“You are what you eat.”
I say this a lot. Enough that the people I work with are probably tired of hearing it.
And it’s why I have a little bit of a physical media hoarding collecting problem
Usually I say it in conversations about creativity: how to build a better culture around it, how to protect it, how to actually feed it. It’s an old phrase, maybe an overused one, but I love it because it holds up. What you consume shapes what you make. What you surround yourself with shapes what you reach for. What you take in, over time, becomes part of your creative vocabulary.
For filmmakers, this idea is almost gospel. You hear versions of it from auteurs all the time. Watch widely. Study deeply. Don’t just consume what’s current. Build your taste on something richer than the last thing that passed through the feed.
A Creative Diet Matters.
And yet I’m always surprised by how narrow the actual reference pool can become in creative and marketing spaces.
In brainstorms, I rarely hear people point to novels, paintings, documentaries, old films, photography books, essays, architecture, music history, or even classic commercials. More often, the references come from whatever someone happened to scroll past on social media that week. A TikTok. A reel. A campaign that was likely already modeled on another campaign, which was likely modeled on something else designed to satisfy the same algorithmic pressures.
Ask someone to pull it back up and often they can’t. The platform served it to them, then buried it. It existed just long enough to leave an impression and then disappeared into the feed.
That kind of inspiration is becoming increasingly self-referential.
And the image I keep coming back to is the ouroboros.
The Ouroboros of Content.
Most of us know it as a symbol: the snake eating its own tail, forming a perfect circle. It’s ancient, beautiful, and loaded with meaning — life, death, rebirth, infinity, regeneration. It has survived across cultures for a reason. It feels elemental.
But recently I came across something darker: a real snake, born in captivity, eating its own tail.
Apparently this behavior does not really occur in the wild. Experts think it can come from stress, confusion, or an environment that is fundamentally wrong for the animal. Too hot. Too cold. Poorly designed. The wrong conditions create a kind of breakdown, and the snake begins to consume itself.
That image has stayed with me because it feels uncomfortably close to the creative environment a lot of us now work inside.
If We Want Better Work, We Need Better Inputs.
Brands are constantly being told to make more content, faster, with clearer hooks, stronger retention, better engagement, better optimization. Creatives are asked to reference what’s currently performing. Teams are fed a steady diet of algorithm-approved work and then asked to make something “fresh.” But if the source material is already optimized for platform survival rather than depth, surprise, or emotional truth, then what exactly are we feeding ourselves?
We end up drawing inspiration from work that was already built to be glanced at, scrolled past, and replicated.
And over time, that starts to show.
The work becomes flatter. More interchangeable. More familiar in the worst way. Brands stop building identities and start producing approximations of whatever already seems to be working. Not because the people making it are untalented, but because the environment around them rewards replication over exploration.
That’s the part I think matters most.
I don’t really blame the brands. I don’t blame the creatives either. Like the snake, a lot of us are operating inside a captive environment that is fundamentally disorienting. We are being fed by systems designed not to deepen taste, but to maximize attention. That may be useful for platforms. It may even be useful for short-term metrics. But it is devastating if you are trying to build work with a distinct point of view.
If you are what you eat, and all you consume is content built from other content, eventually the circle tightens.
You stop drawing from life. From history. From cinema. From observation. From contradiction. From anything with texture or soul.
You start feeding on yourself.
And maybe that’s part of why so much branded video feels weightless now. It isn’t coming from a rich enough source. It’s drawing from a closed loop of stressed, optimized, self-replicating material.
Which is why I keep coming back to that phrase.
You are what you eat.
If we want better work, we need a better diet.
That means going back to the deeper well: films, books, art, music, essays, photography, lived experience, difficult conversations, the world outside the feed. It means building a creative culture that values inputs with history, texture, and surprise. It means resisting the temptation to treat the algorithm as a taste-maker instead of what it actually is: a machine for keeping us there.
Because the alternative is bleak.
The snake keeps eating.
The circle keeps tightening.
And eventually, there’s nothing left to nourish the work but itself.
-Adam
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