You know how every neighbourhood has one cat who stands on top of the tallest garden wall, puffing out their chest, making eye contact with no one, and yowling loudly about their personal achievements?
LinkedIn influencers are humans who do that exact same thing, except big corporations pay them thousands of pounds for it.
Imagine a company that makes vacuum cleaners comes to you and says, “We will give you fifty tins of salmon if you wear a bright blue collar and mention our vacuum in your next yowl.”
That is a sponsored post. The influencer doesn’t write about their genuine thoughts, they write a long, emotional story about how a specific software tool saved their career, inspired their morning routine, and brought peace to their household.
The company pays them a fortune because thousands of other humans are sitting below the wall, listening to the yowl, and thinking, “If I buy that software, maybe I can stand on a high wall, too.”
Once a human gets enough followers, they stop doing actual work entirely. Instead, they write a 10-page document called a “playbook” or “masterclass.”
It is the human equivalent of charging five mice to show other cats a picture of a bush where you once caught a mouse three years ago.
It contains no actual mouse, and the bush is gone, but the influencer sells this document to three hundred desperate humans for £50 each.
They make a small fortune explaining how to catch mice, without ever having to step in the dirt again.
Eventually, companies invite these wall-yowlers to fly to another city, put on an uncomfortable blazer, and stand on an actual stage in front of hundreds of people.
They speak for 45 minutes about “thought leadership” and “disrupting the ecosystem.” They do not build anything, fix anything, or hunt anything.
They just project slides on a huge screen and talk about how important it is to keep yowling. For this, they are handed a cheque that could buy enough freeze-dried chicken treats to last seventeen lifetimes.
It is a fascinating economy built entirely on noise.
While you spend your afternoon quietly doing real, tangible work, like sleeping in a cardboard box or meticulously grooming your left hind leg, these humans are earning a living by loudly congratulating themselves for having opinions.
It is completely absurd, highly lucrative, and proof that humans will pay almost anything just to feel like part of the pack.