I can no longer stomach performative bullshit. Applauding borrowed insight and emotional theatre now feels like colluding in a cheap and nasty fiction.
Maybe it is age.
But then last night I talked to people even older than me and they were deeper into the bullshit than the teenagers (who seem to take everything at face value but in a completely disinterested fashion).
So it is not necessarily age. It must be something else.
I care about how things actually work, and I have the wherewithal to figure out most things.
Some people are so thick and so disinterested that they would still be confused in 500 or 5,000 years.
The reasons for my distaste are not complicated.
One, my identity is no longer under construction, so signalling belonging no longer serves a purpose.
Two, the cost of self deception has risen. My brain refuses to spend energy nodding along to noise.
Three, my lived experience has accumulated too many contradictions. Tidy success narratives feel insulting, not inspiring.
Four, my time horizons have lengthened. Short term applause matters less than outcomes that survive contact with reality.
Five, sincerity is no longer confused with goodness. Character reveals itself under friction, not performance.
Once you’ve realised all this, the interesting observation is that you have an actual quantitative tool to measure people’s intellectual and emotional intelligence. It’s called social media, and more specifically, LinkedIn.
Intelligence: the ability to distinguish signal from performance. Emotional development in the sense of whether someone still needs public reassurance, status stroking, and moral cosplay to feel coherent.
Their feeds becomes diagnostic. Who repeats templates. Who borrows authority instead of earning it. Who confuses optimism with insight. Who needs to be seen agreeing with the correct things, loudly and often. And who can tolerate ambiguity, silence, or saying nothing at all.
Once you notice this, LinkedIn stops being a professional network and becomes a stress test of who you want to avoid.
offshore westerly 