Signals, not scripture

Open your feed and someone is barking life rules at millions.

Move out at 18. Grind 16 hours. Cold plunge or you’ll fail.

The internet didn’t invent bossiness; it industrialised it. Platforms optimise for interaction, and interaction loves confident answers to complicated lives. Advice becomes performance. Certainty becomes theatre. Nuance—well, nuance doesn’t click.

The incentive is structural. Aggregators capture demand, rank content by predicted engagement, and pay creators in attention. Attention rewards clarity, novelty, conflict —the sharp edges of an argument, not the careful middle. If truth is a multi-variable equation, the feed asks for a slogan. Interaction is the KPI; certainty is the hack.

Then the psychology piles on.

Humans play status games: advice signals rank—“I know the way.” Algorithms amplify arousal: outrage and absolutes travel faster than caveats. Context collapses: one rule, thousands of lives. Moral grandstanding earns tribe points. Identity-protective reasoning makes public backtracking feel like losing face. Survivor bias turns “what worked for me” into “what works.” The Dunning–Kruger curve hands the mic to the most certain beginners. Prescriptions also soothe anxiety: telling others how to live calms the fear we don’t know how to live ourselves. In short: advice performs better than it informs.

Consider a familiar decree: “Leave your parents’ house by 18 if you want to succeed.”

Why does it ricochet around the timeline? It’s memetically fit: short, moral, and a bit cruel—the kind of line people quote to look tough. It’s a status flex for the poster (“I did it”), identity armour for the tribe (“we’re self-reliant”), and a cheap hit of certainty for the reader.

But it’s classic context collapse . Housing markets, wages, culture, caretaking, interest rates—flattened into a single command. The claim isn’t useless; it’s situational . For some, early independence is a forcing function. For others, it’s financial self-harm. The feed rarely carries the footnotes.

This isn’t cynicism; it’s diagnosis .

When you know the machine’s goals, the output makes sense. The modern sermon isn’t purely ego; it’s a market response. Creators compete in an attention economy where strong takes are the cheapest way to stand out. Platforms tune ranking systems that learn this and feed it back. Audiences, drowning in information, reach for shortcuts and choose confidence. Everyone is rational inside the wrong game.

A simple 2×2 helps parse the noise: Certainty (low→high) × Skin in the Game (low→high) .

• High certainty, low skin — where most viral sermons live: maximal swagger, no cost to being wrong.
• High certainty, high skin — operators with capital or reputation at risk.
• Low certainty, high skin — often the best: practitioners who show data, admit error, and update.
• Low certainty, low skin — the shrugging think-piece.

The market over-rewards the first quadrant because it’s easy to scale and fun to share.

Your job is to over-consume the second and third quadrants and under-consume the first , unless you’re there for entertainment.

Three heuristics to keep your balance:

1. Scope test: For whom, when, at what base rate?
2. Incentives check: What does the poster gain? What does the platform gain? What do you gain—clarity or a sugar rush?
3. Receipts rule: Data, counter-example, or trade-off. If there’s no cost curve, it’s marketing.

Strong claims can still be useful—if they’re owned and falsifiable.

“If you do X for Y months, Z should happen; if not, I’ll change A” beats “Do X because I did X.”

Reframing our case: If you live independently by 18–20 in a market where rent ≤ 25% of income and you can secure ≥ 30 hours/week of paid work, you’ll likely build capability faster than peers who stay home; the cost is lower savings and higher downside risk.

Now we have variables to argue with, not a moral cudgel to swing. The sermon becomes a scenario .

Watch the stunt; don’t steer by it.

In the end, the social web is a megaphone that pays in attention. It naturally mints absolutists because absolutism is legible at speed.

The solution isn’t softer dogma. It’s a quiet habit: treat posts as signals, not scripture . Ask what game is being played, who’s keeping score, and whether you want the prize. Certainty will keep selling. You don’t have to keep buying.