The performance of seriousness is one of the most telling markers of cultural business decline in our deeply unserious era.

When critical thinking about an issue, of any kind or type, is devalued and instead what is rewarded is low friction, intellectual ease, emotional comfort, and avoidance of pain, arriving at the point of saying serious words without serious meaning behind them is inevitable.

Because when words sound serious but are really performative, flattering, deceitful, or just misapplied malapropisms, a person can gain all kinds of social and cultural brownie points without really having to be serious in the first place.

And from there, it’s a short fall to performing professionalism, rather than doing the hard work of preparing with excellence, to be a professional in the first place. Performative seriousness leads to performative professionalism. All of which confuses the uninitiated, drives the serious professional crazy, and effectively demoralizes the amateur.

Social media and the algorithmic reward system built into the Internet have gotten us here to this space, in real life, and there is no going back. And I’m not sure what the solution to this metastasizing problem is.