For most strategists, product managers, and brand guardians, calling something “pablum” is insulting - a shorthand for content or brands so bland they feel nutritionally adequate but emotionally empty. Yet history keeps rewarding pablum. In the 1930s, Pablum, a precooked infant cereal, became a breakthrough product because it was easy, reliable, and fortified, not because it was exciting.

In “What Does It All Mean? Once a Year, French Students Try to Explain,” by Catherine Porter at the New York Times, I was introduced to the annual baccalauréat philosophy examination in which students must reason through foundational questions about justice, well-being, and the nature of human expression, reflecting French society’s perspective on philosophy as an active thought process rather than dreary, dusty old rumination. 

Technology has extended our lives - the average life expectancy throughout human history was 30-35; it now exceeds 73 years worldwide. Vaccines, antibiotics, sanitation, and surgical advances have limited or controlled diseases that killed billions - smallpox alone killed approximately 300 million people in the 20th century before being eradicated in the 1980s. Child mortality has dropped. Mass starvation at scale has been partially rectified. Inventions from the printing press to the Internet have compressed distance, connected minds, and democratized information.