Most people are full of shit
Just a random 2am rant...
It’s 2 am. I just spent the last hour redoing a task I paid someone to do. This guy showed up to the conversation with the confidence of a man who had invented the wheel. “I’m the best at this”, he said. Okay, now, do it. Turns out this dude is the absolute worst at it. So now it’s 2 am, and I’m here, fixing it, and the only coherent thought I have is: “most people are full of shit”.
Including me. I am full of shit. I could tell you something right now and completely believe it, then wake up tomorrow with a different opinion and equal conviction.
You are also full of shit. And you know it. The crazy part is, the next person you’ll talk to today is also full of shit.
It's basically a factory setting for humans.
We say things for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with fact. We say things to sound smart, to fill silence, to get hired, and not to look like an idiot. I have done every single one of these. You have too. Most of what comes out of our mouths in a high-stakes situation is performance, not information. The mistake we all make is treating it like absolute information.
Let me give you some instances…
So, you hired someone. They came in radiating energy, answered every question with confidence, and had the right words for everything. You thought: this person is the bomb. Three weeks later, you realise they are in fact a bomb. Ticking time bomb. Or no, a bomb strapped to a missile like those big ones Iran has been shooting. The whole interview was a cinema production, and you bought front-row tickets. Job seekers are full of shit.
Someone you work with tells you they’ll send the thing by Friday. They say it with such calm certainty that you put it in your calendar, you colour-coded it too, because you have nothing better to do with time. Friday comes, nothing. You follow up on Saturday. “Oh yeah, sorry, got caught up”. Keep playing. They were never going to send it on Friday. Friday was just a word they picked to end the conversation. Coworkers are full of shit.
You ask your wannabee friend for a recommendation. They go: “Oh, you have to try this restaurant, it’s incredible, best food I’ve had in years”. You drive across the city, you get there, the food tastes like regret, and the chicken is not even well-cooked. That person has not thought about that restaurant in two years. They just needed something to say. Friends are full of shit.
The most concentrated population of full-of-shit people used to be LinkedIn. Those people who’d write paragraphs about how getting stuck in traffic taught them the importance of resilience. One founder once said he “failed forward” into a second round of funding; meanwhile, he got no funding. And there’s this weird recruiter that kept posting “We’re hiring! Only passionate people need apply!” for a job that pays less than an Uber driver earns, with unlimited unpaid overtime. LinkedIn was the world championship of shit.
Then, Twitter got jealous and raised the bar. The situation worsened when Elon started paying people to tweet.
Last weekend, I wasted three hours of my life on some AI tool that had been hyped so aggressively on my Twitter timeline, I genuinely thought I was about to witness fire being invented. “Revolutionary”, “Game-changing”, “Nothing will ever be the same”, I cloned the repo, I set it up, I gave it a real test. You know what it was? It was delusionary. This thing was so underwhelming, it actively set the AI world back. I lost three hours and a small piece of my soul because some goons on AI Twitter needed content, they probably never even tried what they were hyping. Social media people are full of shit.
Low expectations sound pessimistic until you realise it’s the easiest way to survive this full-of-shit world. Most signals are noise, especially the ones where someone looks you dead in the eye and swears on their mother.
The trick will be to calibrate slowly and hold expectations loosely. That way, when someone turns out to be full of shit, and they will, you haven’t lost anything because you already knew.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s past 2 a.m., and I have a task to finish.
