Shiny tin, tarnished gold
Some phrases come to mind almost out of nowhere and then refuse to leave.
This one has stayed with me for days:
Shiny tin, tarnished gold.
I do not know if it sounds harsh. Perhaps it does. But the more I look at what is happening around us, the harder I find it to dismiss the thought as exaggerated.
I am not talking only about social media. It would be easy, and convenient, to place all the blame there. I am talking more broadly about the way we have learned to perceive value: the people we choose to listen to, admire, follow and trust; the figures we turn into role models; the way we evaluate success in politics, business, media, culture, personal relationships and, ultimately, in our own choices.
I do not believe we suddenly live in an age filled with people who lack substance. Nor do I believe that societies in the past possessed some magical ability to identify the truly valuable among us.
Tin has always existed.
So has gold.
What has changed dramatically is the intensity with which the first can now be displayed and the speed with which we are asked to evaluate it.
Today, someone does not need to wait years to build a public presence. In a relatively short period of time, with the right image, the right communication, enough repetition and constant visibility, a person can create an aura of success, influence or authority around themselves.
And that is not necessarily a bad thing.
There are genuinely remarkable people who have simply learned how to communicate their work well. There are people with real substance who found a voice precisely because technology gave them access to audiences they would never have been able to reach in the past.
It would therefore be just as superficial to claim that everyone who shines is hollow, or that everyone who remains in the shadows must be valuable.
The problem is somewhere else.
We have started to use visibility as a substitute for evaluation.
And that is where things become much more serious.
Our ability to distinguish appearance from substance is not formed at the moment we open a social media app. It starts much earlier, at home, with the people we grow up with and with everything we are taught to consider important.
It has to do with what our parents admired, what they praised, and how they spoke about success, money, education, dignity, power and social status. It continues at school and later through our own personal development.
This is where, for me, an important distinction appears: education is not the same as cultivation.
A person may have degrees, professional titles, career success and enormous technical knowledge and still never have learned to question a first impression. They may never have learned to distinguish confidence from competence, visibility from credibility, financial success from personal quality, power from authority, or image from real value.
Cultivation, at least as I understand it, is something much broader than knowledge. It is a way of looking at the world. It is the ability not to be impressed too quickly, to tolerate not having an immediate opinion, to be able to say, “I do not know enough yet.”
It is about observing what someone does when nobody is applauding, comparing words with actions and, perhaps most difficult of all, being able to walk away from a role model you once admired when the evidence starts to show that you were wrong.
That ability is not automatic. It is cultivated.
And with it come our principles, our values and, eventually, the very criteria by which we decide what is worth something.
Then society builds on top of all that.
And this is where things become much more complex, because society does not merely show us what exists. It constantly shows us what it believes deserves our attention: who is successful, who is important, who deserves to be known, who should have an opinion on everything and who should be everywhere.
That constant exposure gradually creates models of what success is supposed to look like.
The “successful” person is expected to look successful, to live in a certain environment, move in a certain way, have a certain appearance, speak with a certain kind of confidence, enjoy certain material rewards, have an audience, have visibility and, above all, have public confirmation that they have made it.
When that image is repeated every day and from every direction, it slowly stops feeling like one possible model of success.
It starts to feel like reality itself.
And this is where we need to be careful.
There does not always have to be some grand, organized attempt at “brainwashing” for a social perception to take shape. Sometimes there is conscious intent behind it, whether political, economic or commercial. Very often, however, there is simply a mechanism that feeds itself.
What attracts more attention is shown more often. What is shown more often becomes more recognizable. What becomes more recognizable gains more value in the eyes of the market. And because it gains more value, it receives even more exposure.
That is how someone can eventually become famous because they are famous and, even more strangely, acquire authority because they already appear to have authority.
This mechanism does not exist only on social media. It exists on television, in politics, in business, in journalism, in sport and across public life.
Very often, we choose whom to listen to not because we first evaluated their knowledge, but because many others are already listening to them. We trust someone because they are constantly in front of us, and the more often we see them there, the more natural it begins to feel that they belong there.
Visibility gradually becomes authority, and authority produces even greater visibility.
We can see this very clearly in politics.
Image management is nothing new. It has always existed. What has changed is the speed and intensity.
A politician today does not only need to govern or produce policy. They also need to manage, every single day, the image of that policy. They need to turn complex situations into simple narratives and respond to a public cycle that now operates almost in real time.
In such an environment, the ability to present can easily begin to outrun the ability to manage.
The same thing happens in business.
Someone who knows how to present themselves well can gain an advantage very quickly over someone who is genuinely good at solving problems but less skilled at communicating that ability.
Again, that does not mean good communication is a negative thing. Being able to explain what you do, present your work clearly and inspire others is an important skill.
The problem begins when the ability to present becomes more important than what is actually being presented.
Perhaps this is one of the defining characteristics of our time. Form often arrives before content, image before evaluation, and first impressions are already firmly established before substance has had time to appear.
This is where technology enters the picture.
And its relationship with all of this is far more complicated than it is often made to sound.
In theory, technology could be the greatest tool we have ever had for distinguishing real value from appearance. We can look up someone’s work, verify what they have actually done, compare statements made years apart, cross-check facts, examine results and discover people who have no access to traditional channels of exposure.
With artificial intelligence, those possibilities can become even greater.
In theory, we have never had more tools for discernment.
And yet the very same technology can make that discernment even harder.
It can create a better image, a better photograph, a better video, a better speech, a stronger public presence, better writing and a far more effective strategy of visibility. It can even construct a better version of ourselves than the one we actually present in everyday life.
Technology, then, is not simply a tool that helps us see more clearly.
It can also intensify the refraction.
I think the word “refraction” is particularly useful here, because it does not mean that what we see is necessarily false.
The light exists.
But it has passed through something before it reaches us.
Through an algorithm, a campaign, a filter, a recommendation system, a public-relations mechanism, artificial intelligence, or simply through the constant selection of what we are shown and what remains outside our field of view.
The result is that we may be looking at something real, but from an angle we did not choose ourselves.
And that matters.
Because in the end we may still insist that our choices are entirely personal. And of course they remain personal to a large extent. But how entirely personal is a choice that has been shaped over decades by family influence, education, cultural standards, advertising, media, social networks and now algorithmically personalized information?
I do not think the answer is that we are simply victims.
That would be far too convenient.
And it would remove from us something I consider fundamental: personal responsibility.
Because in the end, we still choose.
We may be influenced, but we decide whether we will examine those influences. We decide whether we will look a little deeper, whether we will question what everyone around us considers obvious, whether we will allow popularity to become synonymous with value, whether we will let financial success determine whom we admire as a person, or whether we will consider someone important simply because they speak loudly rather than because they genuinely have something important to say.
And somewhere here I return to cultivation.
Perhaps true cultivation is not only the ability to know more. Perhaps it is also the ability to recognize who is trying to choose for you before you make the choice yourself.
To understand when you are being impressed, and why.
To delay your judgment for a little longer.
To give tarnished metal enough time before deciding that it has no value.
Because precious metals have a quality we often forget.
They can lose their shine.
They do not stop being precious.
Tin, on the other hand, can be polished beautifully.
But shine does not change its composition.
So the difficult part is not to condemn those who know how to shine, nor to romanticize those who remain unseen. The difficult part is preserving our own ability to tell the difference.
And as society accelerates, as image becomes more powerful and as technology presents us with increasingly convincing versions of reality, that ability may become one of the most important forms of personal freedom we have.
If you think I am wrong or exaggerating, consider something very simple, whether you are a man or a woman:
who is it that attracts you?