Performative Perfomance Ⅰ: Performative Intellectualism

 I started noticing it in meetings. Not the agenda. Not the coffee. Not even the unnecessary icebreakers. The way people speak. Everyone sounds like a press release now. Smooth. Neutral. Over-rehearsed. Sentences that begin confidently and end without saying anything at all. You leave the room unsure what was decided but very aware that everyone “contributed.” We are not thinking more. We are sounding smarter. There is a difference. It took me a while to name it. Performative intellectualism.

I noticed it first in corporate spaces. Meeting rooms where nothing is said beautifully. Decks filled with words like "leverage," "optimize," "synergy," "ideation," and "value alignment," language so polished it reflects your face back to you but tells you nothing about where the company is actually going. People don’t argue. They “add perspective.” They don’t disagree. They “offer nuance.” They don’t admit they’re lost. They say, “Let’s take this offline.” It is theater. Professional, well-lit, salaried theater. PowerPoint fluency is mistaken for thinking. Frameworks replace convictions. The goal is not clarity; clarity is dangerous, it can be challenged. The goal is to sound unembarrassable. Then you leave the office and find the same thing online. On Kenyan Twitter. On LinkedIn. In Instagram captions written like dissertations. Everyone is suddenly fluent in capitalism, trauma, feminism, masculinity, geopolitics, boundaries, healing, childhood wounds, generational curses, attachment styles, and productivity systems. Fanon is quoted by people who have never sat with his anger. "Decolonization" is used as seasoning. Therapy language is worn like jewelry. We trade in big words the way we once traded in opinions.

And maybe it makes sense. We are a generation that learned early that confidence is safer than curiosity. That saying “I don’t know” costs social points. That uncertainty does not trend. That being loudly wrong is better than being quietly unsure. So we build identities around being the smart one. Not the learning one. Not the listening one. The sounding-right one. Nowhere is this clearer than in the podcast industry. Long microphones. Short thinking. Everyone has a podcast. Everyone is “unpacking.” Everyone is “having important conversations.” But listen closely. Hosts summarize books they skimmed. Ask dramatic questions they will not sit with. Turn vulnerability into a personality trait. Confuse naming a problem with understanding it. There are endless episodes about money, masculinity, femininity, trauma, purpose, politics, God, hustle, soft life, hard life, healing, discipline, and relationships. So many words. So little responsibility. So little change. Conversations circle pain like drones, recording it from above, never landing. Nothing is resolved. Nothing is risked. Nothing is examined long enough to become inconvenient. Thought becomes content. Insight becomes branding. Depth becomes a tone of voice. And the audience learns the script too. We repeat what we’ve heard. We inherit opinions the way we inherit accents. We learn how to sound informed long before we learn how to think. Even in everyday life, it shows.

You meet someone for coffee, and they speak in headlines. You talk about love, and they reply with psychology. You talk about work, and they answer in management theory. You talk about God, and they quote a YouTube theologian. No one says, “I don’t know what I believe about this yet.” Belief must be immediate. Polished. Monetizable. But real thinking is slow. It stutters. It changes its mind. It contradicts itself. It embarrasses you in hindsight. Real thinking requires silence, and silence looks like ignorance in a loud world. Performative intellectualism is not about lying. It is about protection. Protecting the image of intelligence. Protecting relevance. Protecting authority. Protecting belonging. Because in a world where jobs are scarce, attention is currency, and adulthood feels like a group project no one explained, sounding smart becomes survival. So we perform. We wear big words like armor. We hide uncertainty behind theory. We mistake articulation for understanding. And slowly, we forget the difference. But sometimes, in rare moments, someone admits confusion. They say, “I don’t know.” Or, “I’m still thinking about this.” Or, “I might be wrong.” And the room shifts.

The performance pauses. You feel that small relief. That honesty. That intellectual nakedness. It is unsettling. And strangely comforting. Because maybe the real crisis of our twenties is not that we don’t know enough. It’s that we are terrified of being seen while not knowing. So we choose to sound intelligent instead of becoming it.