Series: Lenses

A lot of people say “fake it till you make it.” It sounds like the flex. It is not the same thing.

The flex is display. You perform for an audience. The display is the whole thing. There is no becoming on the other side.

Fake it till you make it, done right, is about behavior. You act as if you are the person you are becoming. You take the meeting before you feel ready. You speak with confidence before you feel it. You hold yourself to the standard of the person you want to be.

The faking is pointed at yourself. It is courage, not costume. And underneath it, you are doing the work. The faking is a bridge, and there is a real become on the other side.

Here is how you tell the difference. Ask one question: does the fake point at yourself or at others? If it points at yourself, act like the person, do the work, it is growth. If it points at others, look like the person, skip the work, it is flex.

And one more rule. You can borrow confidence, but you cannot borrow a record. Claiming results you don’t have is not faking it. That is fraud. The record has to be built, not claimed.

So yes, fake it till you make it. Fake the courage. Fake the posture. Fake the willingness to show up before you feel ready. Then do the work until the fake becomes real. That is not showing off. That is becoming.

Someone posted the happiness curve on LinkedIn, and I got curious.

The classic finding: happiness is high when you are young, dips to a low point around 47 or 48, then climbs again. An economist named David Blanchflower found it in 132 countries. It even shows up in chimps and orangutans, so part of it is biology, not just mortgages and careers.

Interesting data. But it needed a double-click for me. Because Blanchflower looked again in 2025, and the curve has changed. The midlife dip has mostly flattened. Not because midlife got better. Because the young got worse. Distress is now highest among the young and falls with age.

Interesting. But I think there are a few suspects here.

One, the economy. A generation grew up in homes stressed by the Great Recession, and their own start in work and housing has been harder. Two, COVID. It poured fuel on it, but the fire started years earlier. Three, some of the rise is measurement. We taught young people the language of distress, and some normal hard feelings now get counted as disorders. And four, the phones. But I do not think the blame sits in one place.

Here is my main suspect. Youth is not as centered anymore. And there is a biological reason the flood hits them hardest. The brain is not finished until about age 25. The prefrontal cortex, the part that weighs consequences and filters impulses, is one of the last parts to mature. That is a generalization. Some people are not ready until later. But the broad point holds. The filter is still under construction at exactly the age the flood arrives.

Because the landscape changed too fast, and we have not learned how to process it. Information used to be centralized, channelized. It came through a few gates, and parents were the central gate. What a child got exposed to was mostly in someone’s control. Now information is distributed. It comes inbound from too many pathways: phones, laptops, games, the internet, digital music, social apps. The old gate cannot hold, and we have not evolved new gates to replace it.

Even friendship has changed shape. Friends used to be people you knew, who shared your day-to-day activities. Now some young people have friends they have never met and will never meet. For a developed brain, that is a choice. For an undeveloped one, it is dangerous. It cannot yet weigh that influence.

On the toolmakers, a balance has to be struck. They are not blameless. A car was not designed to keep you driving forever. These products are designed to harvest your attention, and that design is aimed at brains whose filters are not finished. That is a real fault. And still, when cars replaced horse carriages, accidents rose because of the speed cars made possible. We did not ban cars, and we did not only blame Ford. Because with cars, we did eventually build gates: licenses, age limits, rules of the road. We have not built the equivalent for information yet. The mistakes here are in many places. The toolmakers built harvesting machines. The rest of us handed them to children with no gates at all.

Information availability is good. But only if you have a way to pre-filter it, to manage it, so your attention stays centered. Without a filter, availability is not a gift. It is a flood.

The curve did not move because middle age changed. It moved because the starting point dropped. And the starting point dropped, I believe, because attention lost its guard, and we have not built the new one yet.

Until we do, the gate has to be your own. I ration my time on these tools. I am not much on LinkedIn or X. The others I use all the time, but I treat them as what they are: information sources. Sources get managed. They do not get open access.

Because time is the most limited resource you have. It is the only thing we cannot grow. Money can grow. Skills can grow. Time only shrinks. Protect your time and attention. That is your gold.

References

Blanchflower, D. G. (2020). Unhappiness and age. NBER Working Paper 26641.

Weiss, A., et al. (2012). Evidence for a midlife crisis in great apes consistent with the U-shape hypothesis. PNAS, 109(51).

Blanchflower, D. G., Bryson, A., & Xu, X. (2025). The declining mental health of the young and the global disappearance of the unhappiness hump. PLOS ONE.

Foulkes, L., & Andrews, J. L. (2023). Are mental health awareness efforts contributing to the rise in reported mental health problems? New Ideas in Psychology, 69.

Casey, B. J., Jones, R. M., & Hare, T. A. (2008). The adolescent brain. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1124(1).

I was talking with someone much younger. They were impressed by people who display riches. The cars, the watches, the lifestyle. I told them to look deeper, at the person who appears not so flashy.

Don’t look at what you see. Look underneath. A book is not to be judged by its cover. Every book has a story to tell. Beauty is skin deep.

There are two kinds of people in the world. Some show off and flex. Others stay calm. And their steady work over time becomes a flex in itself.

Rich is not wealthy. Rich is what you see. Wealthy is what you don’t see: assets, freedom, money that works while you sleep. Successful is not accomplished. Successful is what others say about you. Accomplished is what you actually built. Wannabe’s are not are’s. The wannabe performs the identity. The are has it because they did the thing.

The flex is a signal. It is what you do when the record doesn’t speak for itself. The calm person doesn’t need the signal because the work speaks over time.

Here is the test. Ask one question: what does this person have that nobody can take away? The display can be repossessed. The skill, the reputation, the relationships, the assets, those cannot.

The flex depreciates. The car ages. The post gets forgotten. The substance compounds. Trust, reputation, skill, wealth, they grow quietly. That is why the steady calm becomes a flex in itself. The record gets so heavy it cannot be ignored.

I wish someone told me this when I was younger. Experience is what teaches this lesson. You can’t hand someone the conclusion, they won’t take it even if you do. But you can hand them the lens.