Delhi is under an orange haze. The AQI app reads like an obituary. You can see the smoke curling past your balcony between slides. People are protesting one lane away, auto drivers are wearing scarves like dystopian couture, and yet you are inside a client call about a campaign titled “Fresh Living.”
Fresh from where? Fresh why?
The absurdity of it all is almost cinematic.
The world feels unstable in a precise way.
Tech founders are posting inspirational threads about resilience while quietly laying off teams. Startups are doing “silent hiring,” which is corporate-speak for “do two jobs for the salary of one and smile.”
LinkedIn is celebrating “authenticity” with carousels that look like digital TED Talks. The global marketing world has become this strange hybrid of creativity, crisis management, and corporate theatre.
Let me ask you this. Do you ever feel like you are being asked to create emotional experiences for brands while losing access to your own emotions? You craft warmth, wit, intimacy, and connection.
You write “we are here for you” while ignoring your own Slack pings that feel like mild electrocution. You write “take a moment for yourself” while inhaling your lunch between tasks.
You tell consumers to take a breath while you cannot remember the last time you took one.

Selling us the feelings we lost

The irony is that the same system that punishes emotion sells it back to us through marketing.
Duolingo has turned chaos into charm. A24 makes existential dread look cinematic. Hailey Bieber built an entire skincare empire out of the word “glaze.”
Even Liquid Death, a brand that sells water, built a cult by pretending to feel too much about hydration. Consumers crave softness dressed as edge. We’re buying feelings disguised as products.
Meanwhile, the teams making these campaigns are whispering “circling back” through gritted teeth at 11:42 p.m.
Marketing today sits in this strange place where brands want to feel human without behaving humanely behind the scenes. And no, we will not trash companies. We do not know what happens inside every boardroom. But we do know what happens on the surface.
Every brand wants to sound warm, vulnerable, and connected. But when was the last time a creative team actually had the time or space to feel any of those things while making the work?

Culture on fast forward

Cricket hysteria one evening. Political noise next. Influencers are releasing apology videos at a weekly frequency.
Layoffs are dropping on social media before HR emails land. Global companies are trying to develop personalities using AI-generated scripts.
Creativity is happening in a pressure cooker while everyone expects ideas that feel effortless. On what oxygen?
And yet, somehow, magic appears.
Someone cracks a joke in the middle of chaos, and the whole room relaxes for a second. A designer physically recoils from a bad typeface. A strategist refuses jargon and insists on honesty. A writer quietly obsessing over a single line because they know it can land cleaner.
Softness brings clarity. It is the instinct that knows when something is empty and needs heart. It is the ability to filter cultural noise into a single signal. It is the quiet intelligence that cannot be taught through frameworks or automated through templates.

**Taste. The ultimate superpower. **

The people who still feel something produce work with depth. They catch tone shifts that metrics miss. They notice the cultural temperature change before the insights document arrives.
The people who stay soft don’t look strong. They look present. They look like they still have taste, which in 2025, might be the rarest form of intelligence left.
Cynicism gets likes. Softness builds legacy.
The future of creative work will belong to those who can stay curious without becoming cold.
If you can still laugh, still notice, still give a damn about details no one’s paying for, you’ve already won. You’re the last person in the room who hasn’t gone fully corporate in the soul.
That’s the art of staying soft.
And maybe, the only kind of professionalism worth keeping.