Library

Whether you’re new here or already somewhere down the rabbit hole, this page will help you find your way around The Pleasure Codes.

What began as a body of research into shifting human desire has grown into a larger world of frameworks, essays, field guides, and cultural observations, all organised around one central idea: if you want to understand what people reach for, return to, and quietly build their lives around, you have to understand the desires underneath it.

This page is a living library: a place to start if you’re new, a place to return if you’ve been reading for a while, and a place to follow a thread further when one particular itch has you by the collar.

Inside, you’ll find five main ways into the work:

• The Framework: the foundational pieces that explain where The Pleasure Codes came from, how the system works, and how to use it

• The Compass Codes: the eight territories of desire, organised so you can explore the one your brand already lives in, and the ones it has yet to claim

• The Seven Deadly Sins of Brand Building: the full series on the older, less flattering motives behind modern behaviour, and what they reveal about brand strategy

• Field Guides: deeper dives into the cultural currents and brand moves that show where desire is doing its most interesting work right now

• The Personal Branding Guides: eight ways to make your personal brand, leadership, content or job search more distinctive, memorable, and valuable.

This page will keep growing as the archive grows.

The Framework

Start here for the foundational pieces behind The Pleasure Codes.

Why Pleasure Is the Ultimate Brand Strategy: the big idea behind the work, and why pleasure offers a sharper lens on human behaviour

Pleasure Codes Plus: the intelligence platform behind the work, designed to help you spot sharper opportunities, patterns, and possibilities faster

The Compass Codes

At the centre of The Pleasure Codes is the Compass: eight distinct territories of desire, each one naming a different way people seek pleasure, meaning, aliveness, comfort, recognition, belonging, or escape.

Taken together, they offer a richer way of understanding what people are really reaching for and what that might open up for brands, founders, and anyone trying to build something others are supposed to care about.

You can explore the Compass through four broader families of desire:

The Hedonism Codes: And why we’re longing for more comfort, escape, and wonder

• Zenjoyment: On the gentle art of standing still

• EuphoriaVille: The antidote we won’t admit we need

• WonderWorlds: Creating magic in the age of infinite possibility

The We Codes: The strange economics of belonging

• WonderWorlds: Creating magic in the age of infinite possibility

• WeTopia: When trust crumbles, we pick up the hammer and nails

• Regeneration Nation: The sustainability say-do gap (and how to close it)

The Wellbeing Codes: On the timeless quest for the holy grail

• Regeneration Nation: The sustainability say-do gap (and how to close it)

• Joyning: The loneliness paradox and why the algorithm can’t find you a friend

• Wellthy Living: The unbearable lightness of biohacking

The Me Codes: The peculiar pleasure of being unmistakably yourself

• Wellthy Living: The unbearable lightness of biohacking

• OptiMe: The art of deducing self-seduction

• Zenjoyment: On the gentle art of standing still

Each territory offers a different strategic doorway. The question is not just where your brand already lives, but which territory might reveal a more interesting next move.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Brand Building

This series begins with a provocation: You can’t make money on virtue.

From there, it follows each of the deadly sins as enduring human motives. The older, less flattering forces that still shape what people want, avoid, flaunt, hide, overdo, and ultimately build lives around.

If The Pleasure Codes asks what kind of itch your brand is scratching, this series asks something far less polite:

Which sin is doing the itching?

• Start Here: Why you can’t make money on virtue and what the seven deadly sins have to do with your brand

• Lust: The sin that sells so much more than sex

• Envy & Pride: The sins that need each other

• Gluttony: The cleanest sin (even though we don’t like to talk about it)

• Sloth: The sin you can’t advertise

• Wrath: The sin the internet was built for

• Greed: The only sin that doesn’t need an audience

• Fear: The sin hiding in plain sight

Field Guides

The field guides track cultural currents and the brand moves that reveal where desire is doing its most interesting work right now. Think of them as dispatches from the part of culture that trend reports usually flatten: the odd details, emotional tensions, aesthetic shifts, and little cultural tremors that tell you something bigger is moving underneath.

The newer guides take a trip around the Compass, exploring the cultural currents shaping each Pleasure Code from the inside. Older editions gather sparks from across culture in one place.

• WonderWorlds: The imaginative pleasures that pull us into shared realities, collective stories, and worlds with better rules. Cultural Currents: Portal’d · Fandomonia · Spliced · Worldcasting

• EuphoriaVille: The hedonistic pleasures that make us feel unapologetically and fully alive. Cultural Currents: Rebel, Rebel · Luxified · YOLO · Escapology

• Trends are dead. Long live trends: why culture rarely swaps one thing cleanly for another, and what brands miss when they mistake revival for novelty

• The Right to Be Weird: Why culture is pushing back against coherence, legibility, and the pressure to behave like a brand

• When Sound Becomes the Experience: How brands are using audio to shape mood, ritual, memory, and place more intentionally

• When Authenticity Starts Looking Engineered: How brands are staging refuge, representation, sensation, and even misbehaviour back to us as designed experiences

• When Status Starts Switching Off: How modern status symbols are moving from display to recovery, ritual, taste, and belonging

• The New Question of Enough: Why optimisation culture keeps pushing pleasure into more theatrical, trackable, and emotionally charged territory

• What Counts as Real Anymore?: How brands are navigating the blur between human, artificial, archival, and emotionally convincing

• When Brands Perform Recognition: How specificity, fandom, and theatrical personalisation are becoming the new pleasure standard

The Personal Brand Guides

In the age of AI anyone can appear more coherent than they actually are. True originality will start to matter more than ever. So will taste, atmosphere, and the strangely specific and inimitable quality of a person who could not be confused with anyone else.

The Personal Brand Guides use each of the eight Pleasure Codes to explore a different route into becoming more visibly, fully, and unmistakably yourself.

These are not guides to becoming louder, posting more often, or arranging your personality into a neat little content strategy. They are about the deeper pleasures that make a person magnetic: spectacle, wonder, ease, belonging, restoration, optimisation, vitality, conviction, and the many ways a life, a body of work, or a public presence can become more original in style, form, and substance.

For leaders, creators, founders, job seekers, independent thinkers, and anyone else shaping a reputation in public, this series asks a better question than: How do I build my personal brand?

It asks: What kind of unforgettable are you actually built to become?

• EuphoriaVille: How to become as impossible to ignore as Oscar Wilde.
  On spectacle, conviction, visible signatures, and the art of being just a little too much on purpose. Get the playbook.

• WonderWorlds: How to become as spectacular as P.T. Barnum.
  On curiosity, world-building, theatrical invitation, and becoming the door to a larger possibility. Get the playbook.

• WeTopia: How to become as unbought as Malcolm X.
  On public conviction, costly stances, moral courage, and the personal brand built by standing somewhere specific. Get the playbook.

• Regeneration Nation: How to become as irresistible as Teddy Roosevelt.

  On renewal, integrity, repair, and the personal brand built by tending what others have already given up on. Get the playbook.

• Joyning: How to become as seductive as Gertrude Stein. On presence, belief, ritual, and the personal brand built by keeping a room open whether or not anyone comes. Get the playbook.

• Wellthy Living: Publishes on May 26th
  On vitality, self-possession, sensual wellbeing, and the art of making a life look deeply lived.

• OptiMe: Publishes on June 2nd
  On ambition, self-improvement, mastery, and the seductive pleasure of becoming more capable.

• Zenjoyment: Publishes on June 9th
  On calm authority, restraint, spaciousness, and the pleasure of becoming impossible to rush.