Have you noticed that everyone on LinkedIn has had a profound realisation this week? Not last week. This week. The notifications arrive with the reliability of Bangalore traffic—dense, ceaseless, and going nowhere in particular—each one announcing that someone you barely remember from a 2019 offsite has discovered the one thing that separates great leaders from mediocre ones. They have generously decided to share it.

The notifications arrive with the reliability of Bangalore traffic—dense, ceaseless, and going nowhere in particular—each one announcing that someone you barely remember from a 2019 offsite has discovered the one thing that separates great leaders from mediocre ones. They have generously decided to share it.

In a post.

With a line break after every half sentence.

You know, for dramatic effect.

I am on LinkedIn too, I should clarify. I have been on it for longer than I care to admit, and I have written things there myself that, in retrospect, had all the profundity of a fortune cookie that forgot to be funny. So I am not outside the glass house throwing stones. I am very much inside it, lobbing them at myself.

The thing is, there was a time when a professional insight was the accumulated residue of many years of doing something wrong, repeatedly, with full commitment. You stumbled into wisdom the way you stumble into a piece of furniture at two in the morning: suddenly, painfully, in complete darkness. You did not post about it immediately. You walked around with a bruised shin for a while. The pain was the credential.

Now, of course, we have something faster. You type three sentences into an AI, it returns seven “key learnings,” and before your morning filter coffee has cooled, you are a thought leader. The post writes itself. The algorithm rewards the frequency. The comments say “So true!” from people who would not, if pressed at gunpoint, be able to tell you what the post was actually about. Because they did not read it. Because they were busy writing their own.

The remarkable thing is not that people are doing this. The remarkable thing is that everyone is doing it with such solemnity. There is a magnificent seriousness to the LinkedIn epiphany that you will not find anywhere else—not in temples, not in therapy, not even in motivational calendars designed specifically for the purpose.

A man who spent last Tuesday approving a PowerPoint will declare on Wednesday that failure is the best teacher, and thirty people from his organisation will click “Insightful,” because what else are you going to click.

I do not think this is dishonesty, exactly. I think it is something slightly sadder. It is the public performance of thinking, for an audience too busy performing its own thinking to actually read yours.

The AI did not create this problem. The AI merely handed a megaphone to a tendency that was already pacing the room. But now that the megaphone is free, universal, and requires no prior history of having thought about anything in particular, well, here we are. A civilisation of professional sages, each one generating wisdom at scale, none of it landing anywhere.

There is only one consolation. At least the furniture is still there, in the dark, waiting. And the bruised shin, when it comes, will be entirely your own.

Namaste 🙏🏽