Earn Something To Say
You can't fake having lived
Pop stars pen essays now – 2,000-word meditations on the existential weight of fame. Public figures launch podcasts because yapping is how you capture the voting masses. Founders commission films to canonize their fledgling start-ups as inflection points in human civilization.
It is no longer enough to do something. Everyone feels compelled to say something too. The creator and the commentator have all but collapsed into the same figure. And if you haven’t made anything, you become an internet judge of what everyone else has said, done or made.
Saying something has become the unit of value.
But few have earned something to say. Fewer still limit themselves to what they’ve earned. Performative insight has become the norm, and it runs on schedule.
There was a time when only lived experience counted – when information, argument and perspective could only come from real-world immersion. From places with people and stories that weren’t desperate to be seen. But “experience” has become a blurry concept. If the internet is real life, does living inside it count as experience? Does voyeurism deserve an equal voice?
The clearest case: We’ve replaced time in the field with time on our phones. What we now call experience is the weighted average of our own and the residue of what others broadcast (and theirs is a weighted average too). Inspiration springs from algorithmic reference engines. Novel thoughts are mined from obscure blogs. Doomscrolling has become a primary source.
And now AI surfaces anecdotes and allegories and even perfect quotes that were never said. You can read about experiences you can never have from people who never existed. The ouroboros eats its own tail and calls it research. And yet, we can feel the uncanny valley of thin experience and stretched insight. So why are we still so seduced by the stage?
For one, we’ve lost faith in slow work. The American Dream feels increasingly unattainable or unappealing or both. So we embrace lottery culture. Why strive for 10 years when you can get there by going viral? Patience starts to look like gambling and gambling like a rational game.
The path of least resistance is the remix.
There’s a genre of writing flourishing that never requires the author to leave home: what’s been called “laptop nonfiction” (though any screen will do). You can watch YouTube to write about culture and skim Wikipedia to write about history and read blogs about the human condition … then opine on the human condition. You can reverse-search your way to profundity. The market for insight has been subsumed by public intellectual theater – everyone is a performer now.
Immersion is expensive. Reporting costs money and interviewing takes time and site visits don’t scale. It’s faster to parse and package what’s already legible than labor over the new. And the attention economy rewards formulas (see Substack’s diary entries and Twitter’s memetic threads). Mastering the algorithm pays faster than mastering your craft.
But this “source material” is degrading too. ‘Dead internet theory’ creeps closer to truth every day as ads, bots, and all kinds of slop get noisier. If you’re still living online, you’re working from a hollowing-out representation of reality. Soon immersion will be the only reliable source again.
You don’t have to work in an ahistorical vacuum – everything builds on what came before. But skimming your way to synthesis isn’t a substitute for experience. The epiphany must be earned.
Technical mastery masks existential poverty.
The aesthetics are immaculate. The substance is vibes.
The sexier way to say something profound now is by mastering the form. New creative tools and formats favor the young – the digitally native and technically savvy and performatively fluent. They’re wired from the womb to master the medium of internet influence.
A Harvard undergrad made a YouTube film that went viral enough to catch the eye of Hollywood directors. The cinematography was crisp and the mood atmospheric. And I liked it. But can you live through a full-fledged existential crisis and emerge with a neatly wrapped moral all before graduation? Sure, in theory. But there’s a technique to vibes, and mastering that alone makes you a virtuoso now.
Silicon Valley has its own version of this. The talent is real and the prodigies get crowned early too. Founders are expected to perform product-market fit before they have it. But the more insidious performance is the performance of soul: Launch videos and manifestos declaring deep purpose and world-changing insight. Founders bifurcating their identity into online visionary and offline scrambling to figure out what they’re building and why.
Taste without skill is a gap you can close. Taste and skill without soul is beautifully hollow.
You can’t extract infinite wisdom from finite experience.
Even earned insight has an expiration date. Legitimate voices become their own tribute bands endlessly covering their greatest hits. Manufactured freshness is premature and reheated wisdom is postmature, both cousin sins chasing relevance over sincerity.
Even as the well runs dry, the culture still demands you post. We demand perma-presence in a world struck by collective amnesia, where moments have shorter and shorter lives. The questions are always the same: What have you done lately? What have you said lately?
The imperative: Resist smooth understandings for textured ones, easy frames for richer ones that come with time. Read to challenge and write to think, not just to cite and speak. Let ideas marinate for years. The path to having something to say runs through years of having nothing to say.
You can’t make an entrance if you never leave the room.
Musicians who never leave the studio inevitably just write songs about writing songs. Comics who never leave the stage end up with sets full of jokes about writing jokes. Writers who never leave their desk only have observations about observations. Yes, they’re doing the real thing. But when being the thing becomes your whole identity, the meta becomes all the material.
The meme doesn’t go far enough: Don’t just touch grass, plant it. One odd conversation isn’t enough but a hundred might be. Insight is forged in resistance, and silence can be laziness and cowardice or it can be preparation. It’s the work you do in the dark that earns you the light.
You can’t reverse-engineer having lived.
I’ve wrestled with this too. It’s screentime versus the rest of the world.
It’s my nature to consume critically: I glean motivations from every digital trail and predict industry patterns from apps I use and watch movies I’m not even excited about just to earn my critique of them. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if this is fieldwork or just fluff – it’s probably both. But when you’re in this mode for too long (curator, commentator, analyst), the tethers to reality start to weaken. Your sources slowly devolve into a collection of shower thoughts and URLs. The tacit work starts to fade. You find yourself conviction-poor and running low on truths to tell.
The worst feeling isn’t being ignored but fearing that you deserved to be. Imposter syndrome hits when you are indeed an imposter of lived experience. And lived experience is ultimately what people seek out and remember and want to pay for – the stuff of life that can’t be queried.
So interrogate: Where does your insight come from? Whose experience are you describing? What do you know that you didn’t read somewhere first? What have you alone seen and felt? Are you locked-in or just performing being locked-in? What have you earned the right to say?
I wrote about making something heavy, but the precondition: Heavy outputs depend on heavy inputs. You can’t make something truly heavy without having lived what you’re trying to make.
Earn something to say.
The pressure to say something, anything, isn’t going away.
The standard you must hold yourself to: Earn the right to say it.
The friction of reality must precede creation. So leave the room and get back into the field. Accumulate the firsts and the failures and the raw encounters with the universe that can’t be borrowed. Take your time, stay a little quiet a little longer, and cultivate something undeniable.
Then, and only then, say something.
 | A guest post by
|