The Four futures being cooked up in Nara Smith's kitchen

Nara Smith is making cough drops from scratch. She is wearing Valentino. Four million people are watching.

This is not a cooking video. It's a status signal - and one of the oldest in human history, wearing a new outfit. (If you don't know who she is, here)

In 1899, Thorstein Veblen argued that wealth expresses itself through conspicuous waste. Either conspicuous waste through consumption (think Marie Antoinette ala King or just Burger King and the fast-everything trend) or conspicuous waste of time (leisure). Cue: Nara Smith making bubble gum from scratch.

In a culture that spent a century insisting busyness was the real status signal, this is the third inversion of his original idea, and it raises four questions about the future we're creating and what your brand can learn from it.

Veblen noted that "the need for conspicuous waste stands ready to absorb any increase in efficiency." What is the conspicuous waste of an AI-abundant world? What will we perform?

Or: when AI does the work, what pointless thing will we do to prove we're winning?

Every technological shift produces new waste. The industrial revolution produced mass consumption. The internet produced the performance of attention. AI produces a surplus of output — drafts, research, content, code — all of it available at speed and at scale. When output becomes abundant, performing output loses its signal value entirely. The conspicuous waste of an AI world is almost certainly the demonstrably non-AI thing. The handmade. The slow. The wrong in a human way.

The future this signals: a split economy where "made without AI" becomes the new "made in Italy." Human inefficiency as the premium category. Nara Smith's kitchen is not a lifestyle. It is a luxury brand that does not yet have a name.

What this means for your brand: if genuine human craft, care, or slowness sits anywhere in your process, that is no longer a cost to justify — it is the differentiator to lead with. The strategic question is not whether to automate, but which parts of your process you choose, visibly and deliberately, not to.

If Nara Smith's leisure is also her work, what exactly is she selling?

Or: is she actually free, or just working in nicer clothes?

The soft piano, the Valentino, the kitchen that has never encountered a mess — these are produced. The performance of not-working is, structurally, work. And yet what generates 394 million likes is the appearance of unperformed authenticity. She is not selling leisure. She is selling permission. Permission to want a life organised around unhurried time and still consider it legitimate.

The future this signals: a self-as-brand economy where the work must be invisible because visibility destroys the product. Every future version of this needs to look less like they are trying than she does. The ceiling on effortlessness keeps rising.

What this means for your brand: brands that perform effort will lose to brands that perform ease. The work still happens — but the customer-facing story should be about how your product fits into an unhurried, considered life. Not what you made. How it feels to already have it.

If AI democratises time, does it also democratise status? Or does status simply migrate faster than access can follow?

Or: if everyone gets more free time, does everyone get to be Nara Smith? Or will the wealthy just find a new way to be somewhere else first?

Every time a status signal becomes widely accessible, it ceases to function as one. The form changes. The function, which is exclusion, does not. AI does not democratise status. It accelerates the cycle.

The future this signals: perpetual displacement. The aspirational middle permanently one cycle behind. The algorithm sells yesterday's signal at today's prices and calls it aspiration.

What this means for your brand: if your positioning is built around chasing the current cultural signal, you are probably already behind. The more useful question is what the next grammar of status looks like — and whether your brand has the clarity and flexibility to claim it before it becomes obvious to everyone else.

The greatest luxury might be doing nothing and feeling no need to signal it. How do you perform that?

Or: is there any way off this treadmill, or does opting out just become the new way of opting in?

You cannot.

The moment you perform it, it becomes content. The moment it becomes content, it becomes labour. You are back at the beginning, with better lighting.

The future this signals: a class division defined by absence from the feed entirely. The new upper class will not be visible because they will not be there. The ultimate signal is becoming unsearchable. Not cancelled. Not private. Simply absent, in a way only people who no longer need to be found can afford to be.

What this means for your brand: the most interesting brands in the next decade may be the ones that actively resist over-legibility. Not secretive. Not exclusive in the velvet-rope sense. Simply unhurried, unoptimised, and present without needing to announce it. The brand that does not need the algorithm is the brand the algorithm will eventually come looking for.

Veblen spent his career describing people who could not see the machinery they were operating.

He was largely ignored by all of them.

The algorithm would have suggested he post more consistently.