A fascinating thing about the world is how much the bar is raising. What once took a PhD now takes a weekend. Designs once considered cutting-edge are now baselines. Skills once seen as exceptional are now expected. These shifts signal real progress and propel us forward with faster execution, wider access, and higher standards.

But something subtle is rising too: the bar for sales. Today’s most effective salespeople don’t cold call. They share insights, frameworks, reflections. They educate just enough to feel generous, but the value often flows one way. Their posts look like knowledge, but function like pipelines.

If we fail to notice the endgame is sales, we lose time we thought we were investing. We consume, nod, save, applaud, thinking we’re absorbing insight, when in fact we’re just feeding someone else’s funnel. Learning without action is consumption. Consumption without awareness is a drain.

The Illusion of Knowledge

Online presence used to be gated by institutions. To shape public thinking, you needed credentials from academia, media, or corporate power. Authority was earned, filtered, and scarce.

Today the gate is long gone. Anyone with a posting schedule and a polished tone can project expertise. Content is abundant, distribution is free, and packaging often outshines substance.

This creates the perfect environment for fake knowledge which look relevant but are engineered for influence, not insight. Environment itself is not sufficient - the producers will have to have the drive to do it too. It just happens that there is a growing need to use content as a marketing channel due to the Law of Shitty Clickthrough.

As older channels decay, content becomes the new distribution layer for trust and traffic. Posts that teach just enough to feel valuable, but not enough to make you independent, now sit at the top of every funnel. The result is a flood of ideas that look like knowledge but behave more like persuasion. Tips, frameworks, and threads often optimise for credibility signalling, not insight. They aren’t built to deepen your thinking but rather designed to grow an audience for themselves.

Perhaps an unpopular idea to share: practical values of most communities and networks are overrated. When I was building my first start-up, the advice I had was to build a community. This was deeply troubling for me as it felt like an attempt to trade trust for profit. This pattern is everywhere: there are many communities and other marketplaces where the organisers take a disproportionate share. Some people may call it alignment but I see it exactly like ads, except it is cloaked in goodwill but fundamentally extractive. It just repels me.

Like not every link on Google is a sponsored link, not every piece of content or community is a leads generation funnel. A useful test is to ask: what does the creator stand to gain if I believe this or engage with it?

In general, the most trustworthy content tends to come from people who aren’t optimising for conversion. They're not trying to win you over but trying to make sense of something, or give something away. Examples include Paul Graham’s essays, open source packages etc.

The Perfect Storm

The supply side is well established. The environment rewards visibility, and many creators are incentivised to produce content not just for sharing ideas, but for building personal pipelines.But supply alone isn't enough. There needs to be demand, and the audience is often perfectly primed.

Knowledge workers today operate in a landscape defined by abstraction. Much of the work is invisible, asynchronously collaborative, and mentally exhausting. The line between thinking and performing is blurry. Progress is hard to quantify in real time, which makes people crave clarity. In that ambiguity, consuming content, especially the kind that feels insightful, becomes a substitute for execution. Read a thread, a summary, a framework feels like work or even progress, even if nothing has changed.

And there’s another shift: the growing tendency to seek prepackaged solutions rather than wrestle with problems. Instead of sitting with complexity, we default to scanning for answers. We read how someone else scaled, hired, raised, or built, and we borrow the structure without understanding the struggle. This kind of content reduces uncertainty, but it also numbs originality. It makes us feel like we’re progressing when, in reality, we’re just copy-pasting someone else’s context.

Add to that the pressure to be informed, relevant, and always in the loop, and the system begins to loop itself. Creators are rewarded for pumping content. Platforms surface what’s easy to engage with. And knowledge workers, in a constant search for clarity and shortcuts, consume more than they create. The result is a perfect storm: incentives aligned around motion, not depth; absorption, not agency.

Play Your Own End Game

Most of us are woodcutters where progress does not happen in the background but requires deliberate and focused executions. Ironically, we return from the forest empty-handed, because we spent all day listening about different techniques to cut woods or different brands of axes, without doing much of the cutting. Arguably those contents do not matter, especially when they were passively consumed.

I enjoyed Liam Millward’s relentless obsession around revenue and speed which are the main principles for Instant so the team is built around the goal, with everything else stripped away.

Reid Hoffman’s The Start-up of You and Andrew Grove’s Only the Paranoid Survive bring the start-up philosophy to a personal context. We are the company and we are the strategy. And if there’s one thing we know about startups, it’s that no meaningful outcome happens through thinking alone. It takes action, iteration, shipping, and risk. Progress demands execution, not just clarity of thought, but the courage to move.

This is where the game splits. Content producers are playing for exposure. Their incentives are aligned: every post, thread, or framework serves their goal. They are doing it right for their game.

But most consumers aren’t optimising for exposure. Their goals are different: building, creating, advancing, mastering. Yet they spend their time absorbing content created for a different end game. That’s the trap. And doing it at the cost of their own.

Consuming content is easy to justify. It feels smart, informative, even strategic. But when your end game isn’t visibility, and yet your habits mirror those who chase it, you're not just off track; you're playing someone else’s game, often at your own peril.