Sometimes home is the cost of the dream.

On the embarrassment of wanting something specific

Perceptio is now also on Instagram in case you want to follow: @perceptio.substack

In a recent episode of Talk Easy, Sam Fragoso asked director Ryan Coogler how he reckons with the fact that his dreams pushed him away from home. Coogler’s answer was: “Sometimes home is the cost of the dream.” I’ve been thinking about that sentence ever since, not because it’s comforting, but because it’s honest in a way that almost nothing about ambition is anymore. It names the trade without softening it. The dream and the displacement are the same transaction.

He’s not the only one who has named it that honestly.

In 2018, Brady Corbet was in Norway, seven years into trying to make a film nobody wanted to finance, when he got the call he’d been waiting for. Just another Monday morning where his daughter needed piano lessons and someone was offering him a job that would solve everything and cost him only a year or two of his life. He turned it down. He kept writing, two to three hours every night after fourteen-hour editing days, what he later called “a sickness.” The Brutalist took seven years to make. He deferred his entire salary to get it financed. He and his partner made zero dollars on their last two films combined. The movie received ten Oscar nominations. He found out while directing commercials in Portugal, the first paycheck he’d seen in years. Not every story ends with a phone call. Most of them just end.

These stories are about a specific kind of wanting: irrational, embarrassing, privately held, inconvenient to everyone including the person doing the wanting. The kind that doesn’t make it onto a vision board because it can’t be made to look aspirational yet. The kind that reorganizes a life around an absence, costs things before it gives anything back, and cannot be explained to someone who doesn’t already understand.

That kind of wanting is becoming rare. And what it produces is becoming rare with it.

The backlash against hustle culture was earned. But somewhere in the correction, desire got a rebrand. The vocabulary shifted: growth, alignment, intentionality, becoming. Aspiration with the embarrassment removed. And the embarrassment, it turns out, is load-bearing. It tells you the wanting is real. It tells you the thing you're reaching toward is specific enough and yours enough and large enough to be worth protecting from other people's judgment. Without it you are not at peace. You are just not trying.

Every category of building runs on the same fuel. Products, companies, brands, movements, the things that turned out to matter were almost always made by someone who wanted something that couldn’t be justified in advance, that required them to become a specific and inconvenient kind of person to produce it. The conditions under which certain things get made that could not have been made any other way.

What gets made when those conditions are absent? We have a word for it now. Slop. The word of the year in 2025 wasn’t “AI”, it was “slop”: synthetic content, emotionally sterile, optimized for volume and frictionlessness, produced by a system that has never wanted anything.

But slop isn’t only a content problem. It’s what happens to products built without inconvenient conviction. To brands assembled from validated consumer insights rather than from something a founder couldn’t stop thinking about at midnight. To companies that optimized the wanting out of their culture in the name of scalability and psychological safety and quarterly coherence. Slop is the end state of desire fully managed. We have had slop problem even before AI.

It is what you get when an entire culture learns to want safely and then builds tools to want even more safely at scale.

Real wanting doesn’t scale. That’s the point. And the thing that doesn’t scale is, right now, the scarcest thing available.

Sometimes home is the cost of the dream. Are you willing to pay it or are you still looking for the version that doesn’t cost anything yet?

If you want to join Perceptio Office Hours to discuss some of the topics live together, consider upgrading your subscription. All posts will remain open and free regardless.