We Are Not Having Real Cultural Conversations

What comes to mind when you hear the word 'culture'? Or what is your definition of culture?

Say the word culture in any gathering across Kenya, and within sixty seconds, someone mentions the Maasai. The jumping. The shukas. The beadwork. The rituals that have been photographed, documented, and admired for generations. And then the conversation ends. Or drifts. Or circles back to the same familiar territory — what we were, what we have lost, what the elders used to do.

I want to propose something uncomfortable: we are not having real cultural conversations. Not because we lack the intelligence or the desire, but because we have collectively decided that culture belongs to the past. That it is a museum exhibit, not a living force. Something to admire from behind glass, not something actively shaping the way we live right now.

The Museum Mistake

The museum mistake is when we treat culture as a noun — a fixed object, a set of practices from another time, something to be preserved or mourned rather than examined in the present tense. Culture is not a noun. It is a verb. It is something happening right now, in real time, without announcement or declaration. It is the music your child wakes up to. It is the kind of relationship being normalized in the group chat. It is the behavior that got ten million views yesterday and will be imitated by a thousand people tomorrow. It is the standard your workplace quietly rewards when it promotes one person over another. It is the expectation your family places on your shoulders that nobody ever names out loud.

All of that is culture. All of it is a way of life being built and transmitted and inherited — while most of us are busy pointing at the Maasai.

Why We Default to the Traditional

There are understandable reasons why our cultural conversations gravitate toward the traditional.

First, traditional culture is visible and bounded. It has names, costumes, and ceremonies. It can be photographed and studied. It does not require us to look too closely at our own daily choices and what they reveal. Second, the traditional is safely historical. We can discuss the FGM practices of the Maasai with moral confidence because we are examining something we have already decided to change. The culture being built on TikTok right now — the values being normalized by the content we consume and share without thinking — is much harder to examine because it implicates us personally. Third, and perhaps most importantly, the tradition gives us something to grieve. Grief is easier than accountability. Mourning what was lost is less demanding than examining what we are building.

What Is Actually Happening Right Now

While we mourn the old culture and debate its preservation, a new culture is assembling itself — rapidly, quietly, through millions of small, unremarkable decisions. A single content creator normalizes a behavior that millions imitate. An algorithm rewards transgression with attention, which trains the next generation of creators to push the boundary further. A child grows up in a home where the parents scroll in silence, and absorbs the lesson that presence can be performed without being felt. A young professional learns, by watching who gets promoted, that the appearance of results matters more than the integrity of how they were produced. None of these shifts was announced. None were voted on. None was the subject of a cultural conversation. They were simply built — in the small, ignored things — while we were having a different conversation entirely.

Culture is not what your tribe did. It is what you do — every day, without noticing.

The Conversation We Actually Need

The cultural conversation that matters is not the one about what the Maasai used to practice. That conversation has its place. But the urgent conversation — the one with immediate consequences for this generation — is about what is being practiced right now. What is being practiced in your home? What values are your daily routines transmitting to the children who are watching you without your knowledge? What is your workplace teaching its employees about what really matters, through its rewards and its tolerances and its silences? What is the algorithm teaching your teenagers about beauty, about success, about the kind of person worth becoming — and is anyone examining those lessons?

These are cultural questions. They are more urgent than any debate about traditional practices. And they are rarely asked.

The First Step Is Naming It

The first step in any honest cultural conversation is naming what is actually happening. Not what we wish were happening. Not what we remember happening. What is actually, presently, visibly happening in the cultures we inhabit? This naming is uncomfortable. It implicates us. It requires us to look at our own daily choices — our consumption habits, our relationship patterns, our professional compromises, our parenting defaults — and ask honestly: what culture is this building? Not what culture am I trying to build? What culture am I actually building — right now, through the sum of my repeated choices?

That question is the beginning of a real cultural conversation. And it is the question this entire body of work is designed to help you ask.

Stay with me.

— Sir Anthony | Who Made You Normal?