The average age of a Y Combinator applicant is now 24. We’ve decided that people who can’t rent a car should define what ambition looks like.
There’s a 19-year-old somewhere with 400,000 followers who just announced her third startup pivot. She posts morning routines at 5am. Workspace tours with minimal furniture and maximal Ring lighting. Captions about “building in public” and “staying hungry.” She’s raised money. She has a waitlist. She definitely has a Notion template for sale.
And you, at 28 or 32 or 41, feel the quiet sting of falling behind.
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Here’s what nobody’s saying out loud: we’ve outsourced the entire definition of success to people who’ve barely lived.
Not because they’ve cracked some code the rest of us missed. But because they’ve figured out that the appearance of momentum is more valuable than the thing itself. And we’re all standing around, applauding the performance, mistaking exposure for expertise.
Cool used to mean something you discovered. A band before they went mainstream. A book that wasn’t on the bestseller list yet. A way of moving through the world that couldn’t be taught because it was born from taste, timing, and a little bit of defiance.
Now cool is whatever has the most shares.
It’s not even about influence anymore. It’s about visibility. The person who posts the most, pivots the fastest, announces the loudest. The founder at 18. The “creative entrepreneur” at 22. The self-proclaimed intellectual at 24 whose entire bibliography is four books by Naval Ravikant and a thread about Stoicism.
We watch them and think: that’s what winning looks like now.
Somewhere along the way, we decided that intellectualism was a brand you could build in public. Post enough book quotes, thread enough “frameworks,” speak confidently enough about subjects you learned yesterday, and congratulations, you’re a thought leader. The intellectual influencer doesn’t have time for obscurity or revision or doubt. They need content. So they package half-digested ideas into carousels, sell frameworks that flatten complexity into five digestible steps, and perform depth while staying comfortably shallow.
Then there’s the podcast epidemic. Everyone has one. Two people who met at a networking event last month are suddenly hosting deep dives on productivity, consciousness, the future of work. The format gives them credibility they haven’t earned. Microphones make opinions sound like expertise. Launch a podcast, add “host” to your bio, suddenly you’re a curator of ideas. Never mind that you’re just repackaging other people’s thoughts with worse production value.
Most of these people aren’t building anything that lasts. They’re building audiences. And audiences demand content, which means you’re not allowed to disappear long enough to do something difficult. You’re not allowed to fail in private. You’re not allowed to spend five years figuring out one hard problem, because five years without content is five years of irrelevance.
So they pivot. They rebrand. They launch, pause, relaunch. Season one drops with eight episodes. Season two never comes. They sell the sizzle because the steak takes too long to cook.
And here’s where it gets expensive.
When everyone optimises for announcement over execution, entire industries start to hollow out. Venture capital flows to the best storytellers, not the best builders. Funding rounds get written up in TechCrunch before the product works. Companies hire for “culture fit” and “energy” because nobody wants to be the one asking if anyone can actually code.
The metrics shift. Revenue becomes less important than growth. Profit becomes less important than narrative. A good deck matters more than a working prototype. The person who can sell the vision gets the meeting. The person grinding through the unglamorous work of making something reliable gets passed over.
We’ve created an economy where the ability to package and promote has become more valuable than the ability to build and ship. And that has consequences.
It means capital gets misallocated. Millions of dollars go to founders who can talk a good game but can’t execute. Meanwhile, the quiet operator who’s been profitable for three years but doesn’t have a personal brand can’t get a call back.
It means talent gets misdirected. Smart people stop learning hard skills because hard skills don’t scale on social media. Why spend five years mastering backend architecture when you can spend five weeks building a Twitter audience and get the same perceived credibility?
It means products get worse. When the incentive is to announce features, not ship them, you end up with roadmaps full of vaporware. When the reward is the press release, not the user experience, quality becomes optional.
And it means the people who actually know how to build things get drowned out by the people who know how to talk about building things.
I see this in Dubai constantly. Twenty-three-year-olds with LinkedIn bios that read like they’ve run three Fortune 500s. Networking events full of people with titles but no companies. Someone always has a podcast. Someone’s always “in conversation with” someone else. Everyone’s a founder. Everyone’s scaling. Nobody’s profitable, but everyone’s “growing.”
And it works. Because we’ve all agreed to stop asking the follow-up questions. How much revenue? What’s your churn? Who’s your actual customer? What did you actually read, or did you just save the thread? How many people actually listened to episode three?
We don’t ask because asking feels like doubting, and doubting feels like bitterness, and bitterness means you’re the one who doesn’t get it.
So we clap. We share. We feel vaguely inadequate.
Meanwhile, the 19-year-old founder just posted a carousel about imposter syndrome. The comments are full of heart emojis. Nobody mentions that imposter syndrome requires you to have actually done something first.
This isn’t about hating young founders or people building audiences. Some of them are brilliant. Some of them will build things that matter. But right now, we’ve created an environment where announcing the work has become more rewarding than doing it. Where signalling intelligence has replaced developing it.
And if you’re over 25 and trying to do something real, something slow, something that requires you to disappear for a while and figure it out, you’re doing it wrong. At least according to the algorithm.
The algorithm rewards frequency. It rewards volume. It rewards people who can package their half-formed thoughts into digestible content while the thoughts are still half-formed. Depth doesn’t trend. Nuance doesn’t scale. Difficulty doesn’t photograph well. Silence doesn’t fill a feed.
Cool isn’t counter-culture anymore. It’s not rebellion or taste or subversion.
Cool is compliance. It’s checking every box the platform designed for you. It’s optimising for an audience that doesn’t owe you attention and won’t remember you when the next thing comes along.
You want to know what’s actually cool?
Trying something difficult and failing at it publicly. Writing something that takes six months and might not land. Reading books that don’t have actionable takeaways. Building something for five years before you talk about it. Changing your mind when you learn something new. Admitting you don’t know.
Cool is doing work that doesn’t optimise for applause.
Cool is refusing to package your entire existence into content.
Cool is disappearing long enough to become interesting.
But that doesn’t get you followers. It doesn’t get you funding. It doesn’t get you invited to panels or asked to keynote conferences. It doesn’t make you look like you’re winning. It definitely doesn’t get you podcast invites.
And that’s the trade. You can look like you’re winning, or you can actually build something worth remembering. You can signal intelligence, or you can develop it. You can be visible now, or you can be valuable later.
The saddest part isn’t that teenagers are setting the pace. It’s that we’re all running behind them, trying to keep up, convinced that if we just post more, announce louder, launch another podcast season, optimise harder, we’ll finally feel like we’re winning.
But you’re not winning. You’re performing winning.
And every time you hit like on another founder’s announcement post, every time you congratulate someone on a launch that hasn’t shipped, every time you share a framework you haven’t tested, you’re voting for this. You’re funding it. You’re making it true.
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