Thoughts. What I notice while watching.
Screenshot. Name blacked out. Underneath, three paragraphs about how disrespectful these messages are. Four hundred reactions, two hundred comments, everyone nodding.
Two days later the same soulless garbage lands in my inbox. From the same sender. "My last message probably got buried."
This is not hypocrisy. Hypocrites hide something. Nobody is hiding anything here. Their own message and someone else's message sit in two separate drawers, and nobody has ever walked from one drawer to the other. That is worse than hypocrisy. Hypocrisy requires knowing yourself.
The wing chair
The book on this already exists. 1984, Thomas Bernhard, "Woodcutters".
A man spends an entire evening in a wing chair in a Viennese apartment despising the people around him. The hosts, the guests, the speeches, the prizes, the careers. Two hundred pages of hate.
And he sits there. He accepted the invitation. He eats along. He does not leave. At the end he runs through the city center, wants to write about it immediately, and knows: I am one of them.
Without that last sentence the book is whining. With it, it is a weapon.
The screenshot post has the hate and not the last sentence. Outrage from outside, sender on the inside. Contempt that leaves the person feeling it out of the picture is not criticism. It is a pose.
Titles nobody awarded
They talk about the better society because they did not make the cut for the best one. The comparative is already the confession.
In Bernhard, one of the writers walks around as the Austrian Virginia Woolf. Nobody awarded her that. She says it, nobody objects, and nobody objects because everyone in the room needs their own sign.
Top Voice. Thought Leader. Visionary. Serial Entrepreneur. No body issues these. You write one into your banner and see whether the room plays along. The room plays along. Non-aggression pact: shake my sign and you put your own at risk.
Then the numbers. Six figures, seven figures, eventually ten. Always revenue, never profit. Two million in, 2.1 out, and the post says "2M year". That is not a number, that is a costume, and costumes have no ceiling. No delusion of grandeur is enough. No self-satisfaction is too much. Bernhard had state prizes instead of revenue. Same function, same emptiness: proof from outside that proves nothing.
Revenue as an immune system
The costume is not just decoration, it is also the weapon.
The move goes like this: disagreement does not get answered, the person disagreeing gets classified. Only people without revenue say that. Anyone who really sells sees it differently. Anyone with ambition gets it immediately.
That is built to be irrefutable, on purpose. Nobody can check the number. Doubting the number counts as proof that you do not have one. Every question confirms the person being questioned. In this setup you can only lose or stay quiet, and staying quiet counts as agreement.
Then the rehearsed sloppiness. Spelling mistakes do not get corrected, they get displayed: look, I have more important things to do. Anyone who notices has already been filed. Petty. Envious. No revenue. The mistake is not carelessness, the mistake is a filter. It looks for the people who would say something and marks them before they say it.
Then the line in plain words. The offer is not for people who have their life sorted wrong. The audience is not described, it is built by exclusion. To be inside you need to know someone standing outside. Bernhard's better society, cheapest possible build.
And at the end the safety catch: do not get upset, it was only a remark. Kick first, then explain it was not a kick. From then on any reaction proves you are too thin-skinned. Same grip as the black bar: the act and the protection against being accused of it, in one movement.
The best part is usually buried in the middle. Posts like this like to accuse their critics of being stuck in the same routine day after day. Written in a text that runs the same sentence structure five times in a row. You can spot the person who cannot leave the room by the fact that he accuses everyone else of the room.
No mirror in the room
Sartre furnished the same apartment back in 1944, just without windows. "No Exit". Three people, one room, no way out.
The line everyone knows is "hell is other people", and almost everyone uses it wrong, as a curse on annoying company. It means something colder. There is no mirror in that room. Estelle wants to know how she looks and has to use the others' eyes to find out. From that moment she belongs to them. If the only picture you have of yourself comes from outside, anyone in the room can hold it hostage.
That is the feed. No mirror, only reactions. You learn what you are from the number under the post. The self-awarded title holds as long as the room confirms it, which means the room can revoke it whenever it likes. The lights never go off, the eyes never close.
And then the part of Sartre that actually hurts: there is no torturer. No devil, no instruments, no supervision. The three of them do it to each other for free, with nobody forcing them. That is exactly how the pillory runs. No platform demands screenshots. People supply the punishment themselves, at no charge, and call it community.
The indulgence
Then the post about mental health. Set boundaries. Take care of yourself. It is okay not to be okay.
Written by people who burn through their teams, sit on invoices and send voice notes at half past eleven. The most toxic people in the room talk loudest about mindfulness, and nobody laughs.
Double standards would be the kind explanation. The real one: vulnerability is a format. It delivers reach like everything else, only cheaper, and it cannot be attacked. You can argue with a claim. You cannot argue with a confession. So they confess.
Dorian Gray at least had a picture in the attic keeping the tab. Today the picture is the feed, and it ages in the wrong direction. I wrote more about that here.
The verdict is never "this annoyed me"
The post never says the message was annoying. The post says the sender is too stupid for their job.
Bad outreach. No research. Too lazy to read the profile. Does not understand sales. Probably written by an AI. Wrong line of work.
That is the whole trick. Nobody co-signs your mood. Everybody co-signs a competence verdict. So "I do not like this" becomes a finding, and the finding goes out to four hundred people so they can countersign.
Basis: one message. No reply rate, no pipeline, no closed deal. "I would never have replied to that" is not a number. It is a sample of one, collected by someone who was never the target. Maybe the message is garbage. Maybe it works on two hundred other people. Nobody checked, because checking costs the punchline.
And then the point where it tips: "the message is bad" becomes "the person is incapable". A message can be rewritten. A person cannot. That is exactly why they do it. A charge that can be repaired does not carry four hundred reactions.
The person sending DMs has no distribution
Now the direction. It is never right.
Start a company, put a new offer up against an established state of things, and you get rejection and condescension first. Not sometimes. Always. Nobody gets around it. And anyone without reach has no choice: no audience, just a list.
The post comes from the other side. Four hundred reactions are not luck, that is infrastructure. This is distribution mocking the lack of distribution. Top down. Filed under courage.
Two weeks earlier the same profile said: just start, done beats perfect, a thousand noes before the first yes. The screenshot shows exactly someone doing that. And he gets paraded for it.
The rejection then gets read as a result. It is not. An established state of things says no to everything new first, however good it is. If a no were information, nothing new would ever exist.
Not a free pass: bad outreach is real. Mass mail with no connection to you, followed up three times, generated and never read by the sender either. You are allowed to be annoyed. The question is where the annoyance goes. Delete: fine. Write back: better. Summon an audience: not fine.
The black bar
The blacked-out name is the worst part, not the harmless one.
The bar says: I am decent. And hands the body over anyway. Half-anonymous means the industry guesses within three comments, and then the comments say what the poster would not write themselves. Very convenient. The bar does not protect the person underneath it. It protects the person who drew it.
Anyone who wants to protect the name does not post.
Both options were sitting there the whole time. Reply. Or do not reply. They cost no reach. That is why nobody takes them.
Mendacity, not lying
Bernhard's word is not lying. It is mendacity.
A lie knows what it is doing. You can confront it, it has an author and a timestamp. Mendacity has settled in. It no longer needs awareness, it runs by itself, and it notices nothing, because everyone in the room is making the same movement.
Which is why the accusation achieves nothing. You cannot prove to anyone that they have settled in.
What works is a test, not a moral: do not write about a group you do not count yourself part of. If your criticism only works as long as you do not appear in it, it was never criticism. It was advertising.
The man in the chair stays seated, eats along, and goes home knowing he belongs to it.
No post ends that way. They end with: what are your thoughts?
That is not a question. That is a call for applause, and everyone in the room knows it. Disagree and you do not get refuted, you get filed: negative, bitter, never made it yourself, does not understand the business. Your comment gets no hearts and slides below the fold.
The inflated presence permits exactly one answer. Agreement is allowed. Adding to it is allowed, as long as it admires. Disagreement is heresy, and heretics do not get argued with, they get removed. Comment deleted. Profile blocked. "Sorry you feel that way."
The dinner party at least had a table, where everyone sat and had to put up with each other. Here one person stands at the front and the rest applaud. Whoever does not applaud stands outside.
In Sartre the door opens at the end. Nobody leaves.
Sources and status
As of 22 September 2026. This is an opinion piece.
- Thomas Bernhard, Holzfällen. Eine Erregung, Suhrkamp 1984, in English as Woodcutters. The wing chair, the artistic dinner party and the run through the city center at the end are the load-bearing motifs. The label "the Austrian Virginia Woolf" attaches to the writer figure Jeannie Billroth. Everything here is paraphrase, not verbatim quotation.
- "They talk about the better society because they did not make the cut for the best one" is my own sharpening in the spirit of the book, not a Bernhard quote.
- Jean-Paul Sartre, Huis clos ("No Exit"), first staged in 1944. The missing mirror, Estelle asking how she looks, the absence of a torturer and the door that opens at the end without anyone walking out are all in the play. "Hell is other people" is Garcin's line.
- The LinkedIn patterns are aggregated observations from my own feed. Without examples, names or screenshots, for the reason given in the text.