What happens when we’re asked to prove our worth to something that can never be convinced?
In the old story, Scheherazade tells one thousand and one stories. Not one. Not ten. A thousand and one – because the king only ever grants safety one night at a time, and every single night resets the count back to zero. Nothing she told him on night 400 is worth anything on night 401. She has to be good again. Tonight. From nothing.
That number is the whole point of the story, and it’s the part we’ve rebuilt at work.
The deal Scheherazade made
Her strategy wasn’t luck. It was a real skill, used deliberately, night after night, for survival. By the end, the king doesn’t just spare her one more night – he’s changed. He calls off the whole arrangement. All those stories add up to something permanent. She stops performing because she’s finally, actually safe.
That ending is what makes the story feel worth telling. Effort compounds. Skill, applied consistently, eventually converts into real trust that doesn’t need to be re-earned tomorrow.
The version we’re living now doesn’t have that ending
LinkedIn doesn’t work like the king. The king was a person, capable of being moved, of changing his mind, of remembering a thousand nights of proof and deciding they meant something. An algorithm can’t do that. It doesn’t accumulate an opinion of you. It has no memory of Monday’s post when it’s deciding what to do with Thursday’s. You don’t get to story number 1,001 and have it call off the arrangement. There is no night where it’s finally, permanently convinced.
So people do the only thing that seems to work in a system with no memory: they post again. And again. Constantly proving relevance to something that is structurally incapable of ever being fully convinced, because being fully convinced isn’t how it’s built. It’s not withholding trust from you. It never had trust to give in the first place.
Someone posts. Then, within the hour, they check it. Not once – several times, at intervals, the way you’d check on something that might still be alive. If the numbers move, there’s a small, real relief. If they don’t, there’s a small, real dread, and often another post follows sooner than it otherwise would have, as if to correct the silence. It’s easy to call this vanity. The explanation is probably deeper than that. It’s the same behaviour you’d expect from anyone managing a system that resets nightly and gives no forward guidance; you check because checking is the only information you get about whether tonight’s story worked. The pattern isn’t a personality flaw. It’s what a rational person does inside a structure with no memory and no fixed schedule of reward. Put a thoughtful person in that structure, and they will produce that behaviour, reliably, regardless of who they are.
That’s the real difference between the story and the job market copying its shape. Scheherazade was performing for a judge who could be won over. Most people online now are performing for a judge that can only ever be fed.
The problem isn’t that the king is difficult to satisfy. It’s that he was built not to be.
Scheherazade’s whole strategy rested on the king’s ability to be convinced. That’s what made the thousand and one nights worth the risk. Every story was a real bet, because a verdict was possible, and reaching it would end the arrangement.
An algorithm that ranks by engagement doesn’t work that way, and it’s not an accident. Platforms that rank content by predicted engagement keep people on the platform longer than a plain, chronological feed does. That’s the whole point. It isn’t trying to decide that you’ve proven your value. It’s designed to keep you proving it. A system that could be finally satisfied would stop producing the behaviour it was built to encourage.
Which means the goal so many people are chasing – that if they keep showing their value long enough, the proving will eventually be over – was never just difficult. It was never on offer.
So why do people keep doing it, knowing that?
It’s not really sunk cost, though it looks like it from the outside. Sunk cost is about not wanting to waste what you already put in. This is closer to something older and harder to argue yourself out of: nobody wants to become irrelevant. At the core of it, people aren’t chasing numbers. They’re chasing evidence that they still matter to a community they can’t afford to be exiled from. That’s one of the oldest needs a person has – to belong, to count, to be seen as someone worth keeping around. The platform didn’t invent that need. It just found an extremely efficient way to keep it slightly, permanently unmet, in doses small enough that walking away never quite feels like the safer option.
That’s the real trap in the story. Scheherazade was afraid of something that could actually kill her, and her fear pointed her toward a strategy that eventually worked. Our fear is just as real, but it’s pointed at a judge that was built to never deliver the verdict we’re working for.
And once the goal stops being to reach a verdict, something else happens. The quality that matters most is no longer being right. It’s being compelling enough to keep the performance going for one more round. A system without an endpoint doesn’t just encourage more stories. It changes what kind of stories get told.
And once storytelling becomes the thing being rewarded, something else happens. People start adapting to the reward system. It’s what people do. Over time, the question changes. Instead of asking whether something is true, useful, or meaningful, the system asks whether it performs. Many people seem to be searching for a verdict in a system that can only ever ask for another story.
So we end up with two systems stacked on top of each other, both quiet about what they’re actually doing.
One is a performance requirement with no legal name and no finish line – you can’t be ordered to do it, so no law protects you from it, and unlike Scheherazade, there’s no night 1,001 where it’s finally over. The other is a marketplace of stories that mostly can’t be verified because doing so publicly often breaks a social rule, outweighing the incentive to challenge the story.
The first system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. Complaining that it demands perpetual performance is a little like complaining that a treadmill keeps moving. That’s the point of the machine. The real question is what happens next. Once people start performing indefinitely, what standards does the audience apply to the performance?
But that isn’t the part that matters most
Scheherazade never had a choice about who was judging her. We do. The king in her story could be moved, and that possibility was the whole reason to keep telling stories.
The world is online now, and many of the people who make decisions about our lives are there too. Recruiters, customers, colleagues, investors, hiring managers. They all see the stories we tell.
Visibility and a verdict are not the same thing.
Human beings have always told stories. We tell them to explain who we are, what we’ve learned, what we’ve built, and what we believe. The mistake is thinking that enough stories, told well enough, for long enough, will eventually produce a verdict.
It won’t. The systems we’re performing for were never built to deliver one.