Dynamic #2

Active kindness

Facing permanent acceleration, the cult of performance and asynchronous rhythms (where everyone now organizes their time differently, between remote work, staggered hours, or fragmented days), a desire emerges: to live better, less fast. Individuals redefine their own lifestyles, far from clichés and social expectations. More rooted, fulfillment becomes a new benchmark and a trend emerges: individuals place well-being at the center of their priorities. It's not about giving up but for each person to modulate and arrange time so it also benefits body and mind.

Worldwide, the soft living movement gains ground. Popularized by Nigerian and African-American internet users, this movement invites leaving behind hustle culture (the culture of hyperproductivity), an ideology that values overwork, productivity at all costs, and obsession with success, to favor a gentler life, connected to authentic desires. Leaving big cities, rethinking success milestones, adopting more human rhythms: more and more young people are changing course. In the UK, nearly half of 18-24 year-olds consider leaving metropolises (The Standard, 2023). In China, young people settle in smaller cities to escape urban pressure.

In the Middle Kingdom, a country where the '996' work system is widely practiced (a sustained work rhythm from 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week according to The Guardian, 2024), new practices develop like 'bad mood leave' or mood-based scheduling (organizing time according to emotional state), which recognize the right to emotional fatigue without justification. Yu Donglai, founder and chairman of the Pang Dong Lai store chain, recently announced that his employees could request ten additional days off at their convenience, to maintain a better work-life balance (Le Figaro, 2024).

This mindset change goes hand in hand with a collective will to live longer and better, because it's the rightness of tempo that makes the melody, not the last note. Thanks to medical advances and understanding of lifestyle habits, laboratories today explore ways to stay healthy until 120: so, long live active kindness!

In this context, performance is no longer enough. It's a balanced, joyful life adapted to oneself that new generations seek. By valuing gentleness, emotional stability, and reconnection to the essential, kindness asserts itself as a new engine for the future. This quest for slowdown redefines experiential by making it more sensory, more immersive, but above all more authentic. We no longer seek accumulation of spectacular moments, but the richness of sincere instants, carrying meaning. We favor slow, anchored experiences, fostering connection to oneself and others.

Taking care

Long seen as a territory to discipline, the body enters a new era: it becomes a partner, a compass, an ally. We no longer seek to dominate it but to listen to it, follow it, fully inhabit it. This is a fundamental shift: we move from a body-object to a body-ally. More than a tool, it becomes a life partner. It's a holistic approach that emerges, where body, mind, and emotions form an inseparable whole.

What if slowing down became a new way to live experience, deeper, more sensory, more human?

→ The right to slow down

Returning to the body and circadian rhythms (daily biological rhythms) goes through the sensory. Touch, breath, slow movement become re-anchoring tools. We rediscover the virtues of sleep, rest, silence. This slowdown isn't a pause: it's active care, a preservation gesture. We explore the somatic dimension: feeling, living emotions through the body. Yoga, intuitive dance, breathwork are all practices that reconnect being to itself. This sensitive relationship opens the way to greater acceptance of bodies in their plurality. Each becomes a place of dignity and space of truth.

→ A culture of care

Exercising without leaving bed (+130% searches on Pinterest in 2024), seeking comfort in small gestures, taking care of oneself without pressure: this is no longer an anomaly, it's an aspiration, gestures once relegated to the margins that become assumed choices. Crip time, designating a flexible temporality that adapts to each person's rhythms and needs, particularly those of people with disabilities, neurodivergent, or in burnout, teaches us to slow down without guilt. Soft living becomes a lifestyle, based on regenerative rituals and attentive presence to oneself, where well-being is built in details.

→ An invitation for companies to align

In this quest for stability and emotional balance, companies have a new responsibility. Those who can offer soothing experiences, create comforting products, and encourage care rituals, will gain loyalty. By aligning their commitments with this holistic vision of well-being, they won't simply respond to a trend: they'll embody a new ethic of care and participate in a major cultural shift.

We explore the somatic dimension

OASIS immersion

Presented in Montreal in 2024, Reconnect is a wellness immersive experience by OASIS immersion. Combining soothing sounds, immersive visuals, and disconnection spaces, the exhibition offers a multisensory journey designed to slow down, breathe, and refocus. A regenerative break, at the crossroads of art, mindfulness, and technology.

IKEA

In 2024, IKEA launched Stages of Sleeping in New York, an immersive sleep experience, following a summer pop-up on the same theme. The event included multisensory experiences such as sound baths, light graffiti, a silent disco, as well as product previews (mattresses and comfort accessories) and an expert roundtable in collaboration with the National Sleep Foundation, an American sleep health organization.

Hilton

In March 2024, Hilton organized a Sleep Concert in Shanghai, an immersive event blending soothing music, soft light, and ultra-comfortable beds to promote falling asleep. This unprecedented sensory experience aimed to promote well-being and position the hotel as an innovative player in restorative sleep.

Recreating connections

While traditional benchmarks—family, religion, institutions—don't disappear but transform, new connections emerge without necessarily replacing the old ones. These relational forms coexist in a world composed of contrary dynamics. Chosen friendship, fluid, deep becomes an emotional foundation. It asserts itself as a central pillar in a world seeking emotional security.

What if friendship became the privileged terrain of unprecedented collective experiences, capable of redrawing our ways of living, creating, and connecting?

→ A reinvented friendship: digital and fragmented

The young generation transforms friendship into a space of conscious care. We now speak of platonic life partners, workbesties, and friendly separations are perceived in a new light: in comparison, they would be more painful than romantic breakups. On TikTok, friendship rituals, codified affective languages, shared celebrations illustrate this growing need to give meaning to these chosen connections: only 2 in 10 employees in the United States declare having a best friend at work. Those who don't express more negative feelings toward their employer (Gallup, 2022). Friendships now build through a mosaic of languages: voice, emojis, private stories. Intimacy goes through screens, sometimes even through AI. Artificial companions like Replika or OpenAI's future AI Companion, inspired by Spike Jonze's film Her (2013), explore this new frontier of simulated tenderness. The human bond evolves, but the need for attachment remains intact and seeks refuges in seen places 2.0.

→ The office, new terrain for connection

At a time when the professional world, long associated with obligation and normative space, evolves toward a logic of connection, practices like desk bombing (spontaneously showing up at someone's desk to chat) testify to a need for spontaneous human contacts. A need felt as visceral, since 91% of Gen Z want more 'in-person contact with other members of their company' (Quartz, 2025). By reinventing these moments of connection without conviviality clashing with productivity, companies strengthen their employees' loyalty and well-being.

→ A new territory of engagement for brands

At a time when traditional life milestones (marriage, home ownership…) seem out of reach or less desired, new benchmarks emerge: minorstones. Modest but precious and highly symbolic successes, often celebrated among friends. In this context, companies have a role to play in accompanying, ritualizing, and giving value to these more sincere and authentic moments. Cultivating tenderness isn't a luxury, it's a response to a fundamental need.

91% of Gen Z want more in-person contact.

Donut / Slack

In a context of widespread remote work, the Donut integration on Slack offers random connections between colleagues for virtual coffees or informal conversations as well as facilitating onboarding of new hires.

Objective: recreate informal connection, small talk, and social capital often lacking remotely.

Offline Club

Born in Amsterdam and quickly becoming an international movement, Offline Club organizes regular events in cafes, town halls, and public spaces where participants deposit their phones at the entrance to live screen-free meeting moments. Board games, free discussions, convivial rituals: everything is designed to counter the loneliness epidemic and digital anxiety by fostering authentic human reconnection. Facing the 'global friendship crisis' fueled by our digital lives, these safe spaces embody a new social ritual to weave direct, unmediated connections.

Les Amis

Launched in early 2025 in France and recently in the United States, Les Amis is an app that uses artificial intelligence to suggest meetings between women based on their interests, age, location, etc. It also organizes group events designed as safe spaces – over 4,000 events have already brought together 25,000 participants in Europe.

Event scenarios

Key Trend #3 / Taking care

The corporate event is no longer just a highlight, it becomes a space of regeneration. We slow down, breathe, reconnect. Taking care becomes a lever for engagement, attention, and cohesion.

1. Integrate micro-break rituals in all formats

Slowing down becomes a cultural necessity. Care spaces appear both in offices and festive formats, integrating micro-rituals like sound naps or circles of silence. These sensitive pauses install a new culture of attention at work, where we take care of ourselves at the very heart of the collective.

2. Activate the five senses to rethink attention

The body no longer withdraws: it becomes a partner of experience. Soft lights, enveloping textures, slow rhythms, or guided breathing reinstall presence to oneself, through the sensory. These devices don't oversolicit: they reconnect body, emotions, and attention. Slowing down becomes active care, a cultural choice, and a new form of engagement in the event.

3. Make movement a lever for collective reflection

Leaving the sedentary framework allows thinking differently. Narrative walks, 'walk & talk' formats, mobile conferences in a park or museum: displacement frees speech, stimulates ideas, and softens hierarchies, while fully integrating into a professional framework.

Key Trend #4 / Recreating connections

As work fragments, the event becomes a space to recreate freer, chosen, and sincere connections, in line with a growing need for attachment and recognition within the collective.

1. Reinvent the informal to recreate spontaneous connections

In a fragmented workplace, the event reactivates the warmth of informal exchanges. Mystery coffees in digital, pop-up discussions around a topic during the day: these hybrid relational micro-rituals reinvent the informal, far from forced team buildings, to make room for spontaneity.

2. Create de-hierarchized relational formats

The event no longer thinks in top-down. It becomes a terrain of horizontal exchanges, where everyone, whatever their role, can connect as equals. Rotating dinners, randomly drawn pairs, equal-voice conversation games… So many formats that foster unexpected affinities, far from functional silos, and generate a more fluid, natural, and lively dynamic.

3. Imagine events that celebrate chosen connections

Friendship becomes a key benchmark, including in the professional world. The event integrates this evolution by proposing formats that cultivate chosen and sincere connections: 'workbestie' pairs, frescoes of small victories, encouragement rituals… So many gestures that strengthen emotional loyalty without overplaying the intimate and reinstall sincere collective attachment.