Congratulations on Monetising Your Inner Life

“Resilience, patience, and grace were the hallmark words for me in 2025… I’ve also learned to trust the pause and the unknown, leaning into the possibilities ahead.” 

“2025 wasn’t just another year for me. It was a year of learning in silence, of showing up even when clarity was missing, of choosing discipline when motivation faded. I’ve grown, not just in skills, but in patience, self-belief, and resilience.”

“This year was a rollercoaster of change, that taught me more than I expected and forced me to pause and reflect on my own journey.”  

“ My biggest reflection is learning to be comfortable with the uncomfortable. It was in those moments of uncertainty that some of the most unplanned and rewarding outcomes emerged. When I finally allowed myself to pause and really reflect on what was best for me, I found a sense of clarity that had been missing.”

“2025 was a year of really solidifying my leadership style. I’ve learned that it’s not only okay to lead as my true self…but also to lead in ways that feel good: treating people with respect, speaking honestly, and staying clear.” 

Every December, LinkedIn blooms with a familiar genre: the “year in review” post. Ostensibly reflective, these essays chronicle not just professional milestones (I plead guilty on that count) but profound inner transformations. Work, we are told, has taught their authors humility, resilience, presence, gratitude, grace, compassion, authenticity. Careers no longer merely pay salaries; they midwife spirits and souls. Call it what you want - work, employment, graft, hustle - but judging by the earnest self-help boilerplate language it has become a spiritual practice. Capitalism, it turns out, was just a misunderstood path to enlightenment. We are so #blessed.

There is something faintly and sadly miraculous about how reliably these posts arrive at the same conclusion: that the self, fully enlightened and properly optimised, is the most valuable asset on the balance sheet. Self-actualisation is framed not as a human right or existential struggle, but as a productivity lever. Inner peace is valuable insofar as it enhances output. Resilience and presence are important insofar as they equip us to weather the grind of delivering next quarter’s expectations. Compassion is to be sought insofar as it makes for more persuasive leadership. The soul is welcome - so long as it invoices or does its timesheets.

This is not accidental. As the philosopher Byung-Chul Han has observed, contemporary power no longer disciplines us from the outside; it persuades us to exploit ourselves willingly, under the banner of freedom and self-realisation. We come to experience pressure as purpose, exhaustion as growth, and self-optimisation as authenticity. What a time to be alive.

What we are witnessing is the full maturation of a toxic ideology: the colonisation of inner life by work. At the heart of these posts is a category error masquerading as wisdom. They collapse the distinction between being a person and being an employee. Experiences that are universal, painful, and deeply human - failure, grief, loss, doubt - are reframed as professional development assets. Suffering is rendered meaningful only once it can be narrated as “learning.” If a hardship does not improve performance, it risks being morally suspect: an inefficiency, a missed opportunity to “grow.”

This insidiuous logic does not merely instrumentalise work; it completes the process by instrumentalising the self. The inner life becomes a resource to be mined, fracked, optimised, and - perhaps most importantly of all - showcased. Though only ever humbly. And sometimes pepperered with weirdly infantalising emojis. The result is a strange and ugly inversion: instead of work serving human flourishing, human flourishing is justified by its service to work.

There is, of course, another possibility: that these rituals are less about insight than reassurance. As the anthropologist and political thinker David Graeber argued, the psychological toll of meaningless work is not boredom but doubt - the quiet fear that one’s days do not add up to anything that truly matters. In that light, the year-in-review post begins to look like a coping mechanism more than anything else: a public act of narrative manipulation designed to rescue dignity from emptiness. If the job feels hollow, the self must be rendered profound. If the labour lacks consequence, the inner journey must supply it. Reflection becomes not a by-product of experience, but a compensatory performance - a way of convincing both audience and author that something important really was happening all along.

The language of spirituality is particularly revealing. LinkedIn is awash with references to mindfulness, awareness, stillness, presence, compassion, purpose, authenticity… terms sanitised and stripped of their ethical or philosophical roots and redeployed as corporate accelerants. Ancient practices designed to loosen the grip of ego (or even challenge its very existence) are repurposed to make the ego more resilient under pressure. Detachment becomes a way to tolerate unreasonable demands. Acceptance becomes a way to endure the unacceptable. Gratitude becomes a way of coping with another pay rise-free year. This is not spirituality; it is stress management with a halo. Or an incense burner, a half-read copy of a Jay Shetty paperback, and a yoga classpass that promised more than it delivered.

In its original forms, spiritual traditions were often explicitly critical of worldly ego-centric ambition and the endless pursuit of more as sources of suffering and moral confusion. Their corporate adaptations, distortions, and misrepresentations cunningly invert this critique. They promise inner peace without requiring any challenge to existing power structures. One can meditate one’s way through systemic injustice, breathe through precarity, and journal through exploitation. The problem is never the system; it is always your mindset. My favourite and much missed cultural theorist Mark Fisher called this the privatisation of stress: a world in which systemic pressures are experienced as personal inadequacies. Anxiety becomes a failure of resilience. Burnout becomes a failure of reflection. If something is unbearable, the conclusion is not that it should change - only that you should cope better.

Which brings us to the most pernicious feature of the LinkedIn enlightenment movement: Its moralisation of success. These posts implicitly suggest that professional achievement is evidence of deep and hard-won personal growth, while stagnation or failure signals insufficient self-work. If you have not thrived, perhaps you did not reflect hard enough, adapt fast enough, optimise deeply enough. Structural factors - class, luck (on which I have written at length before), discrimination, economic volatility - fade into the background, replaced by a narrative of individual mastery.

This is profoundly comforting to those at the top. It allows privilege to masquerade as wisdom and survival as virtue. It reassures the successful that their position is not merely advantageous, but deserved - earned through insight, resilience, emotional intelligence, and profound inner work. But this story also comes at a cost. It quietly erases those for whom work is not a journey of self-discovery but a site of exhaustion, alienation, or harm. It leaves no language for righteous anger, refusal, or grief that does not resolve into a tidy, system-appeasing, algorithm-pleasing lesson learned. It denies the legitimacy of simply wanting a job to be a job - not a calling, not a crucible, not a foundry for hammering out a better self.

There is also something quietly coercive about this enforced introspection. The expectation is not merely that you perform well, but that you mean well - publicly, eloquently, and on schedule. You must at all times be reflective, grateful, and growth-oriented. Cynicism is a failure of character. Ambivalence is the presenting symptom of a trouble-maker. Exhaustion is proof of failed adaptation.

In this way, the year-in-review post functions as a loyalty oath. It signals not just competence, but ideological alignment. It reassures employers, clients, and networks that you have fully embraced and internalised the logic of the system - that you will dutifuly metabolise its pressures into personal development rather than collective critique. You will not ask whether the work is necessary, only how it can make you better so that you can continue producing it without ever questioning why it exists.

What is lost in all this is the radical idea that human worth is not contingent on productivity, insight, or employability. That growth does not need to be turned into a narrative to be real. That work can be useful, tolerable, even meaningful at times - without being the primary site of identity, morality, or transcendence.

A genuinely humane, honest, and complete account of work would be far less flattering. It would admit that many jobs are boring, absurd, or damaging; that organisations often reward conformity over wisdom; that burnout is frequently a rational response to unreasonable conditions. It would allow people to say: “This did not make me a better person, it just paid the rent”. And that would be enough.

So when the next wave of LLM-optimised LinkedIn enlightenment scrolls past - so earnest, so polished, so inspirational, so straining for validation and approval - it is worth asking what it is really doing. Is it offering insight, or enforcing a norm? Is it genuine reflection, or is it reputational maintenance? Is it wisdom, or simply another way of saying: “I am still useful”?

So here’s a thought. In a culture that insists work can save us, perhaps the most subversive lesson is this: It doesn’t have to.