Over the past few years I have noticed something with increasing clarity: we have learned to communicate better, and I am not at all sure we have learned to have more to say.
We have better cameras, better microphones, better software. We know the opening hook, the ideal length, vertical format, subtitles, editing, pacing, the call to action. We know a sentence has to land quickly, that dead time needs to be cut and that content has to keep people watching. None of that is necessarily bad: form matters. The problem begins when, after studying the container for so long, we forget to check whether there is anything left inside it.
When the medium becomes the center
I notice it most when I look at businesses, because that is the world I work in. Many have finally understood that they cannot behave online as though the internet were still a digital Yellow Pages. Good. But then something strange happened: instead of asking themselves what do I need to explain better?, they started asking what do I need to publish?
The two questions sound almost identical, but they aren't. The first starts from something that exists and looks for the best form to make it understandable; the second starts from the need to fill a space. That is where perfectly full editorial calendars and surprisingly poor ideas come from.
Social platforms, of course, are not the problem. A platform bears no moral responsibility for whether or not you have something interesting to say. It is a tool. Tools do have one characteristic, though: we tend to adapt our behavior to the things they measure well. If we see views, we chase views; if we see followers, we chase followers; if we see watch time, we build things designed to increase it.
At some point the medium can stop being the tool through which we reach someone and become the subject we are trying to please. The customer, the reader or simply the person on the other side moves into the background; the algorithm remains.
Attention is not trust
It may be the most important distinction I have learned over these years: attention is borrowed; trust is capital.
Attention can arrive in seconds thanks to a good hook, a provocation, a controversy, a familiar face or a sentence simple enough to make someone angry. Trust obeys completely different physics: it needs time, consistency, evidence, repetition and experience. Sometimes it is built precisely in those moments when you could have told the most convenient version of the story and chose the truer one instead.
Confusing the two is one of the great misunderstandings of the platform age. Being seen does not mean being believed; being remembered does not mean being respected; being popular does not mean being preferred when a decision has real consequences.
Content is what remains when you remove the format
Every now and then I run this experiment in my head: I remove the video, the editing, the face, the audio, the colorful subtitles and the hook. Is anything left?
If the answer is yes, we probably have content. If the answer is no, what we mainly produced was form. That is not necessarily useless: entertainment has dignity of its own, making someone smile has value, and not everything has to teach something. The problem begins when someone who wants to explain, inform, sell expertise or build authority borrows the form of entertainment and then assumes that form has automatically produced substance.
It is also why I find the short circuit of trends fascinating. We often use them to stand out, but a trend works, by definition, because it can be replicated. Thousands of people try to look original at the same time by doing the same thing: same hook, same pace, same audio, same joke, same edit. The nutritionist starts to look like the personal trainer, the doctor like the restaurateur, the entrepreneur like the creator, and the creator like every other creator.
At some point we are no longer borrowing a language; we are borrowing a personality. It is paradoxical that this happens in the very era that talks obsessively about personal branding and authenticity.
Trends and identity run on different clocks
A trend lives on speed: you have to catch it while it exists. Identity lives on accumulation: you become recognizable because, over a long period of time, certain things remain yours. A way of thinking, an aesthetic, a set of obsessions, even a few flaws.
That is why I think trends and identity can coexist, but only if we know which is serving which. You can use a contemporary language to say something that belongs to you; it becomes a problem when you have to invent something to say simply because there is a contemporary format waiting to be filled.
Then there is an even simpler reason: thinking is hard work; copying a format is much easier. Truly understanding an issue takes time, study, a willingness to find a contradiction and perhaps change your mind. It also means risking the discovery that the thesis you started with does not hold up.
A format, by contrast, is reassuring because it gives you a structure before you even have a thought to structure: hook, problem, three points, conclusion, CTA. It is easy to feel that you have produced something before confronting the harder part, which is figuring out what you actually think.
This isn't only about businesses
This is where, for me, the issue stops being a marketing problem. It applies to information, politics, education, conversation and even the way we construct our public identity.
We have learned the forms through which an opinion looks convincing: the punchy sentence, certainty, simplification, the tone of someone who has no doubts. Confidence in delivery has become easy to confuse with knowledge, and generative tools are making the line even thinner, because today we can build an impeccable form around a mediocre thought in a matter of seconds.
Perhaps that is precisely why substance will become more important, not less.
I will keep making reels, writing hooks, studying data and looking for the best way to make a message understandable. I don't think the answer to superficiality is poor communication; on the contrary, good form is a gesture of respect toward the person who has to receive something.
The point is to remember the hierarchy: first comes what I want to say, then I choose the best way to say it.
The problem isn't making reels. The problem is making reels with nothing to say.
And perhaps it isn't really about reels either. It is about everything we have learned to make look interesting before asking whether it actually was.