For a while, I had an unacknowledged prejudice against posting on social media. It just felt like it was full of cringe (LinkedIn), full of a bid for validation (Instagram), and that there was an air of professional maturity in keeping your head down.
Then a close friend looked at me and said: “You’re nowhere to be seen. You’re practically invisible.” When I protested and talked about the cheap, easily gained attention economy, they countered.
Do I think that a lot of LinkedIn is cringe? Absolutely. Do I think that a lot of people on Instagram are performing for validation? Yes, frankly.
The cringe, the performance, the validation-seeking: yes, those truths exist. But that conversation forced me to accept a long-rejected piece of logic: two truths can exist at the exact same time.
A platform can be driven by validation-based mechanics, and you can choose to operate as an authentic, ground-level truth within it. You can borrow the distribution of the medium without adopting any of the typical rhetoric.
Attention is not vanity; attention is distribution.
In an attention economy, whoever captures the audience captures the market. If you have real operations, hard lessons, and deep technical depth but don’t build distribution for those inputs, then all that hard-won wisdom lives in private journals while competitors with 10% of your substance occupy the public imagination.
Shedding your moral disgust with social platforms is not about becoming an insipid guru taking lifestyle photos. It’s simply about recognizing how the economic world operates.
Spending decades running complex systems, fixing broken machines, living through cycles of innovation and failure, and not telling anyone because “those platforms are stupid, fake, or cringe” is not a mark of humility; it’s a poor distribution strategy. You are not choosing between being fake or staying unseen; you are choosing between caring about your work or hoarding it from the world.
Cheers to low-key authenticity, thought leadership, and provocative publishing, one article at a time. 🥂
