Why We All Love Four Nerds in a Spaceship

If you're anything like me, you were captivated by the photos and videos being produced by NASA and the crew of the Artemis II mission. Space, just in general, is cool as f*ck. I will watch videos of Carl Sagan or Brian Cox waxing poetic any day of the week. But there's something bigger at play here.

Liz Plank made the point perfectly on Substack: Artemis II is competency p*rn, and we're starving for it.

"Girls will be like, I needed this, and it's just four nerds in space."

In the case of Artemis II, timing is everything. The news right now is basically a parade of people who are supposed to be in charge, failing in extraordinarily loud, public, and demoralizing ways. So, the idea of some people being extraordinarily competent at achieving tasks of generational importance is a real breath of fresh air.

This effect isn't new, but it is especially relevant right now given the state of affairs (Gestures at the world).

Competence is attractive AF.

If you're involved in anything CX-related, or resembling experience, or service design. Take note.

And for that matter, if your brand trades on competence-adjacent concepts like ease, humanity, or simplicity. Good timing, but take warning.

Competence/competency p*rn

If you aren't familiar, the term was defined by screenwriter John Rogers in 2009 as "a shorthand way to talk about the very specific kind of satisfaction that we feel when watching folks competently handle complex situations using the kinds of specialized skills and expertise that we can all appreciate."

Earlier this year, Jada Yuan also wrote about the concept in The Washington Post, applying it to shows like The Pitt and Industry, arguing that it has become a means of escapism in light of the incompetence seen in recent news events.

To understand why you should care about this concept, it's worth first unpacking why it makes us feel so satisfied when we see competent people achieve extraordinary things.

We're starved of competence: The first reason we've already established. Culturally, we're experiencing collective anxiety about leadership and competence deficits. We like to watch, because we're starved of it. With Artemis II, millions of people running on anxiety and dread got to stop for a moment and exhale, or shed a tear, because four humans got into a spaceship and travelled farther from Earth than any humans have ever travelled.

We're starved of substance: We've collectively been running on vibes rather than substance for some time now. Vibes-based culture is a by-product of our media ecosystem. Vibes are a shortcut for grappling with abstractness and complexity in a world that demands shortened language. At some point though, abstractness and complexity have to be reckoned with if you want to be anything more than mid. Collectively, we've been flying by the seat of our pants for too long, and it's time to get real, because we're spiraling out.

Everyone aspires to be competent: Nobody wakes up in the morning and wants to be sh*t. People get tired. They get burnt out. They lose interest in things. But deep down, we all have an innate need to be good at something. We consume competence as a proxy for having it because we're collectively living under duress. It's hard to achieve greatness when you're living paycheque to paycheque, but that doesn't mean you don't want to be great.

Competence transcends

You can feel the pull of competence in the world right now, and it transcends whatever container it's delivered within.

Mark Carney: Competence that transcends political party and political ideology. For my American readers, imagine democrats falling in love with a guy who is actually kind of a republican, but under the democratic banner. And then, republican congresspeople switching sides to become democrats. That's what's happening in Canada right now.

Canadians chose a guy with a PhD in economics to run the country, over a sloganeer whose biggest accomplishment is going on Joe Rogan's podcast. Canada has always had a bit of natural immunity to the populism that has overtaken the United States, but our last election would have looked very different if the absence of competence south of the 49th parallel hadn't created a very dramatic void that left people craving real, competent leadership.

Charles LeClerc: Hot and competent. In the competency economy, this is the full package, because aspiration needs a vessel. It's one thing to witness mastery, and it's another for it to be delivered in an attractive wrapper.

Formula One is a masterclass in human performance that just happens to take place on a racetrack. Drive to Survive made fans out of so many people, who previously couldn't care less about racing, not because of the drama, but because of how effectively it showcased drivers, strategists, and engineers operating at the absolute mind-bending limit of their domains.

Drama and relatability are good storytelling mechanisms — but secondary to what DTS actually sold, which was mastery. There is a reason why the manufactured drama in later seasons of Drive to Survive fell flat for so many people – they've developed enough appreciation for the details to know the difference between substance and spectacle.

The Pitt: Competence that transcends format. If you've seen one medical drama, you've seen them all, but the way the show authentically deals with its subject matter is why people are drawn to it, and find it so refreshing. Time's Judy Berman sums it up nicely: "The Pitt isn't just lionizing its central characters; it's also laying the groundwork for conversations that give dimension to lives that have more in common with viewers' own than we might like to admit."

Its people accomplishing feats despite the frenetic atmosphere of hospitals, nursing shortages, resource limitations, violence against healthcare professionals, misinformation, and working conditions that leave a lasting, negative psychological impact.

Its people accomplishing things that we genuinely find impressive, and are thankful for. And it's relatable because there are parallels to be felt between working conditions generally-speaking and what is depicted in the show.

A well-run emergency room has become utopian fiction. That's… kinda weird.

Performed expertise vs. actual competence

Here's why brands should be paying attention to this:

The more time we spend engaging with something, the more we develop a sensitivity for it. Drive your car long enough, and you can literally feel in your body when something is off. The same applies to competence.

Culturally, we're developing a finer sensitivity to the difference between performed and actual mastery. And this is where things start to get interesting from a brand, CX, experience, or service design perspective.

There is a competence threshold to be cleared when looking to trade on archetypes that are about mastery or leaving a mark on the world. And it's not just about credentials or experience – mastery has archetypal weight. The more we're exposed to and consume competency as nourishment, the more we are wired to feel the difference between someone who actually embodies it and someone who is doing it performatively.

The Manosphere running out of gas: The manosphere is what performed competence looks like when someone finally says: prove it. There's a reason Louis Theroux jestermaxxing for our collective enjoyment had such appeal. And, if Andrew Tate's recent unraveling is any indication, this movement built entirely on the performance of dominance and masculine competence is collapsing under the weight of its own hollowness.

Left-wing populism: Here in Canada, the NDP has elected a new leader. For my American friends, they're like the Bernie Sanders/AOC wing of the Democratic party.

Their new leader, Avi Lewis, is genuinely compelling. He's articulate, passionate, and values-aligned with a significant portion of the electorate. But it will be interesting to see if the NDP can gain ground under his leadership, because there is a fundamental mismatch between left-wing populism and where this cultural current is taking us.

The question that a competence-hungry electorate is asking, consciously or not, isn't "do I believe you care?" It's "can you actually do the thing?"

Inspiration without demonstrated competence increasingly reads as empty.

AI & LLMs: Arguably the most performative display of competence we've seen in our lifetimes. There is a reason some women talk about men who use AI being an ick, or why the internet so thoroughly enjoyed that video of Sam Altman reacting to the weird guy on TikTok who makes videos demonstrating what a toadie ChatGPT can be.

I've also been hearing more and more stories about gen alpha rejection of AI. Kids are perceptive little monsters.

AI collapses the very thing that makes competence satisfying to witness: The gap between what's genuinely hard and what looks effortless. There's no cost. No limit being operated at. No craft underneath the output. It's both empty, and as the little warning at the bottom of your chat window will remind you, it makes mistakes.

More competence cosplay than competence p*rn.

There's a shift underway, and it has everything to do with our collective ability to separate the performative from the real.

Where is this headed and what does it mean for brands?

The cultural appetite for genuine mastery isn't going away. The straightforward implication here is simple: Don't trade on competence and competence-adjacent positionings unless you can actually deliver on them. Performative competence is arguably worse than neutrality, and increasingly so.

But like every significant cultural shift, this won't travel in a straight line. There are a few plausible futures worth considering — and depending on which one you're building for, the implications for brand, experience, and service design are very different.

Competence Consolidates: Our current path. The hunger for competence intensifies, and becomes a genuine market premium. The brands that win do so because they do what they do really f*cking well, show their receipts, and consistently deliver a really good experience.

Competence Gets Co-Opted: As with so many things that came before, the aesthetic of competence could get colonized. We've seen this with authenticity, with sustainability, with purpose-driven branding — each started as a genuine differentiator and ended up as wallpaper. The tells are usually the same: the language arrives before the substance does, and the category fills up with people who have learned to perform the thing rather than do it. When everyone is performing mastery, it all collapses because culture re-calibrates away from it as something that is valued.

Competence Polarizes: There is still a fair bit of anti-expert sentiment in the world. Competence could become very k-shaped, with some groups developing an even greater appreciation for it while others reject it wholeheartedly. The meaning of expertise becomes contested terrain. For brands, this is the most tactically complicated scenario: signaling mastery to one audience without reading as exclusionary to another is a genuinely hard needle to thread.

Obviously, nobody can predict the future, and that's not what foresight is about. Envisioning futures offers us implications about how we can act in the present.

Implications

This isn't abstract. You can see it in the appetite behind movements like Build Canada, or in how new players are shaking up financial services in Canada. The market is rendering its verdict.

The cultural appetite for mastery is your organizational permission slip. The barriers, the sacred cows, the reasons things can't be done properly are harder to defend when the cost of not doing them right is this visible and culturally-relevant.

And some of the most impactful moves available to you right now are also the most accessible ones.

Edges & Research Diversity: Particularly in smaller scale qual, shifting your sampling frame is one of the easiest and most impactful things you can do. Design for the edges. Validate in the middle. The people at the edges of your perceived market boundary are like design rocket fuel. Did I become a Claude Code daily user because it was aimed specifically at me? No, I became one because it was aimed at my nerdiest and most technical friends, who wouldn't stop talking about it and turned me from skeptic into customer.

Get Closer: Host a WhatsApp diary instead of paying twenty grand for a platform. Get closer to real humans in real moments instead of optimizing for reporting convenience. You'd be surprised how much juice you get from people when you stop being so transactional about research. Respondents from prior studies text me all the time and continue to deliver insight well beyond the confines of studies.

Stop waiting for ideal conditions. You'll never have enough time and budget, so find ways to quickly iterate and prototype. A pilot. Ten people and a question you actually need answered. The organizations that win in this moment are the ones genuinely reckoning with cultural change and the people they serve — as an ongoing system and practice, not as large-scale engagements with Deloitte.

Be a sober gatekeeper: And, if you work in brand or communications, embrace the fact that your role is a dual one. One half is about driving growth. The other is about reading the room and preventing things from going awry. The stakes are only becoming higher for brands that navel-gaze or overstate what they offer.

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Seeing the cultural current is one thing. But, the true work here is recognizing what the sort of competence that lowers people's cortisol levels, and causes them to breathe a sigh of relief looks like in your category.

In the AI space it seems to have been Dario Amodei and Anthropic's willingness to walk away from hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts. The numbers don't lie. Claude went from No. 42 in the App Store to No. 1 in 48 hours. Canadian politics also offer a case study that we can all continue to observe and learn from. And, of course, Volvo has been doing this for seventy years. Nobody gets excited about Volvo, which is kind of the point (no shade to Jean-Claude Van Damme).

People are exhausted by performative competence — and they're getting better at spotting it every day. The brands that win from here are the ones that refuse to add to the noise, and actually do the work to understand and deliver on what people need.