There is a fine line between confidence and fraud. We have obliterated it.
The lie is so baked-in we don’t even question it anymore. If you’re nervous, act like you’re not. If you don’t know something, pretend you do. If you have no idea how to accomplish tasks that are, in fact, the entire basis of your job, carry yourself like an authority until no one questions you.
This is what we tell people. This is what people do. And then we wonder why planes nearly collide midair, bridges collapse, the wrong patients get operated on, entire industries fumble their way into ruin.
Because “fake it till you make it” was never an innocent confidence trick. It is a systemic erasure of expertise.
The Bluff Economy is Booming
A shocking number of professionals have no actual idea what they’re doing. If you’ve ever worked a job where you needed to know things, real things, technical things, historical things, things that required more than a five-minute Google search, you’ve seen it.
The executive who gets promoted, while the person who taught them things they should have already known is quietly laid off. The consultant who gets paid double your salary to make a slideshow about the thing you already explained in an email. The colleague who is completely incompetent but so good at playing the role that no one ever calls their bluff.
This is not a workplace phenomenon. It is now the world’s primary economic model. We all operate on the premise that if you say something with enough conviction, it becomes true. That works until it doesn’t.
The Collapse is Always Coming
Faking it is not a long game. The trick has an expiration date, and when it runs out, there is always fallout. It’s just a question of who absorbs it.
Maybe it’s a junior employee who gets fired when an ambitious manager overpromises something physically impossible. Maybe it’s the patient who suffers because the surgeon in the operating room bluffed their way through their career. Maybe it’s the bank that fails because the people making the decisions didn’t actually understand what they were approving.
Maybe it’s all of us.
We are running out of people who actually know things. And we are replacing them with people who know how to look like they know things.
Confidence Has Replaced Competence
A man will apply for a job he is unqualified for. He will get the job. He will be so self-assured, so utterly unbothered by his own ignorance, that he will rise through the ranks unchallenged.
A woman will hesitate. She will wait. She will want to be ready. She will think—incorrectly—that mastery must precede authority. And then she will watch, as someone with a fraction of her knowledge leapfrogs over her.
This is the system we have created. The smartest person in the room is never the loudest. The loudest person in the room is never the smartest.
Skill is the Only Way Out
Here’s an idea: Instead of encouraging people to pretend, what if we encouraged them to learn? Instead of rewarding those who play the part, what if we made actual competence the metric of success?
What if we stopped treating expertise like an afterthought, a thing you circle back to later? What if we stopped valorizing bravado and started respecting knowledge?
Because you can fake confidence. You can fake authority. But you cannot fake knowing what the hell you’re doing.