3,000 years ago, Qoheleth surveyed everything done under the sun and called it vanity. Not pride — emptiness. The striving after wind. Labor that produces nothing that lasts, accumulates nothing that matters, leaves nothing behind worth finding.
He would have recognized LinkedIn immediately.
The flood of AI-generated content that fills every feed right now is not primarily a quality problem. It is a vanity problem. Content produced not because there was something to say, but because the algorithm rewards posting. Because silence looks like absence. Because everyone else is publishing, so you must too.
The tool didn't create this. The tool made it cheaper.
The barrier to publishing was never the writing. It was having something worth saying. Remove the writing barrier without removing the emptiness barrier, and you get an avalanche of nothing — dressed in confident prose, structured in three points, ending with a call to action that leads nowhere.
Qoheleth's diagnosis was precise: vanity is not about what you produce, it's about why. Work done for its own sake, for appearance, for the striving — that is the problem. The medium is irrelevant. A hand-written empty thought is still empty. An AI-generated profound insight is still profound, if it came from somewhere real.
The question AI forces us to ask — and that most people are avoiding — is not "did a human write this." It is "was there anything here worth saying." That question predates the tool by at least three thousand years.
A chasing after wind.
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We spent years worrying about machines writing like humans. Turns out the real problem is humans writing like machines — for the same empty reasons.