Everyone suddenly sells themselves as "AI-native" on LinkedIn #
I want to talk about something that's been sitting uncomfortable with me for a while. There's a concept in developmental psychology called identity foreclosure (Erikson's term for when someone locks into a role not through genuine self-discovery, but to escape the anxiety of not knowing who they are. You skip the messy middle and just... claim the thing). LinkedIn in 2026 is essentially a foreclosure machine. "AI-native" is the latest iteration. And before I sound like I'm cynical. I want to say I genuinely don't think most people doing this are cynical either. The pressure is here and we feel it, well, I certainly do. When a shift feels existential the brain moves fast to neutralize the threat by absorbing it. If I become the thing THEN it can't replace me. The result of all this is a professional culture that can't distinguish between a genuine signal and a coordinated circle jerk. And the people who do have real depth in this space? Most of them go quiet. Not because they're gatekeeping but because the conversation has drifted so far into performance that re-entering it feels exhausting. The loudest voices in any rapidly changing field are rarely the most calibrated ones. It always been like that but not it's just evident. So returning to Linkedin, it becomes kind of SPIRITUALLY thin. More than before. You end up with a professional environment that struggles to distinguish between signal and theater, between people who are genuinely wrestling with a new paradigm and people who have simply learned the right keywords early. It boils down to a thought that survival starts to masquerade as conviction.