This originally appeared as a LinkedIn post. But that's not why it will sound familiar.
It started as an ordinary day. An ordinary meeting. Someone was presenting to the team on Zoom. Most of us were multitasking. Then the presenter said something I didn’t catch – but it made me see what I’d been missing. For years.
It wasn’t one thing.
Or another.
It was a third thing. It flipped the whole conversation on its head.
It made me realize that I’d been looking at my role in a conventional way, when there was another way – also conventional, but different – that I could adopt instead.
It was all there: New platitudes. New paradigms. Most of all, new slop. AI slop, human slop, it didn’t matter. What mattered in that moment was that I realized I could take things people have been saying for years, use AI to rearrange them a bit, and share them on LinkedIn as if I were Cortez discovering the Pacific.
It was a game-changer.
But it raised new questions:
o Should I act like I was deeply moved? Recently I wrote, “What an incredible week with the team in Cedar Rapids!” and it felt like a bit much.
o Is it better to be honored or humbled?
o What if people say I’m wrong?
The more I thought about it, I realized that what truly matters is engagement. Fake emotions are fine. You can be honored and humbled. And if people jump into say you’re wrong, the algorithm will love it.
Even if you really are wrong, so what? Look, Cortez didn’t discover the Pacific. Balboa did. But the British poet Keats misattributed the discovery to Cortez in a famous poem, and it kind of stuck.
What matters is just to post something plausible.
To remind people that I exist.
Maybe– if I’m being honest – to remind myself.
In future posts, I'll discuss my personal emotional journey in much more detail.
Let me know what you think in the comments!
