Quality is a Serious Problem

Understanding The Changing Consumer Definition of Quality in Media

Source: DALL-E

A shift is underway across media. It’s happening on YouTube and Reels, Roblox and Fortnite, Soundcloud and Spotify and here, on Substack. On these platforms—across video, gaming, music and journalism—consumers are redirecting their time and attention to non-institutional, non-corporate content. Call it user generated, social, short form, independent, creator, whatever you like.

I recently wrote about the creator media economy in The Relentless, Inevitable March of the Creator Economy. It is one of the few bright spots in media. In that post, I sized the creator media economy at around $250 billion globally last year, or almost 15% of the total media and entertainment (M&E) market. I also showed estimates that over the last four years it has grown at about 25% per year, representing about half of all M&E growth. In this post, I dig deeper into a key cause and implication of this growth: consumers are redefining quality in media.

A common thread among this non-corporate content is that it usually doesn’t meet the same standards as corporate content. It is lower fidelity, less polished, less produced, more amateurish, rawer, more experimental. Measured against traditional standards of quality, you would call a lot of it crap. In most cases, traditional media companies would be embarrassed to put it out. But it keeps taking share of consumer time and attention anyway.

The only possible inference is that a lot of consumers are changing how they define quality in media, at least some of the time. For executives at incumbent media companies, it’s a big blind spot and a big problem.

I’ve written about quality before many times, like here and here. Below, I provide a more comprehensive framework for thinking about quality and discuss what incumbents can do when consumers’ perception of quality changes.

Tl;dr:

• People often think of quality as a value judgment. Instead, think of quality as the algorithm a consumer uses when choosing between similarly priced goods, in a similar context. Under this definition, quality is revealed preference.

• The goal is to create a framework for understanding why consumers make the decisions they do. This is especially important when the consumer definition of quality changes. It’s one of the most insidious causes of disruption and poorly understood.

• My experience at Turner showed that a changing consumer definition of quality is a blind spot for executives at incumbents. And even when they see it, it can be very hard to adapt. Many companies are optimized around a definition of quality; when it changes, it may cause entry barriers to fall; and company culture is often inextricably tied to it.

• It is clear today that consumers are redefining quality in media. Creator content usually has none of the traditional markers of quality, but it keeps taking share. You can see this empirically, especially in video and gaming. Consumers must be drawn by something else.

• What should incumbents do? They need to acknowledge this change, understand what is that “something else,” and figure out which of those attributes they can emulate.

• When the internet first emerged, it changed the way corporate content was distributed—but it was still the same content being distributed. If you think of it like a breakup, it was like consumers saying “I still love you, I just need to do this a different way. It’s not you, it’s me.” Something different is happening now. Today, the demand for that content itself is declining. It’s more like consumers saying “Actually, yeah, it's definitely you.”

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What’s Quality?

Quality is a tricky word, because it means different things to different people.

In some domains, quality is objectively measured. Meat, diamonds, and olive oil are graded according to objective standards. Total Quality Management measures and tracks KPIs throughout the production process. Consumer Reports has a set of consistent, objective measurement standards in each product category.

More often, quality is determined by experts’ subjective opinions. Critics give their opinions on restaurants, fashion, art, theater, books, movies, TV shows, music and games. Wine experts rate wine. Luxury travel magazines rate hotels. Often, these opinions equate quality with craftmanship, durability, reliability, attention to detail or the time and labor involved. (If it took a long time, it must be good, right?)

Other times, quality is even murkier. Some think it as the inherent “goodness” of a thing that defies measurement and may be completely distinct from its desirability. (“The restaurant was clearly high quality, but I wouldn’t go back.”) It becomes like Justice Potter Stewart’s famous line about obscenity, “I know it when I see it.”

If you are in the business of selling things to people, you need to understand how they define quality.

The problem with a lot of these approaches is that they are divorced from what customers prefer. If you are in the business of selling things to people, you need a practical understanding of why they make the choices they do. You need to understand how your customers define quality.

A Practical Definition

Here’s an effort at a practical definition: quality is the set of weighted attributes a consumer uses to choose between similarly priced goods, in a similar context. This may seem a little academic, but bear with me.

Mathematically, the algorithm might look like this, where the weights sum to 1¹:

\(Quality = w_1(attribute_1)+w_2(attribute_2)+...w_n(attribute_n)\)

These attributes may be functional or emotional and, importantly, consumers are not necessarily aware of all the attributes they consider and almost certainly couldn’t articulate the weights. The emotional attributes especially may be inaccessible to consumers, because the psychological rationale for their choices may be complex and deep seated.² The attributes and weights depend on the context in which the choice is made (the consumer’s “need state”) and can change over time as a consumer’s tastes change.

Some examples may help.

• For a hammer, which is almost entirely a functional good, the attributes might only include a few things, like weight, grip, size, expected durability and brand reputation.

• A largely emotional good, like a handbag, is more complicated. The relevant attributes might include craftsmanship, expected durability, size, carrying capacity, compartments, hardware, versatility, colorways, shape, materials, brand, trendiness, identity reinforcement (“I’m the kind of person who deserves this kind of purse”), status signaling (“I can afford this purse”) and social currency (“I’m cool enough to carry this purse.”)

• For a luxury car, they might include fuel efficiency, driving experience (sporty, comfortable), acceleration, interior finishes, passenger capacity, cargo capacity, off-road ability, handling in bad weather, color, design, and the same attributes about identity, status and social signaling as the handbag.

Think of quality not as a value judgment or stated preference, but as revealed preference. Quality is what people do.

Under this definition, quality is not stated preference or value judgment, it is revealed preference. It is not an inherent property of a product but an emergent outcome of how consumers implicitly weigh its attributes in a particular context.

So, to sum up:

• Quality reflects individual decisions that implicitly weigh a set of attributes. These attributes can be functional (what the thing does) and emotional (what it makes the buyer feel).

• Consumers aren’t necessarily aware of the set of attributes (especially the emotional ones) or their weights.

• It is relative to the price point, set of choices, and need state. It is not an inherent property.

• Quality is inferred from revealed preference, not stated preference or value judgment.

• The algorithm—the definition of quality—changes based on context and can also change over time.

• On the macro level, relative quality is determined by the aggregation of individual choices (again, within a price point, choice set and need state).

In the appendix, I add a few thoughts about how this framework relates to other schools of thought about decision making and also address potential pushback. But in the interest of getting to the point, let’s keep moving.

Disruption Often Changes the Definition of Quality

As I wrote above, this isn’t meant to be academic. The goal of defining quality this way is to create a framework for thinking through why people make the choices they do. That’s a good thing to understand generally, but it is especially important when consumers’ definition of quality changes.

Many businesses expect tastes to change, but it is much more dangerous when attributes that are considered enduring are, in fact, not.

Some businesses are built around the assumption that tastes change often (or, put in terms of our definition, the weighting of some attributes change often). Luxury and fast fashion houses, beauty brands, consumer packaged goods, and even entertainment companies all expect taste to change along certain dimensions. In our handbag example, maybe certain colors or styles become popular or fall out of favor. Maybe the right celebrity is seen carrying the right bag at the right time. Fast fashion doesn’t just expect taste to change but relies on it, because that’s what keeps consumers coming back. Music labels, movie studios, mobile game publishers and creators are all on the lookout for the latest thing.

It is much more dangerous, however, when the definition of quality changes in unanticipated ways, for attributes that are considered enduring but, in fact, are not. It’s one of the more insidious and poorly understood causes, and effects, of disruption.

Most people understand the concept of low-end disruption, which is a cheaper, lower-quality product (as measured against the traditional definition of quality). The idea that disruption often changes the definition of quality is less well understood.

Most people with a passing interest in business strategy get the basic idea of Clay Christensen’s disruptive innovation theory. A new entrant targets an overserved market with a less expensive, less performant product. Incumbents initially dismiss the threat and cede the low end of the market. The product gets better over time, moves up the performance curve, and picks off more of the incumbents’ customers.

But new entrants don’t only compete on the existing measures of performance. Usually, they introduce new attributes and, if those attributes resonate with consumers, they can change how consumers define quality.

New entrants often introduce new attributes.

My favorite example is Airbnb. Prior to Airbnb, leisure travelers’ most important attributes probably included brand reputation, loyalty program, cleanliness, daily housekeeping, security, location, on site dining options, included meals, 24-hour room service, 24-hour reception desk, on site amenities (like a pool, spa and fitness center), and maybe whether there’s a kids club or the scope of resort activities.

Airbnb introduced a bunch of new features to lodging, like a full working kitchen, a quaint or authentic neighborhood, room to entertain, a dedicated parking space, more privacy, a washer-dryer, far more closet space, etc. For many customers, Airbnb has changed their definition of quality in lodging.

Let’s think about this in the context of my definition of quality above. For Airbnb customers, their quality algorithm has changed. They may still care a lot about many of these prior markers of quality, like cleanliness, location and security. They might still value on-site dining or the convenience and peace of mind of access to a 24-hour reception desk. But recall that the attribute weights sum to 1. When a new entrant introduces new attributes that a consumer values, it must reduce the relative importance of some of the other attributes. For Airbnb customers, they still value many of the prior measures of lodging quality, but not as much.

Quality is a Blind Spot

My experience is that a changing consumer definition of quality is a big blind spot for executives.

About a decade ago, I ran a strategy project at Turner. As part of it, I wrote 50 statements about the possible state of the TV business in ten years (which, as it happens, was 2025). The statements fell into four categories, changes in: consumption patterns; the way content is distributed; product (both content and UX); and advertising. They included things like:

• “Usage-based broadband pricing is prevalent, constraining growth of streaming video consumption”

• “Young consumers who initially opt out of pay TV choose to adopt pay TV as they age”

• “New capabilities, such as improved targeting, addressability (and retargeting) and attribution increase the value of TV advertising faster than inventory and viewership shrink”

I then asked a few dozen of the top executives at the company to score each statement on both likelihood (1-5) and, if it were to occur, impact (1-5). The goal was not just to see which they thought were the most important, but also understand the dispersion of opinions around each one.

As a group, the executives had no problem grasping and anticipating major changes in distribution, product and advertising. They foresaw that the cable bundle would splinter, the pace of cord cutting would increase and smaller cable networks would shutter. They also expected that the value of first party data would increase and ad loads would need to go down. The thing they couldn’t get their heads around were major changes to the consumer definition of quality.

Most of the executives couldn’t grasp that consumers’ definition of quality might diverge from their own definition.

Consider these two statements, both of which ranked near the bottom of the 50 in terms of likelihood. Both have come to pass:

• “Low-production value (UGC and professionally-produced) online content is ‘good enough’ in consumers' eyes to take significant share from traditional programming”

• “Consumers increasingly opt for short-form experiences and watch comparatively less long-form content”

Most of these executives were anchored in a relatively fixed definition of quality. For them, quality in TV meant the attributes of prestige TV on HBO: brand name showrunners, big budgets, critical acclaim, high production values, well-known actors, excellent writing, etc. The idea that consumers might redefine quality in TV just didn’t compute.

This was essentially the same reasoning why MP3s would never replace CDs; wireless telephony would never replace wireline; or why UGC and causal gaming aren’t really gaming.

Shifting Quality is Often a Big Problem Even When You See It

While executives at incumbents often are willfully blind to changes in the consumer definition of quality, it can be almost impossible to respond even when they see it.

• Companies often optimize around a definition of quality. This includes potentially every aspect of the operating model, capital structure, distribution channels, brand positioning and organizational structure. Back to hotels. The entire hotel business is built around a definition of quality. The way the hotels are configured; their locations; the way they have developed their brands over decades; how staff is hired, trained and compensated; and their sales channels. If many consumers’ definition of quality now includes a full working kitchen, a barbeque on the back deck, room to entertain, a washer-dryer and a quaint neighborhood, it is very hard, or in some cases impossible, for Hilton or Marriot to compete.

• New attributes often have lower barriers to entry. So, companies are built around a definition of quality, namely the attributes they believe consumers enduringly value. If these companies are profitable, it follows that the most important quality attributes must be tough to replicate—they are moats. (Otherwise, new entrants would easily replicate these attributes and compete away profits.) Hotels are capital intensive. There are only so many prime locations. Brands that convey trustworthiness and quality are hard to build. It is difficult to instill a culture of excellent customer service. As long as these are critical attributes in consumers’ definition of quality, they create competitive barriers to entry. But if these become less important and the new attributes of quality are easier to replicate, the moats fall.

• A definition of quality is often inextricably tied to company culture. Culture implicitly reflects a definition of quality—what beliefs are reinforced and which behaviors are rewarded. Let’s say you work at a TV production studio at which the culture is built around prestige TV. The highest ideals are critical acclaim, industry awards and attracting top talent. The people who work at the studio are self-selecting for those who believe strongly in the importance of prestige TV and probably joined expressly to help make it. The people who get congratulated, envied, promoted and paid are the ones who shepherd the most prestigious shows. How do you tell them their definition of quality is no longer valid? When they come in the next day and sit down at their desks, what are they supposed to do?

The Definition of Quality is Clearly Shifting in Media Today

It’s clear, by inference, that many consumers are redefining quality in media.

One simplifying factor when comparing choices in media is that most occur at the same price point: zero. Most media is “free,” supported by advertising—like social networking and social video—or purchased through a monthly subscription—like cable TV, streaming video, streaming audio, and digital publications—and therefore carries no marginal cost to consume.

So, almost all media choices are “similarly priced.” Whenever someone chooses one option over another for a similar use case and need state, it reveals that they implicitly considered that choice higher quality. When you slump down on the couch after a long day and scroll through Reels for 20 minutes rather than pick up the remote that’s an arm’s length away, you’re revealing that Reels is higher quality than anything on Netflix (or Disney+, Hulu, Max, Amazon Prime, etc.), at least in that context.

Figure 1. Social Video is ~1/4 of Total Video Consumption

Source: Maverix Insights MIDG data, Nielsen, Author analysis.

Figure 2. YouTube’s Share of Video is Up >50% in 2 Years

Source: Nielsen.

Let’s stick with video as an example. I estimate social video is now 1/4 of all video consumed in the U.S. (Figure 1), which is primarily YouTube, TikTok and Reels. It’s tough to construct a time series of that data, but Figure 2 is a good proxy. It shows YouTube’s share of all video viewing on TVs (and is therefore a subset of the total social video viewing shown in Figure 1). As shown, its share is about the same as Disney+, Hulu, Max, Peacock, Paramount+, Pluto, and Tubi combined, and it is up more than 50% over the last two years.

Why does that indicate that the definition of quality is changing? There is little room for debate that social video is “low quality” according to the traditional attributes of quality. Most of it has none of the attributes of prestige TV that I mentioned above, like high production values, big budgets, brand-name showrunners, convincing special effects, famous or prestigious actors, excellent writing, and beautiful cinematography. Consumers must be drawn by something else. We can guess those new attributes include authentic, relatable, relevant to me, relevant to my subcommunity, provides social currency, helps me bond with my friends, what’s trending, low investment, easy to find, and digestible, among others.

Figure 3. Emerging Markers of Quality in YouTube’s Why We Watch 2.0.

Note: Survey of 12,000 viewers. Source: YouTube Why We Watch 2.0, October 2024.

Or, instead of guessing, we can just ask. In October, YouTube published a report called Why We Watch 2.0. It tried to get at this question of why consumers make the content choices they do and how they define quality. As shown in Figure 3, of the 12,000 participants in the study, almost all of them said that quality was determined by both “emotive” and “technical” factors (we can think of technical factors as production values). Those emotive markers include “is authentic and relatable” and “is relevant to my interests and preferences.” Elsewhere in the report, YouTube stated that 55% of viewers agree that their content choices “collectively create a sense of belonging.”

Figure 4. A BCG Survey Shows Gen Z Viewers Value Creators “Who Reflect Me” and Content That’s Easy to Find

Note: Among Gen Z households with 1 + SVOD subscription that use 1+ short-from platform. Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) Global Institute for the Future of Television (GIFT) survey, March 2024.

Figure 5. Deloitte Also Highlights the Importance of Low Friction

Source: Deloitte Media Trends, March 2024.

Other recent studies similarly show new quality attributes cropping up. A BCG survey from March found that 76% of Gen Z viewers think that short form is better than SVOD at hosting content and creators “who reflect me” and 65% think short form is superior in enabling them to “find videos that I like” (Figure 4). Deloitte’s Digital Media Trends, also from March, found that 60% of Gen Z prefer short form because it’s easier to find content (Figure 5).

We can see the same thing happening in gaming. A couple of weeks ago, The New York Times published an article titled “Video Games Can’t Afford to Look This Good,” which argues that AAA developers have overspent on increasingly realistic graphics that consumers don’t value. Although the author doesn’t use this wording, his gist is that the consumer definition of quality has changed in gaming. Here’s one quote:

“It’s very clear that high-fidelity visuals are only moving the needle for a vocal class of gamers in their 40s and 50s,” said Jacob Navok, a former executive at Square Enix who left that studio, known for the Final Fantasy series, in 2016 to start his own media company. “But what does my 7-year-old son play? Minecraft. Roblox. Fortnite.”

Matthew Ball just released a presentation called The State of Video Gaming in 2025. It’s worth poring over, but there are a few charts in particular that lend quantitative support to the same point.

Compare Figures 6 and 7 below. Figure 6 shows that both the share of the population that plays games and playtime are stagnating in the U.S. By contrast, look at the comparison with Roblox, which is low fidelity and comprises almost entirely user generated content. As shown, in contrast to the overall gaming market, Roblox is growing by leaps and bounds (granted, these are global figures, not U.S., but the comparison still holds). And, as also shown in Figure 7, Roblox now has almost as many MAUs as the entire console and PC market combined. These aren’t just 8 and 9 year olds; almost 2/3 of Roblox players are over 13.

Just as is the case with short form video, a clear implication is that Roblox users have a different definition of quality. The traditional markers of quality in AAA gaming were things like high-fidelity graphics, game mechanics, the right balance of challenging and accessible gameplay, technical performance (lack of glitches), length of gameplay, etc. The most popular Roblox games have none of these attributes.

Figure 6. U.S. Players and Playtime are Stagnating

Source: Matthew Ball.

Figure 7. Roblox is Growing Rapidly, With Almost as Many MAUs at All Console and PC Combined

Source: Matthew Ball.

What Can You Do About It?

This brings us to an inevitable question: if you’re working at a traditional media company, what can you do about it? One answer is Christensen’s general solution for disruption: cannibalize yourself by establishing a business unit with the necessary resources and freedom to pursue the disruptor’s business model—which is to say, build a new business around this emerging consumer definition of quality.

If you want to read more about that, books like The Innovator’s Solution by Christensen and Michael Raynor, and Dual Transformation, by Clark Gilbert, Mark Johnson and Scott Anthony, are good places to start. But disrupting yourself is hard to do. The companies that have succeeded are few and far between.

In the absence of that kind of commitment, here’s a start:

Believe Your Customers

My wife likes to say “when someone tells you who they are, believe them.” When consumers tell you that their definition of quality is changing, believe them. As described above, the usual knee jerk reaction of incumbents to evidence of a changing definition of quality is to dismiss or deny it. Don’t do that.

Home in on the New Attributes

Adapting doesn’t mean abandoning the old markers of quality or willy-nilly throwing resources at creator content. It means figuring out which attributes are most important and most accessible.

Without an understanding of why, you might pursue the wrong response. As social video continues to rise, for example, and in particular YouTube, the chant has gotten louder that incumbent media companies need to adopt a “social video strategy.” But what does that mean? Hire creators? Create quick, low-fidelity content? Launch a YouTube competitor (good luck)? Splice up all your shows and movies into 30-second chunks? Build up communities around your content? It’s critical to understand what it is about social video that’s drawing consumers.

The best way to do this is better left to professional researchers. But at a high level, the first step is to identify the new attributes. You can probably get a good list though a combination of conjecture, ethnography (watching what people actually do “in the wild”), and surveys (with the caveat that consumers often can’t articulate why they do what they do).

The next step is to then figure out which of these attributes are the most important. This could entail using tools like conjoint analysis, a market research technique that determines which products or attributes consumers prefer by forcing them to choose between options.

If you have a big enough dataset, another approach is to use machine learning (ML) to extract the relative importance of different attributes. Imagine that you have a large dataset including both consumer behavior (clicks; watch time; engagement, such as likes and shares; and contextual factors, like time of day, device used, etc.) and content attributes (genre, length, production quality, and a wide range of others). You could then use a variety of ML approaches to model the weights of different attributes.

Figure Which Attributes to Pursue

Once you have a sense of which attributes are the most important, odds are that some will be more accessible than others.

Sticking with social video, if the most important attribute is authenticity, it would probably be hard for a TV network to replicate the same relationship that creators have with their fans. But if the most important attributes are low friction and digestibility, traditional TV companies might be able to satisfy those. They could carve up their shows into short clips and publish these both to social video platforms and create their own “shorts” sections in their streaming apps. (This isn’t far-fetched. Reel Short is currently the #1 free app in the iOS app store. It features movies like “Found a Homeless Billionaire for Christmas” cut up into 50-90 roughly one-minute clips.)

It’s Not Me, It’s You

When the internet emerged, it brought new distribution models to media. Napster, Apple and Spotify were a new way to distribute the major labels’ music. Netflix was a new way distribute the studios’ TV shows and movies. Google and Facebook were new ways to distribute articles from The New York Times and Conde Nast. That was disruptive to traditional media because it upended the way their content was distributed—but it was still their content that was in demand, just distributed in a new way.

The internet initially changed the way traditional content was distributed. Today, the demand for that content itself is falling.

This is something different, because as consumers’ definition of quality changes, the demand for traditional content itself is falling. Think of it like a breakup. When the distribution model changed, it was like consumers saying “I still love you, I just need to do things a different way. It’s not you, it’s me.” Today, it’s more like “Actually, yeah, it's definitely you.”

Like many people facing rejection, traditional media companies are going through the classic stages of denial ("They'll come back when they want quality"), anger ("This stuff is crap"), bargaining ("What if we make our shows more 'authentic'?"), and depression ("Why doesn’t quality doesn’t matter anymore?"). But, as always, the only way out is through. They need to acknowledge what’s happening, do their best to understand it and, if they can, adapt.

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Appendix

Bridging Disciplines

Here’s how this quality framework relates to, and differs from, other ideas about utility and decision making.

• In classical economics, a utility function is a mathematical representation of the welfare or satisfaction someone derives from a combination of goods or services. However, utility functions usually entail several unrealistic simplifying assumptions, like consumers make rational choices, they know their preferences and those preferences are fixed over time.

• The main idea underlying behavioral economics is that people aren’t rational and don’t know why they do what they do. As social psychologist Richard Nisbett said "There’s no more central message of psychology than the fact that most of what goes on in our heads we have no access to.” I’ve tried to reflect that here, since in this framework consumers aren’t entirely aware of what they want or why.

• Jobs to be Done theory (JTBD) argues that people “hire” products to do a specific “job,” which is based on the progress they’re trying to make in their lives under certain circumstances. My definition of quality similarly acknowledges that choices are based on context, although it assumes that decisions are far more complex, with many more factors, and consumers often aren’t aware of their reasoning.

• Other branches of decision theory, like Choice Architecture and Decision Field Theory also assume that decisions depend on context.

Anticipating Pushback

Some may argue I am just equating quality with popularity, like saying that a salacious reality TV show with high ratings is higher quality than an award winning documentary with low ratings. I am not.

The idea is that consumers’ choices reflect relative quality within the constraints of a certain price point, set of choices and need state. The more-popular reality show is not necessarily higher quality than the less-popular documentary; it’s higher popularity probably reflects that the associated need state of watching “light entertainment-that-is-voyeuristic-and-makes-me-feel-superior” is more common than the need state of watching “deeply-researched-and-deeply-engaging-factual-entertainment-that makes-me-feel-smarter.” Under this definition, we can only draw relative quality comparisons when the choices are made within the same context.

Some may also bristle at this definition if they think of quality as the inherent “goodness” of a thing. My definition overlooks concepts like craft and art. It also overlooks whether consumers’ choices are good for them or not. (For the need state of “grab something quick to eat in the morning,” revealed preference may show that donuts are higher quality than oatmeal.) Fair enough. The idea is to expressly avoid value judgments and instead create a framework for understanding consumer decisions. If you prefer to think of “quality” as a value judgment that exists independently from what people choose, maybe use the phrase “revealed quality” instead.

1. You could make this more complicated. For instance, if you believe that there is some sort of correlation between the attributes or they exhibit non-linearity (e.g., there is a diminishing value above a certain threshold), you could think of it instead as a multi-variate optimization problem. Alternatively, you might stick with the linear approach but believe that there are certain critical attributes that disqualify a choice below a certain value. For instance, when choosing a car, if it’s perceived safety or fuel efficiency falls below a certain threshold, it might be disqualified as an option altogether. But let’s try to keep it simple.

2. Louis C.K. has a bit about being in an airport and standing in line at the Cinnabon. In his telling, everyone on line is filled with self loathing. “No one is happy on the Cinnabon line. No one is like, ‘I love these, I can't wait!’” (The punchline is that he’s not waiting to take off; he just landed.) The truth underlying the joke is that the reasoning behind a decision can be complex, deep seated and mysterious even to the person making it.