What if it's all an act?

Posted on: 26 November 2025

There was a moment, I couldn't date it precisely but I'd say sometime in the last fifteen to twenty years, when saying "fuck" went from being bad manners to potential violence. I'm not exaggerating. What was once vulgar is now abusive. It seems like a lexical nuance, but it changes everything.

Vulgar is an aesthetic category. If you're vulgar, you're rude, someone wrinkles their nose, life goes on. Abusive is a moral and potentially legal category. If you're abusive, you're guilty. There are consequences: a report to human resources, a post that goes viral for the wrong reasons, a burned reputation.

This transformation has created a brutal asymmetry of incentives. Whoever declares themselves offended immediately acquires bargaining power. Whoever might offend has only risks and no upside. The rational response to this structure is obvious: everyone walks on eggshells, calibrates every word, performs a version of themselves that minimises risk.

The result is what we see every day on LinkedIn and in every professional context: a theatre of enthusiasm, mandatory positivity, victory celebrations, language sterilised beyond recognition. Everyone seems to have graduated from the same course in assertive-but-not-aggressive, inclusive-to-excess, careful-not-to-upset-anyone communication.

The problem isn't kindness itself. The problem is that this language no longer communicates information, it only signals tribal belonging. It's a display, like the peacock's feathers. It says: I'm one of you, don't attack me.

The paradox of exclusionary inclusivity

Those who promote this system present themselves as champions of inclusivity. But try criticising it and discover how inclusive it really is: you're immediately a fascist, a reactionary, part of the problem. The accusation works like a switch that turns off debate. You don't need to refute the argument, just label the person.

It's the same mechanism as medieval heresy. For the believer, the heretic was worse than the infidel. The infidel simply doesn't know the truth, the heretic knows it and rejects it, therefore is guilty. Today it works the same way: whoever has never heard of inclusivity is "to be educated", whoever knows it and criticises it is morally compromised.

This makes the system impermeable. If criticism is itself proof that the critic is part of the problem, no evidence can ever refute the position. It's circular by design. And when a position cannot be falsified by anything, it's no longer an intellectual position. It's a faith.

The amygdala hasn't read the memos

But there's one aspect this system cannot control: biology.

The brain we have was selected for a completely different environment. Small groups where everyone knew each other, scarce resources, immediate physical threats. In that environment deception was discovered, cooperation had visible costs and benefits, stress activated responses that made evolutionary sense.

The environment we operate in today is evolutionarily unprecedented. Enormous audiences of strangers, zero immediate consequences for virtue performance, no feedback that punishes hypocrisy. The brain does what it knows how to do: performs, signals status, seeks approval. But beneath that veneer, the architecture hasn't changed in a hundred thousand years.

Remove the comfort zone and observe what happens. Put the most inclusive, assertive-but-not-aggressive person you know under pressure. The masks fall in seconds. Fight or flight, territory protection, aggression when resources seem threatened. The amygdala hasn't read the HR memos.

This isn't cynicism, it's observation. We can do all the training courses we want, but when the limbic system activates, social performances evaporate. Which proves they are precisely that: performances, not real transformations.

Fragility as a system output

Then there's a consequence affecting those who grew up entirely within this system.

An entire generation has been told they can aspire to anything, that limits are merely social constructs, that discomfort is always unjust and someone must remedy it. The problem is the real world doesn't work that way, has never worked that way, and no amount of correct language can change this reality.

The result is structural fragility. If you've never been exposed to direct feedback, you don't develop resilience. If every frustration is "trauma", you don't learn to tolerate the inevitable difficulty of existence. Paradoxically, obsessive protection produces people less equipped to handle what life brings.

And the cycle feeds itself: more fragility requires more linguistic protection, which produces more fragility, which requires still more protection.

Hypocrisy as institution

What I find most irritating isn't this system's existence. It's that almost everyone, in private, knows perfectly well it's theatre. The same people performing enthusiasm on LinkedIn admit over dinner that it's absurd. But then the next day they return to acting.

There's a name for this: institutionalised hypocrisy. Everyone knows everyone is pretending, everyone pretends anyway, and whoever points it out is the problem.

I don't know the solution. It probably doesn't exist at a social scale. But what I can do is choose the contexts in which I operate. Build spaces where the rules are different, where direct feedback is the norm, where "I tell you what I think because I respect you" is the founding pact.

The rest of the world can continue its performance. The amygdala, sooner or later, always presents the bill.