On September 18, we hosted Stocksy’s first live client event in NYC: Signs of Life: Subversively Human. Too often, discussions about creativity get lost in tech chatter. This gathering flipped the script, bringing brand and agency leaders together to celebrate what’s still alive, real, and unmistakably human in creative work.
Listening as a Human Superpower
Dr. Paul Browde, psychiatrist, storyteller, and faculty member in Columbia University’s Narrative Medicine Masters Program, opened the afternoon by illuminating how listening itself is a foundational and often undervalued act of human connection. He also co-leads programs with renowned psychotherapist Esther Perel, bringing unique depth to the conversation on presence and creativity.
He introduced two metaphors to help us deepen our listening:
- Bowl of Listening: encourages awareness of thoughts, sensations, and impulses that fill our attention, noting that the desire to help or fix often dominates.
- Listening Elevator: describes three levels, the penthouse (thinking), the lobby (feeling), and the basement (intuition), and encourages moving fluidly between them.
“The art of a good listener is to have a really good working elevator to think, feel, and sense with intuition.”
Listening as a Leader
Drawing inspiration from Stewart Brand’s first photograph of Earth — “our first global selfie” — Stocksy CEO Trace Cohen encouraged creative leaders to move beyond an obsession with algorithms and trends and listen more attentively to the wisdom of your heart and your community.
Once a stutterer who “wasn’t listening, but waiting to speak,” Trace learned the value of attentive, generative listening — a practice embedded in Stocksy’s culture, highlighting the co-op’s founding principles of collective decision-making.
“Real always resonates.”
The Power of Ambient Realism
Stocksy Creative Director Genevieve Ross shared a perspective on ambient realism — a visual aesthetic rooted in imperfection and everyday life. By embracing candid techniques like tilted horizons, soft focus, and unexpected crops, ambient realism transforms ordinary moments into emotionally resonant experiences. It’s an aesthetic that has endured across decades and remains essential to understanding how photography connects us to presence, optimism, and the beauty of the everyday.
“Photography has always been the syntax of attention, not only to the world around us, but the world right in front of us.”
Observing Culture to Inspire Creativity
Futurist and CEO of Concept Bureau, Jasmine Bina explored how three core psychotechnologies — mental models embedded in the human mind offer a way to glimpse the future before it arrives.
She discussed three psychotechnologies:
- Big Ideas: How people think, feel, and interact, revealing underlying desires.
- Market Conditioning: How advertising, norms, and trends shape what people notice and how they respond.
- Units of Culture: Small, everyday rituals and artifacts that expose deeper human patterns.
Together, these technologies act as a compass, uncovering consistent cultural patterns hidden beneath surface chaos. By learning to observe and interpret them, creators and brands can anticipate shifts, make more human-centered decisions, and craft work that resonates deeply with their audience.
“Carl Jung said it best, he said, ‘People don’t have ideas, ideas have people.’ We are possessed by the ideas of our time. They are what control us.”
At Signs of Life, the takeaway was clear: creativity thrives when we pay attention to these signals, reminding us that the future is already written into the present.
