no one is an island, everyone is vanilla extract

desire needs reverberation to come alive

The Orchestra at the Opera (1870) by Edgar Degas

Until very recently, I worked at a product consultancy. It was a curious business. Many of the services we advertised were tangible: product design, design systems, motion and illustration. But in my experience, most of the real work was of the reverberation kind.

I’ll explain what I mean. I’ve sat in many ideation sprints—or what we call “zero to one” conversations—either as a fly on the wall or as a facilitator. I remember one of them very clearly. A French artist wrote to us, asking for some time to discuss an idea that was bouncing through her head. A professional of the fine arts coming to a tech-first product consultancy was a curiosity in itself, and her idea even more so. My bosses weren’t too keen on the viability of this project, but they encouraged me to have the conversation anyway, if it was something that interested me personally.

Over coffee, the artist explained her idea to me very animatedly. She was a teacher in Paris as well as an artist, she said, and she had come to realise that the children and adults she worked with—many of whom were iPad babies—hadn’t been exposed to art in the messy, corporeal way that previous generations had (up to the elbows in paint tubs, finger streaks on the walls). Or if they had, they had forgotten. They saw colours as flat, uni-dimensional things, pixels on a screen that they could pick up using a colour picker. They knew almost nothing of what it took to make a colour from scratch, or how a hue could look different depending on what surrounded it. She was resolute: it was cognitive decline. Mixing paint engages multiple senses: sight, sound, and smell. This multi-sensory input helps build neural connections and fine motor skills in ways that tapping a screen simply doesn’t. It builds cognitive flexibility: what happens if I mix blue and red? What do I need to add to inch it closer to purple? Colour mixing, she said, was a bodily, intuitive way to engage with the abstract concept of transformation.

That said, she wasn’t anti-screen; she knew digital tools had a definite place in our lives (ah, I thought, that explains why she came to us). What she proposed was a marriage between mediums: A simple colour-mixing game. On a minimal interface, there would be three pots of primary colour paints. In the centre of the “canvas”, there would be a single-colour drawing. The child would have to fill in the rest of the canvas to match that colour, by tapping each pot to add its colour, layer by layer, onto the canvas. Each attempt would give instant visual feedback through the canvas itself: did the colour blend right? Did it match the reference? There was no undo button, only iterative play that would tune their eyes and fingers to what small shifts in hue could do. In her words, it would free people to “play with colour as a language of subtle differences without reference to theories, categories or cultural ideas”. 

In the hour or so that followed, we circled the idea together—turning it over, tugging at its edges, testing its weight. Within the bounds of that conversation, something shifted. The idea felt less nebulous, more real. We didn’t end up building the app for her, no. But it had entered a shared space, however briefly, and the resonance there was enough to tell her that the idea had room in the world, not just in her head. 

This is, I think, the most fragile stage of desire: you’ve just birthed an idea and, right now, you’re the only person who believes in it. But for that larval idea to start to press against the boundaries of its own shape—for it to begin chafing and stretching—it needs something from the outside: just enough reverberation to keep going.

We could talk about impact at scale, or in terms of revenue and headcount and other numbers. But none of it would have mattered, or even materialised, if the desire that started it all hadn’t been kept alive a little longer by reverberation from someone else.

Sam Altman once said that great ideas are fragile, and that at first they often sound bad. That tracks. Fragile things don’t really hold up well to scrutiny. They collapse under the weight of certainty, so they need space to stumble, reform, find shape. There’s a temptation to frame this kind of patience as a solitary act: the creator alone in a room, shielding their early ambition from a world that would crush it. I have to say, that version of events has a kind of romance to it.

But I think what we forget is that solitude is never the whole truth of ambition. What fragile ideas need isn't absence of response but the right kind of response. Reverberation—the feedback loop between thought and expression, inner voice and outer echo—is what gives nascent desires the strength to persist. You might have the inkling of a desire, but whether you follow it depends on who hears it, and whether they reflect it back in a form you can recognise, or name it in a way that helps you see it more clearly than you could alone.

The presence or absence of reverberation determines whether desire lives or dies. 

In my head, reverberation isn’t the same as validation or echo. Validation is approval. Is this good or bad? Is this only valuable because others say so? Reverberation is about acknowledgement. This stirs something in someone else (interest, happiness, understanding, anger)¹. Reverberation invites nuance; it builds relational momentum, the kind of forward movement that happens when two or more people engage with an idea together.

I think another way to think of this is: who are your co-sustainers of desire?² Early believers, yes, but also people who kept showing up while the idea changed shape, propelling it forward or, at least, refusing to let it vanish. 

***

Vanilla extract³, when you taste it on its own, is… bitter. It tastes nothing like it smells, which feels like a betrayal. It’s one of those things that only makes sense in context, as part of something larger. That’s kind of what early desire is: Too strong, too bitter, too intense to be consumed alone, but given reverberation through the right conditions and co-sustainers, it becomes the thing you notice most when it’s missing.

¹Not all reverberation is nourishing. Some ideas get distorted in the echo chamber, or scaled too early because they sounded good before they were solid. But as of now, I think absence is still the greater risk. For most ideas, silence kills long before distortion does.

² Some questions I’m still turning over in my mind: what makes someone a good co-sustainer versus merely an audience? Are there different types of co-sustainers needed at different stages?

³ From this excellent Tumblr post I think about all the time:

Thanks for reading this issue. I’m going to take a break from this newsletter for a month or so, mostly to refuel my tank, leave my mind fallow for a bit, and work on Patina. I might post on Notes if I find something interesting during the course of my sabbatical(?) but I’m not putting any pressure on myself. In the meantime, it would be really lovely if you could share this or any other issue of Kindred Spirits with friends, family, and smart strangers so we can build our collective of kindred spirits. Back in your inbox sometime in late June or early July!