HumanWORKS

Tag: self-improvement

  • You aren’t reading enough, and you definitely aren’t thinking enough – so read and think about this

    I’m reading Henry Fairlie this weekend. Bite the Hand That Feeds You – collected essays from one of the sharpest provocateurs the English language produced, and a man whose photograph on the cover alone – cigarette in hand, glasses slightly askew, typewriter lurking in the foreground like an accomplice – communicates something about the relationship between a writer and their craft that no amount of productivity guru content has ever come close to replicating.

    (The typewriter is doing real work in that image. It isn’t decorative. It is the instrument through which the provocations were forged, and there is something quietly honest about having it visible – no pretence that the words simply materialised from some frictionless creative ether. They were hammered out. Key by key. Which is, when you think about it, rather the point of what follows.)

    Those of you who know my influences will know that Christopher Hitchens occupies a significant position in how I approach both writing and argument. Not because Hitch was provocative – though he demonstrably was – but because his provocation was deployed with genuine intellectual scaffolding beneath it, which is a distinction that matters enormously and that most people confuse with volume. You don’t awaken someone from the torpor of collective slumber with a gentle suggestion. You use a bucket of cold water. The trick – and it is a trick, albeit requiring genuine craft – is ensuring the bucket contains substance rather than merely noise.

    Fairlie understood this. Hitch understood this. Whilst in an age where we have outsourced the generation of text to systems that are, by any honest assessment, genuinely impressive at producing words whilst being fundamentally incapable of the thing that makes words matter, understanding this distinction has become rather more urgent than it was when Fairlie was bashing away at his typewriter.

    the agent provocateur’s actual job, or why being uncomfortable is the point

    Fairlie’s polemics were, I suspect, constructed partly for effect – closer in spirit to the work of an edgy comedian than to some earnest manifesto designed to reshape civilisation overnight. There is nothing wrong with that assessment. In fact, there is something deeply undervalued about it, because it misunderstands what the effect actually is.

    Here’s the thing.

    Understanding how to construct an argument – not merely to have an opinion, which is approximately as difficult as breathing and roughly as intellectually demanding – but to deploy that opinion with knowledge, precision, and persuasive architecture that forces the reader to genuinely engage rather than simply scroll past – is one of the foundational skills of anyone who wants to make a real impact on anything beyond their immediate surroundings.

    I learned this in amateur debating societies, where the single most valuable lesson was not how to win an argument but how to understand the opposing position well enough to articulate its strongest case and then use that knowledge to dismantle them.

    Those who cannot do this aren’t debating. They’re performing. The distinction matters because performance can be detected, dismissed, and scrolled past in approximately 0.3 seconds. Genuine argument – the kind that actually lands – requires the reader to do cognitive work. It requires friction. By comparison, spouting rhetoric – that pervasive performance that many think sits as some actual substitute for argument rather than the piss poor presentation of idiocy – is not debating at all.

    Fairlie understood this instinctively. His essays don’t simply assert positions – they construct them with enough rigour and enough provocation that the reader finds themselves genuinely wrestling with the ideas rather than passively absorbing them. The discomfort is not a bug. It is, in the most literal sense, the mechanism by which thinking actually occurs.

    (And yes, I recognise the recursion here – I am arguing, via essay, about why essays matter, whilst simultaneously doing the thing I’m describing. My therapist, Becky, would note this with a raised eyebrow and the observation that “Matt is doing the recursive analysis thing again.” She would be correct. The recursion never stops. Welcome.)

    the cognitive friction complex™ (or a lack thereof)

    We live in a moment of extraordinary and largely unexamined paradox regarding information and capability. We have, quite literally, more collective knowledge accessible through our fingertips than at any previous point in human history. Simultaneously – and this is the part that deserves rather more attention than it currently receives – the tools now available to generate text on our behalf have created an environment where the process of engaging with ideas is increasingly being outsourced to systems that, whilst impressive in throughput, cannot replicate the cognitive friction that actually changes how you think.

    This matters more than most people appreciate. Considerably more.

    The ability to cultivate not merely awareness of information but the capacity to use it effectively – to construct arguments, to identify the weak points in positions that appeal to us, to hold genuinely opposing views in tension without immediately dismissing them as wrong because they’re uncomfortable – is a skill that degrades with disuse. It is, in this sense, rather like physical fitness. Nobody loses the capacity to run by deciding not to run once. The degradation is gradual, imperceptible, and by the time you notice it, you’ve lost ground you didn’t know you were standing on.

    Erudition – whether formally acquired or built through the kind of autodidactic discipline that involves actually sitting with difficult texts until they yield rather than asking an LLM to summarise them – isn’t a luxury. It’s infrastructure. Cognitive infrastructure, specifically, and infrastructure that societies require to function at anything beyond the level of collective reflex.

    Now, here’s where it gets interesting. And by “interesting” I mean “slightly existentially destabilising if you follow the thread far enough, which I obviously intend to do.”

    (Stay with me.)

    what an LLM actually does, and what it doesn’t

    An LLM – a large language model, for those who have somehow avoided the last three years of breathless discourse on the subject – is, at its core, an extraordinarily sophisticated pattern-matching system. It has consumed vast quantities of human-generated text and learned to predict, with remarkable accuracy, what sequence of tokens is most likely to follow any given input.

    This is genuinely impressive. I say this without irony or false modesty on behalf of the technology. The statistical inference involved is staggering, and the outputs are frequently useful, occasionally insightful, and – in the right hands – genuinely productive.

    Here is what an LLM does not do.

    It does not think. Not in the sense that Fairlie thought when constructing his provocations, or that Hitchens thought when dismantling an opponent’s position with surgical precision. It does not experience the cognitive friction of encountering an idea that genuinely challenges its existing framework – because it has no existing framework in the sense that you or I possess one. It has statistical weights. These are categorically different things, in much the same way that a photograph of a fire is categorically different from an actual fire, despite being visually recognisable as one.

    (The photograph will not warm your hands. The LLM will not change your mind. Both will give you the impression of the thing whilst being, in some fundamental sense, the total absence of it.)

    What an LLM produces when asked to write an essay is therefore not an essay in the sense that Fairlie wrote essays, nor the way that Hitch did, or how I do.

    Instead, it is a statistically probable approximation of what an essay looks like – the textual equivalent of a very convincing forgery. Smooth, competent, occasionally even elegant. Entirely devoid of the thing that made the original worth reading in the first place. It’s technologically driven sophistry with the depth of a puddle.

    The thing being: a consciousness grappling with something it found genuinely difficult, and producing language as a byproduct of that grappling.

    which brings us back to the question of what reading actually does

    Here is an uncomfortable observation that I have been turning over for some time, and which Fairlie’s essays have crystallised rather neatly.

    When you read a genuinely provocative essay – one constructed by a mind that was actually wrestling with the ideas it presents – something happens in your own consciousness that is categorically different from what happens when you read competent but friction-free text. Your assumptions get disturbed. Your pattern-matching gets interrupted. You are forced, briefly but genuinely, to consider a perspective you hadn’t previously entertained, and the cognitive effort of doing so leaves a trace.

    This is not metaphor. This is, in the most literal neurological sense, how minds change. Not through passive absorption of information – which is what scrolling, summarising, and LLM-assisted reading largely provides – but through active engagement with ideas that resist easy consumption.

    Sometimes people can consider my non-dualistic thinking to be the rough equivalent of getting splinters in my arse as I sit on the fence. In reality, it’s nothing like that – it’s just having an openness to be able to let in the message of things that are being said, not only because it may make your ego feel vulnerable as new data arises, but specifically because we should seek to challenge what we think with the tools of finding what is right.

    In short, to learn you have to accept the reality that you may be wrong and move on from that rather than entrenching yourself in a position. It’s deeply uncomfortable, stirs up emotion, and is prone to make you wonder what’s going on – arguably the opposite of what our increasingly intellectually soporific state offers as the easy option.

    Sometimes you need a wake up call. Fairlie’s essays resist easy consumption with the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the temple. As essays, they are deliberately constructed to create an impact. The provocation isn’t decoration – it’s the mechanism of delivery. The discomfort is the point of entry telling you to wake the fuck up.

    (Which raises a question that I find genuinely fascinating, and which I’ll pose here before I disappear down the rabbit hole it opens – which, knowing my brain, I absolutely will: if the value of an essay lies not in the information it contains but in the cognitive friction it generates in the reader, then what happens to that value when the reader outsources the reading to a system that experiences no friction whatsoever? The information survives. The transformation does not. And it is the transformation that was ever the point. In short, we end up with well written but pointless AI photocopies of thinking whilst thinking goes the way of the dodo)

    the attention span question, handled honestly for once

    The conventional narrative about attention spans runs something like this: they’re shrinking, long-form content is dying, the future belongs to thirty-second video clips and algorithmically optimised dopamine delivery systems designed by people whose own attention spans are, presumably, slightly longer than the products they’re creating.

    This narrative is partially true and almost entirely beside the point.

    Yes, the average attention span appears to be contracting – though one might reasonably question whether it ever existed in the unified form we nostalgically imagine, or whether we’ve simply become more honest about the distribution. The person genuinely engaged with something they care about will still read five thousand words. They always have. What’s changed isn’t human cognitive capacity but the competition for the first thirty seconds of attention before someone decides whether a piece of writing deserves the effort of genuine engagement.

    (If you like my work, you’ll take the time to appreciate it. Others will bounce at just seeing the word count and that’s OK too – although I’d argue that they need to find topics that they find sufficiently interesting to keep their own attention spans healthy without implying my work is going to be for everybody. By design is explicitly isn’t, and is designed to create discomfort in much the way as my mate Tom’s gut reaction is to mushrooms albeit with less toilet based carnage)

    The real question – and this is the one that actually matters – isn’t whether long-form writing will survive as a format. It’s whether the capacity to engage with it will survive in sufficient numbers to maintain the intellectual commons that civilisations actually require to function.

    This isn’t abstract philosophising. This is a structural question about the cognitive infrastructure of societies.

    Fairlie’s essays represent exactly the kind of material that either sharpens one’s capacity or reveals the absence. There is no middle ground with genuinely provocative writing. You either engage with the argument and find yourself thinking differently afterwards – which is to say, you find yourself changed, however slightly – or you bounce off it immediately because the cognitive infrastructure required to absorb the friction simply isn’t there.

    The uncomfortable bit follows.

    The capacity to absorb that friction – to sit with an argument that challenges you, to resist the impulse to dismiss it because it’s disagreeable, to actually do the work of understanding why an intelligent person might hold a position you find uncomfortable – is itself a skill. A skill that requires practice. A skill that atrophies without it.

    Essays are one of the primary instruments through which that practice occurs.

    the uncomfortable implication, or what fairlie actually teaches you in 2026

    Here’s what reading Fairlie in 2026 actually teaches you, stripped of nostalgia for a different era of political discourse and stripped, equally, of any romanticised notion that things were better when writers bashed away at typewriters whilst smoking in black and white photographs.

    (I will, unashamedly, claim my preference for one of Hitch’s favourite drinks – Johnnie Walker’s Amber Restorative – but acknowledge that as one of my role as a Gen X/millenial whereas many young people will see such a tipple as equivalent to chain smoking Marlboro in the 1970s)

    Getting back to the study of essays, it teaches you that the ability to write well about something – to construct prose that forces genuine intellectual engagement rather than merely confirming what the reader already believes – is vanishingly rare, increasingly undervalued, and arguably more important now than at any previous point in history.

    Not because we lack information. We are drowning in information. It’s literally everywhere and injected into your eyeballs at ever increasing speeds.

    Not because we lack the tools to generate competent text. We have more of those than ever.

    Because we are, as a civilisation, systematically undermining the very cognitive capacity that makes information meaningful – the capacity to be changed by it. This in particular is the Achilles heel of modern LLMs – they are architectural designed to kiss your arse so hard it may leave a mark. Essays, by contrast, tend to leave a mark of intellectual whiplash when they are deployed correctly.

    Instead, we have unprecedented tools for generating text. We have, comparatively speaking, a dwindling investment in developing the human capacity to think through text rather than merely consume it. The essays of someone like Fairlie represent the product of a mind that did the latter extensively and the former with genuine craft – a mind that understood, whether consciously or instinctively, that the value of writing lies not in what it tells you but in what it does to you.

    (And here, if I’m being honest – which I am, because this is a version of an essay I’m putting on my website and not LinkedIn given the whole point of this platform is that I don’t have to pretend otherwise – I should note that writing this essay has done precisely that to me. It has forced me to articulate something I’d been circling for months without quite landing on. The cognitive friction works in both directions. The writer is changed by the act of writing, and the reader is changed by the act of reading, and neither transformation is possible without genuine resistance. Without difficulty. Without the uncomfortable sensation of ideas that don’t slide smoothly into place.)

    If you value that kind of intellectual friction – the productive discomfort of encountering an argument that genuinely challenges your assumptions – Bite the Hand That Feeds You is well worth your weekend. The political context is historical, certainly. The underlying skill on display – how to make someone actually think – is timeless. Although one might argue that the desire to challenge the political status quo is needed now more than ever.

    That skill of writing is worth studying. Worth practising. Worth protecting from the comfortable assumption that competent text generation is the same thing as meaningful writing. It isn’t – and I’ll strongly argue it never will be.

    LLM sophistry is not an essay and it isn’t designed to provoke. The difference between writing content and actually changing opinions through discomfort might be one of the more important distinctions of the next decade.

    The world moves forward. How we choose to respond is in our hands.

    Do me one favour, ideally before we collectively forget how to think.

    Read the fucking book.

  • The Age Ban as Confession: Why Our Response to Social Media Proves We’re Already Lost

    There’s a particular species of policy announcement that functions less as solution and more as an indirect-but-inadvertent confession. The UK’s proposed ban on social media access for under-16s belongs to this category – not because protecting children from psychological exploitation is wrong, but because the measure’s spectacular inadequacy reveals something far darker about our collective situation.


    We’re not implementing insufficient protection because we haven’t grasped the scale of harm. We’re implementing insufficient protection because we’ve lost the capacity for an adequate response. The regulatory theatre itself proves the dependency it claims to address.


    It’s rather like watching someone with late-stage addiction announce they’re cutting back to weekends only whilst their hands shake reaching for the bottle to celebrate this triumph of self-control.

    The Regulatory Confession


    Every policy reveals assumptions about what’s possible, what’s necessary, and what’s absolutely off the table. The age ban confesses several things simultaneously, though only one gets stated explicitly.


    What we admit openly:


    Children lack psychological defences to resist platform manipulation. Their impulse control isn’t fully developed. They’re vulnerable to exploitation designed by teams of behavioural psychologists specifically trained to defeat human resistance. Therefore: restrict access for the vulnerable population.


    Reasonable. Protective. Entirely inadequate.


    What we admit implicitly:


    The platforms themselves are too valuable/profitable/embedded to consider shuttering. Adult populations either possess adequate defences (demonstrably false) or their vulnerability doesn’t warrant protection (closer to actual position). The business model of attention extraction can continue operating at scale provided we check IDs at the entrance.


    What we confess accidentally:


    We lack collective capacity to choose systemic solutions even when the harm is obvious, the mechanisms are understood, and the inadequacy of half-measures is predictable. Not because we’re stupid. Because we’re dependent.


    The age ban isn’t evidence of protective governance beginning to address social media harm. It’s evidence of civilisational addiction constraining regulatory response to measures that won’t threaten the supply of cocaine water we’ve all been drinking for twenty years.


    (I’m going to lean heavily on the cocaine water metaphor throughout this piece because it captures something viscerally true that sanitised language obscures: we’re dealing with engineered dependency operating at population scale, and our inability to name it honestly contributes to our inability to address it systemically.)

    The Adequate Response We Can’t Choose


    Let’s establish what an adequate response would look like, not as fantasy but as a logical conclusion from accepted premises.


    If we accept that:


    ∙ Social media platforms are built on business models requiring psychological harm to generate sustained engagement
    ∙ The harm isn’t incidental but foundational (attention extraction demands defeating user resistance)
    ∙ Children lack defences against industrial-scale manipulation
    ∙ Adults exhibit identical vulnerability despite physical maturity
    ∙ Twenty years of operation has produced catastrophic individual and systemic consequences
    ∙ The platforms are specifically engineered to prevent voluntary cessation


    Then the adequate response is obvious: shutter the platforms entirely.


    Not as punishment. Not as Luddite rejection of technology. Rather as recognition that we’ve conducted a civilisational-scale experiment in psychological exploitation that has produced precisely the catastrophic results the original warnings predicted, and continuing the experiment serves no legitimate purpose beyond shareholder value.


    We don’t allow casinos to operate in primary schools even with age verification. We don’t permit tobacco companies to design cigarettes specifically optimised for youth addiction then rely on ID checks at point of sale. We recognise that some business models are incompatible with human wellbeing regardless of age restrictions.


    Social media platforms operating on attention extraction represent that category. The business model requires harm. Age verification doesn’t change the fundamental equation.


    So why can’t we choose the adequate response?


    Because we’re fucking addicted.


    Not metaphorically. Not as some sort of rhetorical flourish. Instead, this is an accurate description of our collective neurological situation after twenty years of systematic dependency creation.

    The Addiction That Constrains Response


    Here’s where the analysis gets uncomfortable, because it requires examining not just the platforms but our own relationship to them – and more specifically, our inability to imagine existence without them.


    Try this thought experiment: Imagine the government announced tomorrow that all social media platforms would cease UK operations in six months. Given the debacle of what’s going on within the US, this could happen if felt they were no longer a trusted ally.

    Imagine it. A complete shutdown. No Facebook, no Instagram, no TikTok, no Twitter/X, no LinkedIn. Gone.


    Notice your immediate reaction.


    Not your considered philosophical position after some careful analysis. Your immediate reaction. The one that arose before any sort of intellectual justification.


    For most people – including those who intellectually recognise the platforms’ harm – that immediate reaction includes some variation of panic, loss, resistance. How would I stay in touch with people? How would I know what’s happening? How would I maintain professional connections? How would I fill the time on the train? What would I do when I’m bored?


    That’s the language of dependency talking.


    Not “I find these platforms useful and would prefer to keep them.” That’s preference. This is “I can’t imagine functioning without them” despite the fact that you – yes, you reading this – somehow managed to function perfectly well for most of your life before they existed.


    Many of the platforms aren’t even twenty years old. If you’re over 40, you spent more of your life without them than with them. Despite this, the immediate reaction to their removal is a feeling of existential threat rather than one of mild inconvenience.


    That neurological response – the panic at imagined loss – constrains what regulatory responses feel possible. We can’t choose to shutter the platforms because we’ve lost the capacity to conceive of existence without them. Not at a policy level but at somatic level.


    The age ban represents the maximum intervention our collective dependency permits. Anything more aggressive triggers the same resistance as suggesting to the profound alcoholic that perhaps complete cessation might be healthier than switching to 4% ABV beer on weekdays.

    The Regulatory Capture By Dependency


    Traditional regulatory capture involves industry influence over regulators through lobbying, revolving doors between industry and government, the funding of sympathetic research, and other mechanisms of institutional corruption.


    All of that is happening with social media platforms. Obviously. The usual suspects doing the usual dance.
    However, there’s a second, more insidious form of capture operating here: the regulators themselves are dependent.


    The MPs drafting age restriction legislation are scrolling Twitter during parliamentary debates. The civil servants implementing policy are checking Instagram between meetings. The ministers announcing protective measures are maintaining LinkedIn profiles for professional positioning.


    They’re not corrupt in any traditional sense – such as those who are taking bribes to protect industry interests. They’re dependent in the neurological sense – their own relationship to the platforms constrains what interventions feel possible.
    You can’t design adequate response to addiction when you’re currently using. The alcoholic makes excellent arguments for why complete cessation is unnecessary, extreme, or otherwise disproportionate to the actual problem. They’re not lying – they genuinely believe the rationalisations their dependency generates.


    Social media generates the same mechanism operating at a policy level.


    The regulatory response to social media platforms is constrained not primarily by lobbying (though that’s happening) but by the regulators’ own inability to conceive of systemic solutions that would threaten their own access to the cocaine water. So instead, we’ll just ban the kids.


    This isn’t intended as conspiracy. It’s the predictable outcome of twenty years of systematic dependency creation encountering attempt at self-regulation. The addict announces they’re cutting back. The specifics of how they’re cutting back reveal they have no intention of actually stopping.


    You can check IDs at the entrance to the casino, but the house keeps operating.

    The Civilisational Bind


    Individual addiction is a story of tragedy. Civilisational addiction has existential consequences.


    When an individual becomes dependent on substances or behaviours, intervention is theoretically possible – family, friends, medical professionals, legal system, employers can potentially combine to create conditions forcing confrontation with dependency.


    When entire civilisations become dependent, who exactly is positioned to intervene?


    The mechanisms that might force confrontation with collective dependency are themselves composed of dependent individuals. Governments full of scrolling MPs. Regulatory bodies staffed by Instagram-checking civil servants. Media organisations whose business models now depend on social platform distribution. Educational institutions using the platforms for “engagement.” Healthcare systems offering mental health support via Facebook groups.

    We live in an addicted world – one where, with no hint of fucking irony, there are people suggesting a LLM is an effective therapist, and an algorithm as a suitable replacement to friendship.


    The entire institutional apparatus that might address the problem is thoroughly infiltrated – not by malicious actors but by the dependency itself.


    It’s rather like discovering the immune system has been compromised by the very pathogen it’s supposed to fight. Who mounts the immune response when the immune response is infected?


    This creates what I’ll call the Civilisational Addiction Bind:


    ∙ The harm is obvious and systemic
    ∙ Adequate response requires systemic intervention
    ∙ Systemic intervention requires collective capacity for voluntary cessation
    ∙ Voluntary cessation becomes impossible after sufficient dependency creation
    ∙ Therefore: inadequate responses that preserve access whilst performing concern


    The age ban is Exhibit A. We’ll implement symbolic protection for children whilst carefully preserving the infrastructure that created the problem, because adequate response – shuttering the platforms – triggers existential panic in the dependent population proposing the regulation. The kids are safe whilst the adults play with matches and wonder why everyone keeps getting more and more burned.

    What Recovery Would Require


    Let’s be unflinchingly honest about what an adequate response – civilisational recovery from social platform dependency – would actually require.


    It wouldn’t just policy change. Nor merely regulatory reform. Instead, it would need to be something approaching collective withdrawal from engineered dependency operating at neurological level across entire populations.


    At the individual level:


    ∙ Sustained periods without access to algorithmic feeds
    ∙ Relearning capacity for boredom, sustained attention, genuine human connection
    ∙ Confronting whatever emotional/social needs the platforms were medicating
    ∙ Rebuilding psychological architecture systematically eroded over twenty years
    ∙ Accepting that some neural pathway damage may be permanent


    At an institutional level:


    ∙ Restructuring every system now dependent on platform infrastructure
    ∙ Finding alternative mechanisms for communication, coordination, information distribution
    ∙ Accepting significant short-term disruption to operations built around platform integration
    ∙ Developing new approaches to problems we’ve forgotten how to solve without algorithmic mediation


    At civilisational level:


    ∙ Collective tolerance for extended discomfort during withdrawal period
    ∙ Sustained political will despite inevitable backlash from dependent populations
    ∙ Acceptance that recovery timelines are measured in years or decades, not quarters
    ∙ Recognition that some capabilities lost may not return in currently living generations


    Look at that list. Really examine it.


    Now consider: Do we have collective capacity for voluntary embrace of that process?


    Or are we like the late-stage alcoholic who recognises the bottle is killing them but can’t imagine Friday evening without it, Monday morning after it, the family gathering surviving exposure to it, the work stress managed absent its chemical assistance?


    The adequate response requires collective capacity we’ve systematically destroyed through the very process we’d need that capacity to address.


    We can’t choose to shut down the platforms because we’ve lost the neurological and institutional capacity to function without them. The dependency has become load-bearing infrastructure. Removing it triggers collapse fears – justified or not – that make removal psychologically impossible.


    So we’ll implement age bans. Start to check IDs. Announce we’re protecting the vulnerable whilst carefully preserving access for everyone else. Declare victory over harms we’re actively perpetuating.

    Success! Alas, no – it’s more of the same with a thin veneer of consideration for younger people whilst the rest of the adult population says it’s fine for us.

    The Tobacco Parallel That Terrifies


    You know and I know that we’ve been here before. Different substance, but remarkably similar patterns.


    The tobacco industry created:


    ∙ Obvious harm visible for decades
    ∙ Industry suppression of evidence
    ∙ Regulatory capture preventing adequate response
    ∙ Incremental half-measures arriving far too late
    ∙ Warning labels, advertising restrictions, designated areas
    ∙ Continued operation of systems known to be catastrophically harmful


    By comparison, social media platforms:


    ∙ Obvious harm visible for decades
    ∙ Industry suppression/dismissal of evidence
    ∙ Regulatory capture (now including dependency capture)
    ∙ Incremental half-measures arriving far too late
    ∙ Age restrictions, content warnings, “digital wellbeing” theatre
    ∙ Continued operation of systems known to be catastrophically harmful


    The parallel is exact. We’re following the same timeline, implementing the same inadequate measures, protecting the same profits, accepting the same casualties.


    With one crucial difference that makes the social media version potentially more catastrophic:


    Tobacco primarily killed individuals. They were horrible, preventable, unacceptable deaths – but ultimately individual tragedies aggregated. Society continued functioning. Institutions remained intact. Collective capacity for response persisted.


    Social media platforms erode collective psychological capacity itself. Not just harming individuals but degrading the civilisational infrastructure – sustained attention, impulse control, genuine connection, shared reality, democratic discourse, institutional trust – necessary for collective response to collective crisis.


    We’re losing the neurological and social capacity to address problems at the same time we’re accumulating problems requiring that capacity to address.


    Tobacco took fifty years from obvious harm to meaningful regulation. We eventually got there because collective capacity for response survived the interim casualties.
    Social media is eroding that collective capacity now and rifting the world into myriad micro-societies. Each year of continued operation makes adequate response less likely by degrading the psychological and institutional architecture necessary to choose it.


    We might not have fifty years to arrive at an adequate response. We might not even have twenty. We might already be past the point where collective capacity for voluntary cessation exists.


    The age ban, implemented two decades into obvious harm, suggests we’re already well down that trajectory.

    The Answer We Can’t Speak


    There’s a question we’re collectively avoiding, because asking it honestly would require confronting answers we lack capacity to implement.


    Not “should we ban children from social media?”


    Instead: “Should these platforms exist at all?”


    The honest answer – based on twenty years of evidence, understanding of business models requiring harm, recognition of systematic psychological exploitation, assessment of individual and civilisational consequences – is clearly no.


    They shouldn’t exist. Not in their current form. Not operating on attention extraction. Not optimised for engagement over wellbeing. Not designed to defeat human psychological defences. Not structured to prevent voluntary cessation.


    The business model is incompatible with human flourishing. Full stop.


    But we can’t choose that answer. Not because we don’t understand the harm. Because we’re dependent on the harm-creation mechanism.


    The platforms have successfully created the neurological and institutional conditions that prevent their own removal. That’s not an accident – it’s the explicit goal of engagement optimisation. Make yourself indispensable by making users dependent. Success measured by inability to imagine existence without you.


    They’ve succeeded spectacularly.


    So we implement age bans. Announce protective measures. Carefully avoid the actual question because we know – at somatic level, before intellectual justification – that we lack capacity to choose the adequate answer.


    The regulatory response itself confesses the dependency. We can only implement measures that preserve the infrastructure we’re dependent on. Anything more aggressive triggers withdrawal panic that makes it psychologically impossible.

    The Generations That Won’t Recover


    Here’s perhaps the darkest implication: even if we implemented adequate response tomorrow – complete platform shutdown, and civilisational withdrawal from engineered dependency – significant portions of currently living populations might never recover full psychological capacity.


    The neural pathways carved by twenty years of algorithmic manipulation don’t just disappear after a week off. The psychological architecture that never developed in those raised entirely within platform environments becomes hard to subvert. The institutional knowledge of how to function without digital mediation that we’ve systematically lost in service of some vague promise of social engagement.


    Some of that damage may be permanent.


    Not because humans are fundamentally broken but because neuroplasticity has limits, developmental windows eventually close, and twenty years of systematic erosion doesn’t reverse through six months of abstinence.


    The children we’re now proposing to protect with age bans were born into world where platform dependency was already civilisational norm. They never experienced pre-smartphone existence. Their entire psychological development occurred within environment optimised for attention extraction.


    Even if we stopped creating new casualties tomorrow, we’re looking at multiple generations carrying the neurological consequences of civilisational-scale experiment in psychological exploitation.


    The adequate response – shuttering platforms – would prevent additional harm but wouldn’t reverse existing damage. We’d be stopping the poisoning whilst acknowledging that some effects are permanent.


    That’s the hardest truth to accept. Particularly when accepting it would require implementing response we’ve already established we lack capacity to choose.


    So we don’t accept it. We implement age bans. Pretend that protecting future children compensates for abandoning current casualties. Announce measures that won’t meaningfully address the problem whilst carefully preserving our own access to the mechanisms creating it.
    The civilisational equivalent of the parent announcing they’re quitting drinking whilst pouring their morning whisky, rationalising that at least they’re setting a good example for the kids by not letting them drink too.

    The Confession In The Silence


    What’s most revealing isn’t what the age ban does but what it deliberately avoids.


    No discussion of shuttering platforms entirely.


    No consideration of business model regulation that would eliminate attention extraction economics.


    No proposals for systemic intervention that might actually address root causes.


    Just age verification. ID checks. Symbolic protection for one vulnerable population whilst leaving the exploitation infrastructure intact for everyone else.


    That silence – the complete absence of adequate response from policy discussion – confesses our dependency more honestly than any admission we’d make explicitly.
    We can’t discuss shuttering platforms because the suggestion triggers immediate panic. Not careful policy analysis of costs and benefits. Immediate, somatic, pre-rational resistance.


    That’s truly the words of dependency talking.


    The profound alcoholic doesn’t carefully analyse whether complete cessation might be an optimal long-term strategy. They immediately reject the suggestion as extreme, unnecessary, disproportionate. The dependency generates rationalisations that protect access to the substance.


    This is the same mechanism operating at civilisational level.


    Policy discussion carefully constrained to measures that won’t threaten platform operations. Not through conscious conspiracy but through unconscious dependency. The bounds of “reasonable policy debate” are set by collective inability to imagine existence without the things destroying us.


    The age ban represents the maximum intervention our dependency permits. Everything more aggressive is automatically categorised as unrealistic, extreme, impossible to implement – not based on careful analysis but based on somatic resistance to imagined loss.
    We’ve become the thing we’d need to not be in order to address the problem adequately.

    Whether It’s Already Too Late


    So here’s the question that matters: Is civilisational recovery from platform dependency still possible?
    Or have we passed some neurological and institutional point of no return where collective capacity for adequate response no longer exists?


    I genuinely don’t know.


    The optimistic case: Humans are remarkably resilient. Neuroplasticity continues throughout life. Social systems can reorganise rapidly when circumstances demand. We’ve recovered from collective dependencies before – smoking rates have declined significantly following adequate regulation. Civilisational recovery is difficult but possible.


    The pessimistic case: The tobacco parallel breaks down because tobacco didn’t erode collective capacity for response. Social media platforms have created dependency whilst simultaneously degrading the psychological and institutional infrastructure necessary to address dependency. Each year of continued operation makes adequate response less likely. We may have already passed the point where voluntary cessation is collectively possible.


    The honest case: We won’t know until we try. Of course, we won’t try until we’re forced to by consequences so catastrophic they override the dependency-generated resistance to adequate response.


    Which means we’re likely headed for version of civilisational withdrawal that’s involuntary rather than chosen. Not policy-driven shutdown but collapse-driven cessation when the platforms’ continued operation becomes materially impossible to sustain.


    That’s a considerably less pleasant scenario than a voluntary, managed transition to platform-free existence. However, it may be the only pathway available when the population has lost capacity for voluntary cessation.


    The age ban suggests we’re not even close to voluntary response. We’re still in the “4% beer on weekdays” phase of addressing civilisational alcoholism. The catastrophic consequences that might force involuntary withdrawal haven’t yet arrived – or haven’t yet been recognised as such by populations whose capacity for recognising catastrophe has been systematically eroded.

    The Regulatory Theatre Continues


    Meanwhile, the age ban will be implemented. Headlines will be written. Politicians will claim credit for protecting children. Industry will comply with minimal measures whilst continuing operations unchanged. Everyone will declare victory.


    Children aged 15 years and 364 days will be protected from psychological exploitation through rigorous ID verification.


    Adults aged 16 years and 1 day will continue unrestricted access to identical exploitation infrastructure, their lack of psychological defences carefully ignored because acknowledging adult vulnerability would require admitting the platforms themselves are the problem.


    And what of us? We’ll all continue scrolling, checking, engaging, medicating whatever needs the platforms serve, convincing ourselves that protecting children whilst preserving adult access represents meaningful progress rather than confession of our own dependency.


    The cocaine water keeps flowing.


    The isolation cages remain operational.


    The rats – young and old, in school uniforms and grey suits – continue drinking.


    And the fact that we can only implement symbolic protection whilst carefully preserving the exploitation infrastructure proves exactly what we’re unable to admit: we’re not protecting anyone.


    We’re protecting our access to the thing destroying us.


    The age ban is confession masquerading as solution.


    And somewhere, future historians are watching this regulatory theatre, wondering why we thought checking IDs whilst operating civilisational-scale psychological exploitation constituted meaningful reform rather than admission that we’d already lost collective capacity for adequate response.


    The answer is simple: Because we’re addicted.


    Not metaphorically.


    As neurological reality constraining what regulatory responses feel possible.


    The inadequacy of our protection reveals the depth of our dependency.


    As well as the fact that we can’t choose better measures proves we’re exactly as lost as the measures themselves confess.

  • The Power Paradox: Why Those Most Eager to Lead Should Probably Be Locked in the Office Supplies Cupboard

    Let’s discuss a serious issue that has plagued human societies since approximately fifteen minutes after we climbed down from the trees and someone declared themselves “Chief Banana Distributor” – namely, that the people most desperate to be in charge are precisely the ones who should be kept as far away from power as humanly possible, preferably in a soundproof room lined with pictures of kittens and motivational posters about ‘synergy’ so they can at least feel at home.

    Such a reflection, whilst possibly exaggerated for effect, isn’t merely a cynical observation on my part – one only need look around at the liberal sprinkling of proverbial self styled “hard men” in our contemporary political environment.

    It’s a structural problem that manifests with the reliability of a British train cancellation announcement – predictable, depressing, and somehow still surprising when it actually happens. (Depressing might not be the case for all people as my right hand man at work actually likes cancellations – on the proviso that he gets a decent refund. Bless you Marrows).

    Consider the psychological profile of your average power-seeker. The person who looks at a leadership position and thinks, “Yes, what the world desperately needs is ME telling everyone else what to do.”.

    This individual – and I’m sure you’ve met a few like I have – typically possesses the exact cocktail of traits you’d want to avoid in someone making consequential decisions: unshakeable self-belief detached from actual competence, a conviction that complex problems have simple solutions they alone can see, and an ego so robust it could survive a direct nuclear strike.

    Meanwhile, the person who might actually make a decent leader – thoughtful, self-aware, cognisant of their limitations, capable of balancing competing perspectives – is often found desperately trying to avoid being nominated for the role whilst muttering something about “just wanting to get on with some actual work.”

    What we’ve got here is a classical selection problem that would make Darwin reach for a stiff drink. Don’t worry me old mucker, Charlie – we’ve got some ideas!

    The Douglas Adams Rule of Leadership

    The late, great Douglas Adams perfectly captured the paradox of leadership in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” when he wrote:

    “The major problem – one of the major problems, for there are several – one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”

    This isn’t just witty science fiction (I mean it is that also), but rather it’s practically a mathematical theorem that plays out with depressing regularity across organisations from corporate boardrooms to parish councils to national governments. No locale is safe – Vogon inhibited or no.

    Sadly, the desire for power often correlates inversely with the wisdom to wield it responsibly. Those most attracted to leadership positions tend to be those most enamoured with the trappings and status rather than the actual responsibility of stewarding an organisation or community through difficulty and uncertainty.

    The Confidence/Competence Inversion

    I’ve spent enough time in corporate environments to witness what I’ll call the Confidence/Competence Inversion Principle: the relationship between someone’s certainty about their capabilities and their actual abilities often bears an unfortunate negative correlation.

    You know ThatGuy™. I talked about them briefly a few weeks ago in one of my recent articles.

    They’re the one who speaks first, loudest, and with unwavering certainty about topics they discovered approximately 37 minutes before the meeting. (I can play catch up on learning with AI, you know!)

    The one who has never encountered a moment of self-doubt that couldn’t be immediately crushed under the weight of their own magnificence (behold the glory that is constrained within this mid-range Next two-for-one suit!).

    The one whose confidence in their prescriptions is matched only by their complete ignorance of the subsequent clean-up operations required after their brilliant ideas implode. (I always find it remarkable the amount of people who think they are great drivers but constantly have near misses with accidents – funny that).

    These individuals don’t merely suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect; they’ve turned it into a leadership philosophy, that would have a whole saleable framework of what was involved in being as good as them – if it wasn’t for the ego delusion and the fucking inability for them to do any actual work of value.

    These people have mistaken certainty for competence, volume for insight, and stubbornness for principle.

    Meanwhile, somewhere in your organisation sits someone with actual expertise – thoughtful, nuanced, aware of complexity – who prefaces every contribution with “This might be wrong, but…” or “I’m not entirely sure about this…”

    Guess which one gets promoted?

    Precisely.

    The Reluctant Leader Hypothesis

    There’s a persistent myth in modern management that leadership requires unbridled enthusiasm for the role. That the person who wants it most deserves it most. This is roughly equivalent to suggesting that the person most eager to perform brain surgery on you – despite having no medical training but owning a really sharp kitchen knife and having watched several YouTube tutorials – should be allowed to crack on. (Several videos – not one. How much more evidence do you need!?)

    Perhaps we should consider what I’ll call the Reluctant Leader Hypothesis: those best suited to positions of responsibility are often those most aware of its burdens and limitations.

    History offers some support for this idea.

    Cincinnatus, the Roman dictator who relinquished power voluntarily to return to his farm.

    George Washington refusing a third term and establishing the peaceful transition of power.

    Even the mythological King Arthur, a man pulled from obscurity by a sword that apparently had better leadership selection mechanisms than most modern organisations. (There’s a real thought – maybe we should seek out mythical swords to determine who should be king, except I’ve just checked the stock levels at the Mystic Warehouse, and they’re all out).

    What unites these examples isn’t merely their reluctance, but their sense of service rather than entitlement. Leadership as duty rather than as a prize. Authority as responsibility rather than playground dynamics of who has the sharpest title. You know – God forbid – actual leadership.

    The Corporate Selection Problem

    In theory, modern organisations should have sophisticated methods for identifying and developing genuine leadership talent. In practice, most promotion systems operate with all the nuance and discernment of a hungry toddler at a birthday party buffet, grabbing the brightest, loudest things while ignoring the vegetables of quiet competence sitting forlornly on the side.

    The standard corporate selection process rewards several traits that have at best a tenuous relationship – and arguably an inverse one – with actual leadership capability:

    – Unwavering self-promotion – Because nothing says “I’m focused on organisational success” like an obsessive documentation (and associated proclamations) of personal achievements

    – Strategic visibility – Ensuring one is seen doing things rather than simply doing them well (because why do the work when you can just take the credit?)

    – Confident proclamations – Making assertions with certainty regardless of their relationship to reality

    – Relationship cultivation with existing power structures – Proving one’s fitness to lead by demonstrating a profound capacity for strategic flattery and a fondness for the taste of human excrement of staff who, obviously coincidentally, sit further up the hierarchy

    None of these correlate strongly with the ability to navigate complexity, build consensus, acknowledge uncertainty, or make difficult decisions under pressure – you know, the actual job of leadership.

    The Quiet Competence Conundrum

    Meanwhile, genuine capability often manifests in ways that are systematically overlooked or undervalued:

    – Thoughtful consideration – Interpreted as indecisiveness rather than prudence

    – Nuanced perspectives – Dismissed as “complexity” in a world enamoured with false certainty

    – Acknowledgment of limitations – Seen as weakness rather than self-awareness

    – Focus on work rather than self-promotion – Resulting in the organisational invisibility of the actually competent

    The result is a persistent filtering mechanism that elevates the confidently inadequate whilst overlooking the quietly capable. It’s not merely an unfortunate coincidence but a structural feature of systems that mistake confidence for competence, certainty for clarity, and self-promotion for achievement.

    Beyond the Binary: The Confident-Competent Unicorn

    Despite my ongoing affinity for hyperbole, surrealism, and aligned topics, let’s acknowledge the legitimate counterargument: confidence and competence aren’t mutually exclusive.

    Occasionally – about as frequently as a total solar eclipse visible from your precise geo-coordinates where you read this article – these qualities align in a single individual.

    These rare creatures – the confident-competent – do exist.

    They combine genuine capability with the self-assurance to deploy it effectively.

    They’re the unicorns of the organisational world, and finding one feels about as likely as discovering your cat has been quietly paying half your mortgage.

    The problem isn’t that these individuals don’t exist; it’s that our selection mechanisms are catastrophically bad at distinguishing them from their more common doppelgängers: the confident-incompetent. From a distance, and particularly to existing leadership equally afflicted with the confidence/competence inversion, they appear identical – how are people going to deduce the difference between bullshit and brilliance if at least part of their own rise to the top involved a suitable amount of bluff and bluster?

    The Selection Renovation Project

    If we accept that our current approaches to identifying leadership talent are fundamentally broken, how might we improve them? How do we find those capable but not necessarily clamoring for power?

    Here are some horribly unfashionable suggestions that would probably get me removed from any corporate HR function within approximately 17 minutes:

    1. Value proven problem-solving over persuasive self-presentation

    Track record of quietly solving complex problems without creating new ones might be a better indicator of leadership potential than the ability to create a compelling PowerPoint about one’s own magnificence. Projects that never go red are probably better places to find leaders compared to the ”heroes” who always seems be in the thick of the latest corporate bomb site.

    2. Seek evidence of epistemic humility

    The capacity to say “I don’t know” or “I was wrong” indicates an intellectual flexibility essential for navigating uncertainty. Someone who can’t recall the last time they were mistaken isn’t displaying confidence; they’re displaying delusion.

    3. Observe behaviour under genuine pressure

    Not the manufactured pressure of interviews or presentations, but the authentic stress of unexpected challenges. Character reveals itself not in rehearsed moments but in unscripted responses to difficulty. As the old saying goes – “adversity introduces a man unto himself”.

    4. Listen to those being led

    The people working directly with potential leaders often have the clearest perspective on their actual capabilities. 360-degree feedback isn’t perfect, but it’s frequently more accurate than upward-only assessment, because often the nature of senior leadership is that they don’t have the understanding of the detail, because the detail has probably changed in the last 20 years since they were doing the actual work on the ground.

    5. Create selection mechanisms that don’t reward self-promotion

    Design processes that identify capability without requiring candidates to engage in competitive displays of ego and certainty. (The amount of people I see overlooked simply because they aren’t extroverted enough still baffles me to this day).

    6. Value the questioners, not just the answerers

    Those who ask thoughtful questions often have a deeper understanding of complexity than those offering immediate, confident solutions.

    The Fundamental Recalibration

    Perhaps most fundamentally, we need to recalibrate our collective understanding of what leadership actually is. It’s not about being the loudest, the most certain, or the most eager.

    It’s most certainly not about having immediate answers to every question or projecting an image of infallibility.

    Leadership in a complex world requires the capacity to:

    – Navigate uncertainty without resorting to false certainty

    – Integrate diverse perspectives without losing decisiveness

    – Acknowledge limitations without abdicating responsibility

    – Maintain direction without ignoring changing conditions

    – Build consensus without avoiding necessary conflict

    None of these capabilities correlate strongly with the traits we typically filter for in our leadership selection processes. None emerge reliably from processes designed to identify the most confident rather than the most capable.

    The Reluctant-But-Capable Draft

    Maybe we need leadership term limits with mandatory periods of actual work in between. “Congratulations on your three-year stint as Director of Strategic Initiatives! Please enjoy your new two-year residency in Customer Support where you’ll experience the joyful consequences of all those ‘streamlining processes’ you implemented. Your corner office has been converted into a supply cupboard, but we’ve left you a lovely desk lamp.”. (That sort of thing tends to sharpen the mind in a way that no abstracted thinking can really illustrate when there’s a chance that making one’s subordinates lives hell might come back to burn one’s own backside in future)

    I’d like to propose the Turvey-Serve-y leadership selection process. (I’ll admit the naming needs work).

    Imagine an organisational world where leadership positions came with an obligation rather than a corner office, premium brand electric vehicle, and stock options.

    Where selection focused on demonstrated capability rather than performed confidence.

    Where the question wasn’t “Do you want to lead?” but rather “Given your demonstrated capabilities, would you be willing to serve?”

    Servant leadership isn’t a particularly new idea, and this approach would likely encounter immediate resistance from those most invested in the current system – particularly those whose rise has been fuelled more by confidence than competence. It would require restructuring incentives, reconceptualising leadership development, and fundamentally challenging our collective assumptions about what leadership looks like – far from an easy or overnight job.

    It would mean real change to ensure the new breed of servant leaders are empowered with the tools to generate real success, rather than loaded up with seventeen tons of load like the Little Donkey until said donkey has collapsed and needs to be put to sleep.

    It would be difficult, messy, and uncertain – much like actual leadership itself.

    The Uncomfortable Conclusion

    The power paradox has no simple resolution. The very nature of power attracts those who desire it for its own sake rather than for what it enables them to accomplish for others. Our selection mechanisms systematically mistake confidence for competence, certainty for clarity, and self-promotion for achievement.

    Yet perhaps acknowledging this paradox is the first step towards mitigating its worst effects. Perhaps by recognising the inverse relationship between power-seeking and suitability for leadership, we can begin to design systems that select for the qualities we actually need rather than those that shout loudest for attention. These plans will take time, but that’s surely an area where we should invest our thinking if we want a better world over time.

    In the meantime, perhaps the most practical heuristic remains a profound skepticism toward those most eager to lead. The person telling you they were born for leadership is precisely the one you should escort gently but firmly to the nearest supplies cupboard, where they can organise the paper clips into a splendid hierarchy of their own design while composing a 15-page manifesto on ‘The Future of Office Supply Optimisation: A Leadership Journey’.

    By contrast, the truly qualified leader is probably hiding under their desk right now, hoping that this particular chalice of responsibility passes them by, ideally to land on the desk of someone with enough confidence to be utterly untroubled by their complete lack of qualifications.

    The original copy of this article was published via my personal LinkedIn on April 17th, 2025. You can find the original link here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/power-paradox-why-those-most-eager-lead-should-locked-turvey-frsa-ydrde/?trackingId=7afVev12RM2JcryLdCRZuA%3D%3D

  • The Uncomfortable Utility of Feeling Like a Fraud: Why Your Imposter Syndrome Might Actually Be Doing You a Solid

    Look, we need to have a deeply uncomfortable conversation about that persistent feeling that you’re somehow faking it whilst everyone else in the room has their proverbial shit neatly packed into labelled containers with colour-coded lids.

    You know the one. That low-grade psychic hum that whispers “they’re going to find you out any minute now” whilst you’re nodding sagely in a meeting about something called “strategic alignment” or “paradigm integration” or whatever linguistic mulch is being served in today’s corporate salad.

    Here’s the thing: we’ve collectively decided that this feeling – this imposter syndrome – is a bug in your psychological operating system rather than a feature. With that the internet, that magnificent producer of oversimplified solutions to complex human problems, has a ready prescription: “Just believe in yourself!” Which, as actionable advice, ranks somewhere between “just be happy” and “have you tried not being poor?”

    The Dubious Virtue of Unwavering Certainty

    Let’s consider for a moment the alternative to imposter syndrome. Not confidence – which is entirely compatible with nuanced self-assessment for the seventeen seconds I feel it in a calendar (or financial) year – but the complete absence of doubt. The absolute certainty that one’s knowledge is comprehensive and one’s skills are beyond reproach.

    Now, ask yourself: who are the people you’ve encountered in your professional life who possessed this quality? Who are the colleagues, managers, or public figures who’ve demonstrated unwavering certainty in their own competence?

    I’ll wait.

    If your experience resembles mine in even the slightest degree, you’ve just mentally assembled a rogues’ gallery of the most catastrophically incompetent individuals you’ve ever had the misfortune to share oxygen with. These are the people who’ve piloted projects into mountainsides whilst assuring everyone that turbulence is normal, and that the explosions are in your head.

    Who’ve set institutional money on fire whilst explaining that smoke is just another word for profit.

    Who’ve failed upward with the buoyancy of a helium-filled ego untethered from the gravitational pull of reality.

    The correlation is so consistent it might as well be a physical law: the more certain someone is of their competence, the more aggressively they’ll defend demonstrably terrible ideas when the consequences start arriving with the subtlety of a brick through a tastefully created stained-glass window of your preferred corporate deity.

    The Hidden Operating System of Doubt

    What if – and I’m just spitballing here – your imposter syndrome isn’t a malfunction? What if that nagging sense that you might not know everything necessary for the task at hand is actually your cognitive immune system functioning exactly as intended?

    Consider the alternative. Consider what happens when that system gets compromised.

    We all know That Guy™. The one who read half a Wikipedia article on a complex topic and is now explaining it with the conviction of someone who’s devoted three decades of focused study to the subject.

    The one who confuses having an opinion with having expertise.

    The one who mistakes volume and certainty for insight and accuracy.

    That Guy™ doesn’t have imposter syndrome, and nobody is better off for its absence.

    Your doubt – that uncomfortable, persistent questioning of whether you know enough or can do enough – creates the cognitive space necessary for continued growth. It maintains the gap between what you know and what remains to be learned. It prevents the terminal crystallisation of knowledge that ends in spectacular, confident failure.

    The “Just Believe!” Industrial Complex

    The internet drowns in advice about overcoming imposter syndrome, most of it amounting to some variation of “just believe in yourself harder.” This advice approaches psychological complexity with all the nuance of telling someone with clinical depression to “try smiling more” or instructing a person like me with chronic pain “have you considered not hurting?”. Yeah pal – I tried and, guess what, it’s still the same.

    This framing misunderstands both the phenomenon and its function. It assumes that doubt represents a defect rather than a calibration mechanism – one that prevents you from waltzing confidently into situations beyond your current capabilities with the carefree abandon of a toddler approaching an electrical socket with a fork.

    The problem isn’t the existence of doubt but its calibration. Too much, and you’re paralysed into inaction. Too little, and you’re a walking Dunning-Kruger graph with exceptionally poor risk assessment capabilities.

    The goal isn’t to eliminate doubt but to integrate it – to develop a working relationship with uncertainty that allows forward motion without delusion. This represents a far more sophisticated psychological task than “just believing in yourself,” which sounds suspiciously like advice from someone selling motivational posters featuring eagles and sunsets, whilst kneeling cross legged in tie-dyed attire.

    The Unexpected Virtue of Knowing What You Don’t Know

    Here’s the deeply unfashionable truth: knowing the limits of your knowledge and capability isn’t a weakness. It’s a metacognitive superpower in a world increasingly dominated by people who mistake confidence for competence.

    This awareness – this persistent questioning of what you know and can do – creates the necessary conditions for actual growth rather than the performance of expertise. It allows you to identify gaps in knowledge or skill before they become catastrophic failures. It enables you to ask questions when others are nodding along to avoid appearing uninformed.

    In a professional landscape increasingly resembling a confidence game in the most literal sense, this capacity becomes not a liability but an asset of considerable value. It allows you to:

    – Learn when others assume they already know

    – Question when others accept uncritically

    – Adapt when others remain rigid in their certainty

    – Grow when others have convinced themselves they’ve arrived

    None of which involves “just believing in yourself” more vigorously, and many of which add value that show your ability to “tell it like it is” is of a lot more value than the 17th nod in that room full of groupthink.

    The Arrogance Tax: What Certainty Costs Us

    The social premium placed on unwavering confidence has created environments where the appearance of certainty is rewarded above actual knowledge. This dynamic produces leaders who cannot acknowledge error, systems resistant to correction, and discourse increasingly unmoored from reality.

    We’ve all seen the consequences.

    Financial systems collapse because warning signs were dismissed by those too certain of their models.

    Companies implode because executives couldn’t admit they misunderstood market conditions.

    Political systems falter because leaders cannot acknowledge the complexity of problems facing their constituents.

    In each case, the absence of doubt – that quality we’re all supposed to be striving to eliminate – plays a central role in the eventual catastrophe.

    Meanwhile, those plagued by imposter syndrome are busy double-checking their work, seeking additional information, and considering alternative perspectives – activities that don’t exactly make for compelling LinkedIn humblebrags but tend to prevent spectacularly public failures. As many of my colleagues have commiserated from time to time – there’s some sort of privilege reserved for the rescue of a red project, and less clamour to thank the ones that never went even a yellowing shade of green.

    The Calibration Game: Making Friends with Your Doubt

    The challenge, then, isn’t to eliminate imposter syndrome but to calibrate it – to develop a working relationship with doubt that enables action without delusion.

    What might this actually look like in practice?

    First, it means recognising that confidence and certainty aren’t synonyms. Confidence allows you to act despite incomplete information; certainty precludes the possibility that such information could exist. The former enables progress; the latter ensures eventual collision with reality.

    Second, it involves distinguishing between doubt that prompts continued learning and doubt that prevents necessary action. The former expands capability; the latter constrains it unnecessarily. This distinction isn’t always immediately obvious and requires ongoing attention rather than one-time resolution.

    Third, it demands awareness of context – recognising when the social pressure for unwavering confidence might be pushing you toward certainty that exceeds your actual knowledge or capability. These moments require particular vigilance against the contagious certainty that often pervades professional environments.

    My hope is that I know when to say “I know what I’m talking about” versus “I like the idea of being seen as someone who knows what they are talking about regarding this popular topic”. The value lies is understanding which is which.

    None of this involves affirmations in the mirror or whatever self-help gurus are currently selling as the solution to the “problem” of not being sufficiently certain of your own brilliance. It mostly just requires being honest with ourselves as well as others. Imagine that?

    The Social Dimension: When “Just Believe” Becomes Gaslighting

    It’s worth noting that the experience of imposter syndrome doesn’t fall evenly across social categories. Research consistently demonstrates that women and members of marginalised groups experience imposter syndrome at higher rates – not because of inherent psychological differences but because they face greater scrutiny and more persistent questioning of their capabilities.

    In these contexts, the experience of imposter syndrome cannot be reduced to individual psychology but must be understood as responding to actual social dynamics that impose different standards for different groups. The prescription to “just believe in yourself” becomes particularly hollow when directed at those facing genuine structural barriers to recognition and advancement.

    It’s rather like telling someone they’re imagining the rain whilst refusing to acknowledge they’re the only person at the table who wasn’t given an umbrella. That sort of declaration serves to help nothing other than making the privileged look like they exploit the circumstances of those with less than them.

    What we need to do is shift the focus from trying to simply make individual psychological adjustments to creating institutional environments that recognise the value of intellectual humility and that distribute the burden of proof more equitably across social categories.

    The Integration Project: Making Doubt Your Ally

    The path forward doesn’t involve eliminating doubt but developing a more sophisticated relationship with uncertainty – one that recognises its value while preventing its transformation into paralysis.

    This integration requires moving beyond the binary thinking that frames imposter syndrome as either a weakness to be conquered or a badge of authentic humility to be celebrated. Instead, it suggests that our relationship with certainty about our capabilities requires ongoing calibration – adjusting to new information, different contexts, and evolving demands.

    It positions doubt not as an obstacle to success but as a necessary component of sustainable development – a form of cognitive friction that prevents both stagnation and delusion.

    This nuanced approach stands in stark contrast to the motivational poster simplicity of “just believe in yourself” – a prescription that, again, approaches the complexity of human cognition with all the sophistication of telling someone in a wheelchair to “just stand up and walk” because ambulatory people manage it without difficulty.

    The Uncomfortable Conclusion

    Perhaps, then, we might begin to recognise the uncomfortable utility of imposter syndrome – not as something to be overcome but as something to be integrated into a more balanced and sustainable relationship with our own capabilities and limitations.

    In a world where the most confidently wrong people seem to fail upward with remarkable consistency, perhaps your persistent doubt represents not a defect but a different kind of intelligence – one that acknowledges complexity, remains open to correction, and resists the seductive certainty that precedes catastrophic error.

    The question becomes not how to eliminate doubt but how to engage with it productively – how to maintain the humility necessary for continued growth while developing the confidence required for meaningful action. This balance represents a far more sophisticated psychological achievement than the elimination of doubt, and its development requires nuanced engagement rather than motivational platitudes.

    So the next time someone tells you to “just believe in yourself” as the antidote to imposter syndrome, perhaps consider that they’re prescribing the psychological equivalent of bloodletting – a treatment that misunderstands both the condition and its function, and that might leave you worse off than the original “ailment” ever did. If they do, maybe suggest trepanning to alleviate the spirits in their head that dreamed up their purported solution, and then debate how it might be as effective, or not as the case may be.

    In reality, your doubt might just be the most valuable thing about you in a world increasingly dominated by those who’ve eliminated it entirely from their psychological repertoire – usually with catastrophic consequences for everyone in their vicinity.

    Sometimes thinking you don’t know everything is far more valuable than trying to convince yourself – and others – that you do.

    This article was originally published on my personal LinkedIn profile on April 3, 2025. A direct link back to the original post can be found here – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/uncomfortable-utility-feeling-like-fraud-why-your-you-turvey-frsa-fjewe/?trackingId=BmKLTjPfT8megNPPovceNA%3D%3D