As life moves off the map, maybe we just need to learn to navigate without one

Monday, 6 April 2026

James Bush is a womenswear designer and regular opinion contributor.

The start of the century saw the increased ubiquity of cellphones, one of the landmarks in James Bush’s early years.

OPINION: In December 2025, I turned 35 years old. I am neither old nor young, naïve nor jaded — but my cohort and I have been around long enough to take stock of the world we've inherited.

We'd been told the winning streak was straightforward. Marriage, home, family and career success.

But I am of a generation who have grown up with constantly changing goalposts. As a 10-year-old I distinctly remember the planes hitting the Twin Towers. It shook my naïve childhood belief that the world was a sure and steady place. Clearly it was not.

The Global Financial Crisis roiled world markets including global real estate, and with it a young person’s sense of security.

We graduated high school at the end of 2008, as the Global Financial Crisis rocked the world order and I was glad that I was off to study, rather than entering the workforce at that time.

Our childhoods were analogue, but our teenage years followed the path of the digital revolution. A computer arrived in our home when I must have been around 10 or 11 and it was only a few years later that I inherited a cellphone from a glamorous uncle and would have been able to send black and white texts to my friends, had they had the ability to receive them.

By the time I graduated and entered the workforce in 2012, blogs and YouTube had given birth to the internet celebrity. As we all piled onto Instagram, it was obvious that the social media revolution was in full swing resulting in a sense of constant change.

And thank god. Because the reality is, the game of life has changed and continues to change at a rapid pace. It's not just that the goalposts are shifting — the whole concept is being redesigned.

A catwalk model at a Parisian fashion show in 2026. Fashion has historically been a reliable barometer of the cultural mood, but is directionless, James Bush writes.

The linear model we inherited from our 20th century forebears was never just a personal roadmap, it was a cultural contract. One foot in front of the other, and everything would work out fine. That contract assumed a shared direction and a common understanding of what progress looked like. It's increasingly difficult to identify what that shared direction might be today, or whether one exists at all.

Old age pensioners are desperate for superannuation to keep pace with the cost of living. The generations below them are uncertain whether the age of draw-down will be raised. And then the rest of us, fairly certain that by the time we reach our twilight years, any form of safety net will have long since ceased to exist. If anyone can find a politician able to solve that particular clusterf…, I will be beyond impressed.

As a result fashion, historically a reliable barometer of the cultural mood, is directionless. In previous eras of disruption — the post-war period, the sixties, the eighties — uncertainty produced radical creative movements, new aesthetics and new identities. The confusion had energy. Today, we are witnessing the opposite: consumers retreating into established norms and group identification as a source of security.

When the old map lets you down, maybe you just need to find your own way in life.

Meme culture tells a similar story from a different angle. The ubiquity of irony and the reflexive deflation of seriousness. The joke as the default register of public discourse. These are not signs of a culture at ease with itself. Humour has always been a coping mechanism, but when it becomes the dominant mode, it suggests a culture that has lost confidence in its ability to say anything.

The problem with the linear path was always that it was easy to fall off. A structured set of norms is comforting and clear, but when too rigidly defined they are often accompanied by shame and regret. The further one deviates from the prescribed route, the heavier the weight of having done so.

A culture that learns to live with uncertainty and that internalises adaptation as a value rather than a failure, may find it has shed something it didn't need. The creativity that feels absent right now may simply be waiting for the culture to stop mourning the map and start moving without one.

It would seem that reactionary fashion, art and design have run their course, because there is no longer a central norm to react against. We will most certainly lose something in that transition, but a culture that can no longer react must eventually learn to originate.

Far be it from me to predict the future, but once the cards have fallen and we've learnt to understand how to live in a world of AI, long-term digital footprints and a vastly different understanding of work, constant flux and change may be no bad thing.

If we are forced to become more socially and culturally agile to face this new era, it may just mean that life becomes a dance, rather than a march, and to me at least, that sounds far more appealing.