”
What defines the intentional class more than anything else is what they have unlearned.
They have unlearned the need for constant novelty.
They have unlearned the reflex to upgrade.
They have unlearned the addiction to speed.
They have unlearned the belief that price equals value.
They have unlearned the compulsion to fill space for fear of emptiness.
They have unlearned the narrative that more possessions mean more life.
This unlearning is not cynical. It is liberating. The intentional class has discovered something countercultural but deeply sane, a smaller life can be a richer one.
Not smaller in ambition, smaller in clutter. Not smaller in reach, smaller in noise.
Not smaller in experience, smaller in waste. They do not aspire to less, they aspire to better.
Better food, better tools, better habits, better environments, better relationships, better work and it is reshaping every part of their lives. Walk into the home of someone from the intentional class and you will notice three things immediately:
It is peaceful.
It is considered.
It is used.
Not in the showroom sense, in the real sense.
The kitchen will have a handful of tools but each one will work beautifully. The table will likely be wood real wood, with grain that tells a story older than the house itself. The textiles will have texture. The lighting will feel warm instead of bright. There will be books that look read, chairs that invite you to sit and objects that tell you something about the person rather than about the algorithm that sold it to them. It is not minimalism. It is intentionalism.
Minimalism removes. Intentionalism selects.
One is subtraction. The other is curation and curation changes everything. I personally live between three and five houses in any given year. Each one a testament to my wife’s eye for detail, apart from the kitchen tools which are all chosen by myself or presents from people that dare make that step.
My other luxury love is clothing and here the same principles apply.
Fast fashion sells the illusion of identity through quantity. The intentional class chooses identity through fit, fabric and longevity.
I’ll take three excellent shirts over twenty disposable ones. Two pairs of boots resolable for a decade over five trendy pairs that disintegrate after a spring. A wool coat that becomes part of your winter self. The brutal truth was brought home to me by a chaotic travelling schedule and the need to have and elegant but functional wardrobe that supports, London, the Shires of England, Budapest, Prague, Cantabria/Basque and Athens. It’s better to have fifteen beautifully crafted pieces that you can wear with pride than fifty pieces that create doubt.
These choices aren’t aesthetic, they’re psychological. When your clothes are well-made, you move differently more confidently, more serenely. You feel supported by what you wear rather than disguised by it. Fashion chases attention. Crafted clothing enhances presence.
The intentional wardrobe is not performative it’s personal.
For years, taste was dismissed as elitism, as snobbery, as pretension but taste, in its real form, has nothing to do with class and everything to do with noticing. Taste is the ability to distinguish between the genuine and the generic. Between the sincere and the synthetic. Between flavour and filler. Between craft and churn.
The intentional class are not snobs, they are sensate. They feel the difference.
Taste is not exclusionary. Taste is emancipatory. It frees you from the treadmill of trends and delivers you into the realm of discernment. This is why the intentional class is growing: taste is not an asset of the wealthy; it is an asset of the attentive.
At the heart of the intentional life is the intentional table the meal shared without hurry, without screens, without noise, without distraction. Food is where value becomes human.
A tomato grown in living soil.
Milk from cows that saw daylight.
Bread that had time to rise.
Meat from animals raised with dignity.
A salad that smells like a field rather than a warehouse.
These are not luxuries, they are truths. The intentional table is not gourmet, it is grounded.
It is not fashionable, it’s familial. It is the table where children learn flavour, where adults remember texture, where families learn the meaning of time and where life feels anchored rather than accelerated.
This table is becoming the cultural hearth again.
The intentional class does not only consume differently they work differently.
They prefer depth over multitasking, craft over churn, autonomy over bureaucracy, focus over noise, precision over productivity theatre, teams over departments, identity over job titles.
They want work that feels like contribution, not extraction. Work that produces something even something intangible that feels aligned with their sense of integrity.
They resent being used as a resource. They thrive when treated as custodians.
This shift is transforming companies more than any technology.
Among founders, the intentional class has created a new archetype the builder who values the product more than the pitch deck, the customer more than the scale, the craft more than the valuation. These founders are allergic to feature bloat, hypergrowth toxicity, vanity metrics,
shortcuts and anything that sacrifices integrity for optics.
Their companies tend to be small, profitable, loyal and oddly beloved.
They are the slow companies with fast hearts the ones that create things people depend on not because they’re ubiquitous but because they’re trustworthy. The intentional founder will shape the next decade of quality.
The intentional class is not loud.
Not angry.
Not self-righteous.
They are corrective. They are the counterweight to disposable living, algorithmic thinking and aesthetic fatigue.
Where the culture has grown thin, they thicken it.
Where the culture has grown fast, they slow it.
Where the culture has grown shallow, they deepen it.
Where the culture has grown crowded, they clear space.
They are the quiet architects of a future defined not by efficiency but by integrity. The most interesting thing about the intentional class is that it is not exclusive it is contagious. People do not admire them for what they own but for how they choose. Intentionality has a gravitational pull.
It makes others wonder:
What would my life look like with fewer things but better ones?
What would my home feel like if it reflected my values rather than my purchases?
How would I behave if my clothes supported me rather than disguised me?
What would my work feel like if I performed it with craft?
How much quieter would my mind be if my environment respected it?
This is cultural influence at its gentlest and strongest.
