Why am I coming back to this? I wrote about personas before, but my flight to Spain the other day triggered something.

Picture this: RyanAir [I know...], cheap flight, uncomfortable seats, loud and late.

We took off from Luton 30 minutes behind schedule because a family was late. I wasn’t annoyed about the delay. Not after this story started to unfold.

Back to the scene: Both aircraft doors are open, there is a cold draft, people look at their watches, a young family boards. Two adults in their forties, one kid. Happy. Excited. They move around and finally find their seats. The kid gets the window seat and starts asking questions. He's funny. People around them smile. The crowded flight suddenly feels lighter. The mother preps the little man for a nap; they must have been driving before getting to the airport. Their handbags get pushed under the seats in front of them.

The man, [presumably the father] is gorging on a bag of Skittles. Empties the bag in his mouth like a todler and folds the plastic into a pocket of his brown bag.
Then, he pulls out two phones from his pockets, an iPhone and an Android-something. The engines roar.

Ten minutes later, we’re in the air.
I’ve got my AirPods in, and I’m listening to the latest episode of Prof G Markets. It got hot; I got up to put my jacket away and glance at the family.
The kid is asleep. The mother too. The engines act like a white noise machine.

The man is also asleep. Well, sort of. His left hand holds a phone, his right index finger scrolling mindlessly. Eyes closed. WTF, am I seeing things now?

I stash my jacket, the overhead bin clicks shut, and the sound wakes him. He puts down the phone, only to pick up the other one.

Two minutes later, he’s asleep again. Holding his phone, scrolling.
And that’s when it hits me.

Not every organisation is stuck in the past. Not every designer clings to personas like a child with a security blanket. Some actually do the work—real research, real user understanding.

But this message? Well, part of it is for the ones still burning incense at the altar of this useless, distracting relic we call personas. If that’s you, listen up.

Building a product or service isn’t about crafting some tidy little "user" with a cute name and a list of generic pain points. It’s about solving real problems for real people. Getting to work on time. Paying bills. Filing taxes. Saving energy. Eating healthier. Managing relationships, managing stress.

People aren’t static templates or definitions—they’re messy, distracted, overwhelmed, and navigating a world that moves too fast.

Yet, some teams still pretend a persona is a stand-in for reality. It’s a beautifully wrapped package of delusion. It feels scientific. It looks like research. It gets executives to nod along. But it’s nonsense. Real people don’t fit on a slide deck. 

They fall inlove, they lie and make mistakes. They forget their passwords. They abandon carts. They doom-scroll Twitter instead of filing that report. They don’t behave the way your persona document says they will.

Ah, one more thing: if your team isn’t careful, your product becomes the distraction. The obsession with "building the product" rather than solving the problem leads to bloated, useless features no one asked for. A product is only as good as the context it fits into. If it doesn’t help someone navigate their reality better, congratulations—you didn’t build a solution. You built another thing for them to ignore.

Just because personas are dead doesn’t mean we can’t overcorrect.

We went from creating fake users to engineering addicts. The more we learn about human psychology, the more we find ways to exploit it.

Cambridge Analytica took big data and psychographics and turned elections into behavioral science experiments. Mark Zuckerberg and the inventors of major social media networks have enrolled most of humanity in this insane social media experiment. How? They gave it away for free...

I don’t believe in life after death, heaven or hell, but in this instance, I hope there is a hell and that hell has a special place for people like Alexander Nix.

Social media algorithms have perfected it—feeding users precisely what they need to stay hooked. We’ve stopped designing experiences and started designing dependencies.

People aren’t customers anymore. They’re just users, not in the "valuable user base" sense but in the drug addict sense.

Dopamine hits, micro-rewards, infinite scroll- we’ve created systems that don’t just serve needs; they manufacture them.

More and more companies are mainly focused on retention hacks rather than solving real problems. The goal isn’t to make life easier; it’s to keep people engaged, searching for the next hit of dopamine, awaiting the next notification, the next delivery, the next Black Friday, the next like.

So yeah, personas were a useless lie. But the alternative, is worse.
If we don’t put guardrails around this, we’re not designing products anymore; we’re designing dependency loops. And at some point, someone has to ask: Who’s holding the keys to the human mind? And what the hell are they doing with them?

So what can we do? What do we need? Not better tools. Not better research. We already have those.

What we need are better guardrails. People and systems that protect customers from being turned into addicts. We need to stay connected to customers continuously during the research phases. Because if your product doesn’t solve a real problem meaningfully, congratulations—you didn’t build a solution. You built another trap.

When the plane landed, the young family gathered their things and headed off. In their hurry, they left behind a pair of socks and an Elf on the Shelf. I picked them up and ran after them through the airport.

They got their belongings back.
And the father? He checked his phone before even thanking me.

I guess this is just normal now.