Just as everyone is fretting over AI and what it’s doing to creativity. Look another way and you’ll see we’re in the midst of a Renaissance. Douglas Rushkoff, the author and podcast host, spoke on this topic last year in a delightful little festival, OffGrid Sessions, that deserves mentioning as it pretty much exemplifies the rebirth. Two hundred and fifty people gathered on an Island off the coast of Essex to listen to an eclectic roster of twelve carefully curated speakers. We shared meals together, went for a collective swim, made friends, had random, inspiring conversations and tapped back into that magic of being human. All under the guise of ‘work’.
Why? Because without that connection to other humans, to our deeper emotional selves, our ability to see different perspectives and think critically – we don’t have much to bring to the age of AI. The Renaissance isn’t just another trend, it’s about human transformation. It’s not really even a lifestyle choice it’s more of a survival strategy. Brands can help fuel this shift by asking, ‘how might we support and feed this new age of human wisdom?’ Or they can hold the whole thing back by reducing audiences to an eyeball and a click leaving humanity exploited and de-valued. I know which side I’m taking.
The good news is I’m not alone. Momentum for the Renaissance is in full swing so even the most heartless out there will come to see its commercial potential. It started in 2022 in fact when according to research from the FT and GWI social media peaked, and our usage of it has been declining steadily ever since. Even if you don’t look at the numbers but to culture instead, it’s clear something is afoot. People aren’t signalling the hours they spend bedrotting and doomscrolling. Instead, phone-free parties are the new flex, as leading figures like Andrew Yang ditch their presidential aspirations to drive ‘offline parties’ instead. Audio bars like London’s Space Talk operate a strict no-phone policy in favour of conversation, being truly present and feeling nourished by the experience is what people want. Rushkoff spoke for us all when he pointed out, “It’s so easy to get addicted to Netflix but it doesn’t actually feed you.”
People’s uneasy relationship with technology is clear to see but now the pushback is more than simply an aspiration, it’s an action. This is a Renaissance that stems from face to face, inter-human coming together and ‘touching grass’. It’s a Renaissance of new routines designed to trigger pleasure and being our most creative selves. And lastly, because let’s not pretend the world isn’t really frightening right now, it’s a Renaissance fuelled by mutual compassion and practices such as collective grieving to process trauma and sit with the mess.
And this is where the OffGrid Sessions fit in because the Renaissance sees people coming together in weird and interesting ways and it is starting to reinvigorate how we approach work too. Even Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, recognised this in a recent interview when asked which sectors or industries would grow as a result of generative AI, his answer? “In-person, fantastic experiences”. As a coach, this immediately takes me to the company away day. Yes, they do get a bad wrap and in our current climate who can justify huge entertainment budgets that lead to awkward office dramas or excessive alcohol consumption. But it doesn’t have to be like that, there is another way. OffGrid is one example.
Just picture my arrival at this festival of ideas on a bright and sunny morning in June last year. Set on Osea, a tidal island off the Essex coast, it involved me driving my car out across the dried-up sea-bed to get to a tiny island on the other side. I steered through giant algae covered boulders, down a meandering path and it felt like I was being transported to an enchanted land, a bit like that scene from Frozen where moss covered rocks turn into trolls that start talking. This trippy arrival felt more like the entrance to Burning Man than a work do. Before the talks even start I’m in a state of bliss, ready to expand my mind. Imagine if all company vision days started like that?
This is how the Renaissance is going to reinvent work, because people are demanding physicality, they are tapping into our environments as a way to awaken the senses and get the creative alpha brain waves flowing. “You need to break the algorithm and get new ideas and signals in,” says Jeremy Hill, OffGrid founder, “Discovery sits right at the centre of OffGrid. We’re in an industry where people are paid to think, but we don’t invest enough in our mental R&D.” The Renaissance is driving a holistic approach to learning that is sensory, social, emotional and physical not just cognitive.
For one expert I recently interviewed, that meant getting her teams to endure an ice bath together, noting this to be a fast-track to better team rapport. Team members helped each other withstand the cold, shared a collective high together enjoying increased blood flow to the brain before then jumping into an afternoon of collaborative tasks much improved by their deeper bond and those physiological benefits of cold therapy.
Bonding at the extremes may not be for you but new ways to connect with people emotionally and learn how to read them are tipping mainstream too. Some start with a chess club or a reading rave, others are turning to poetry. This literary genre has boomed over this last decade, with 2023 a particular stand-out year for poetry sales in the UK according to NielsonIQ. This is largely driven by ‘instapoetry’ which may not be everyone’s idea of the best place for depth or intimacy, but it’s a start. A brand strategist friend of mine at Haines and Partners is using poetry in his debriefs as a way to ignite the client’s imagination and escape the tyranny of powerpoint. Word from the clients is, they love it.
Of course we were all told we’d have more time for poetry and painting in the early days of AI, I’m aware this is a well trodden cliche but I don’t think anyone predicted the use of poetry in real work scenarios quite like this. Trainee doctors at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine in Singapore for example are now analyzing poems to practice better listening and how to read between the lines of what patients say or not. As Professor Joseph Sung, dean of the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine told the Straits Times, “Medicine is both a science and an art. There is an art to knowing and listening to your patients. If you have only the knowledge and skills and no heart, or your heart is not in the right place, you are not a good doctor.”
Poetry offers an alternative for scientists to see the world as more than just black and white, right or wrong. It also encourages self-expression and can help unleash a creative confidence that may have been quashed out of people who don’t have ‘creative’ in their job title. And it’s exactly what this moment needs. No wonder open mic nights and spoken word events are on the rise too. Inkwell a non-profit literary organization that holds writing workshops and readings across China for example has seen a 50% increase in participants this year, “It feels good for people to be away from the machines for a while and just focus on developing their own voices,” says co-founder Ryan Thorpe.
As Margaret Heffernan, author, “Embracing Uncertainty: How writers, musicians and artists thrive in an unpredictable world” says, “There is huge potential to remind people that they’re much more creative than they think they are. The two ways companies will distinguish themselves in this new era are first by using proprietary data and second with extremely creative thinking.” We all have access to the same tools so as Heffernan points out, if you can’t be creative in your thinking you won’t get anything more out of AI than anyone else. The Renaissance is a collective realisation of this and a desire to do all we can to work that creative muscle.
Step one is to create time and space for that part to grow and having the confidence to not be busy all the time. You don’t have to be a flaneur necessarily although if you can set out with no agenda or destination you will certainly develop your curiosity. But it can also be about what ethnographers call ‘deep hanging out’. Heffernan’s latest book is an exploration into what the most creative people do to get their ideas and something as simple as being open and interested in your environment goes a long way. “Don’t walk down the street on your zoom call, or listening to your audio book. It’s about being where you are, really absorbing your environment. You have to be alive and alert for what’s interesting, what’s happening. Make time for this everyday. Looking at the space between things,” she says.
As someone who spends her life in deep hangouts I can report that it takes time to make sense of what is seen and to then join the dots. It often feels like an indulgence in a world designed around speed and efficiency. But this Renaissance is built around AI-powered methods doing the fast work so humans have the capacity to immerse, to interact, to look and of course to feel.
This brings us to step two which involves connecting to the full range of human emotion so that when we are with each other we can get to deeper communication and share the lows not just the highs. But it’s not easy in a culture that connects happiness to success and where so much energy and attention is channelled into projecting and broadcasting #joy. It gets in the way of deeper conversations and sometimes it’s an easy way to avoid sharing what’s really going on. The WHO has actually identified this as a health risk in their 2025 Social Connection report. We know of the risks around loneliness which incidentally the report finds 1 in 6 now suffer from globally, but this latest study also draws distinction between quality and quantity of social interaction. Deep conversation is good for our health and they suggest interventions are required to specifically deliver meaningful social connections.
Expert facilitators are one way to help scaffold that kind of interaction. People like Jessica Ball who uses the Bohm Dialogues framework and the concept of Worm Time to work with small groups in London to help them process or as she writes, “compost thoughts and feelings, metabolize their experience and turn over new ideas” communally. Elsewhere people are signing up to Grief Rituals to grieve collectively and share the losses they carry which could be loss of a loved one, but might also be loss of a pet, or loss in the wider sense of the world’s biodiversity for example. Psychotherapist Francis Weller champions this in his writing and advocates regular grief rituals highlighting the therapeutic benefit to collective release. Did you know that tears actually contain cortisol and natural pain killers for example? That’s proof that when you cry (for emotional reasons not chopping onions) it really does help to reduce stress.
We hear a lot about the importance of being a T-shaped individual, the broader your frame of reference, the more insight you can bring to a problem. I see this as product of both emotional and cultural bandwidth and it’s one area where AI really does fall down and humans have the edge. Particularly those in cultural research but of course, I’m biased. Curious humans feel their way, joining dots from disparate sources to tell the story. Their findings are engaging because they are unexpected. AI tends to the average with safe and slick but boring outputs. Its natural bed-fellow is the free-thinker whose role is to surprise, inject emotion, quote real experience and generally disrupt. It’s the companies that can nail that combination by rethinking KPIs to encourage deep listening, creative meandering and trouble making that will have their place in The Renaissance.
The Renaissance
More than just a vibe.
A lack, a need, for magic.
Deep, wise, human, shared.
Cultural Insights expert Miriam Rayman is also an executive coach and founder of the trend consultancy, Now Then.
