Everyone thinks technology made life easier.

Message people instantly. Read news anytime. Watch any series on demand.

It didn’t really make life easier. It just changed what people suffer from.

The beginning of two beautifully articulated words turned parents into comparison machines and children into idea factories: Artificial Intelligence.

First it was newspapers. Then social media. Now, every morning, someone discovers a teenager who built an AI startup.

"Look at this boy."

I look at the article.

"Dad, this is just an AI wrapper."

"It raised money."

"How?"

"I don't know."

"Neither do the investors."

Everything today is AI-powered, revolutionary, disruptive, or game-changing. Even if it's just a calculator wearing a hoodie.

The funniest part is that nobody knows what any of these words mean anymore—but everyone nods anyway. I watch people react to a new AI feature the same way Gollum reacted to the Ring: "My precious."

Three months later, they forget it exists.

The Hype Lifecycle

1. Discovery
2. Obsession
3. Conference Talks
4. LinkedIn Posts
5. Abandonment

The real question was never whether something uses AI. The real question is whether anyone will still care about it next year.

Chapter 1: Convenience That Didn’t Feel Convenient

Technology was supposed to remove effort. That was the pitch. Message anyone instantly. Watch anything anytime. Know everything in seconds.

On paper, life got easier. We don’t send pigeons anymore. Nobody is running across towns to deliver a message. In reality, nothing actually got easier. We just lost the ability to disappear.

We didn't create convenience. We created a system where the world could compare, judge, and evaluate you without waiting.

Chapter 2: The First Wave of Comparison (The Newspaper Era)

Before social media, before LinkedIn, before AI-generated teenagers founded startups between lunch breaks, there was the newspaper. Parents had limited information back then, but they decided to be detectives that would put the FBI to shame.

A parent would open the morning paper and read:

"Local boy gets into Google" or "Local student wins international scholarship."

This meant your day started with a morning you wouldn't forget.

The good news was that newspapers had limits. There were only so many successful people printed each day. If nobody achieved anything extraordinary, you got a day off. Modern children never understood this luxury.

• Back then: Parental disappointment operated on business hours.
• Today: It runs on cloud infrastructure.

A newspaper article lasted a day. A comparison lasted a week. Then everyone forgot. Life moved on. The newspaper era was peaceful—not because parents compared less, but because technology hadn't figured out how to automate it yet.

Chapter 3: Social Media Made It Global

Before social media, you were usually compared to the neighbor's kid who was academically strong, or some mysterious student who supposedly studied under a candle and still topped the class. Life was manageable.

Then social media arrived and said: "What if everyone became your competition?"

Suddenly, you were no longer competing with people in your city. You were competing with:

• A teenager from Singapore who speaks six languages.
• A startup founder from California.
• A chess champion from India.
• A 14-year-old on YouTube explaining economics better than your university professor.

And somehow, all of them appeared on your phone before breakfast.

Social media achieved something remarkable: It turned billions of strangers into relatives. Every scroll became an opportunity for someone else's success story to find you.

At some point, I stopped asking whether these stories were real. I became more interested in how they kept finding me. Social media didn't create comparison; it just gave it fiber-optic internet, cloud infrastructure, and an unlimited marketing budget.

Chapter 4: LinkedIn Turned Success Into a Feed

Social media made comparison global. LinkedIn made it professional. That was the upgrade nobody asked for.

At least on normal social media, success was scattered—a vacation photo, a random achievement, a motivational quote written after emotional damage. You could scroll past it. But LinkedIn removed all randomness. Now everything is structured, optimized, and professionally disappointing.

Every morning begins the same way. Someone wakes up and decides to “humbly announce” they have changed the trajectory of human civilization.

• “Grateful to share…” (Nobody is ever ungrateful to share).
• “I am excited to announce…” (Nothing announced on LinkedIn has ever been boring).

Then comes the list:

• Built a startup
• Raised funding
• Scaled globally
• Disrupted something that was probably doing completely fine

And somehow, they are 19 years old. Meanwhile, I am 24 and still deciding whether I am a morning person or just unemployed in different time zones.

The worst part is not the success stories. It’s the consistency. LinkedIn didn’t create ambition; it industrialized it. Now success is not an event. It is a feed.

Chapter 5: AI Turned Everything Into Achievement Inflation

Then came Artificial Intelligence, and suddenly every achievement became unstable. Before AI, you could at least understand what people built. Now, everything sounds like it was generated during a caffeine overdose.

[ Your Idea ] -> [ API Wrapper ] -> [ Gradient UI ] -> [ "Revolutionary AI Workflow" ]

Nobody builds apps anymore. They "leverage intelligent systems to revolutionize workflows," which usually means they wrapped an API and added a flashy UI. And somehow, this is enough to raise funding, write 30-part Twitter threads, and become a “thought leader.”

Tech feeds have turned it into a daily sport:

• Season 1: “AI will change everything”
• Season 2: “This AI will replace everything”
• Season 3: “This AI is everything”
• Season 4: “Actually this AI is useless, but here’s a thread anyway”

You open your feed and see:

• “This AI tool is INSANE.” (Translation: It auto-completes text slightly differently).
• “This will 10x your productivity.” (Translation: You will now procrastinate 10x faster).
• “This changes everything.” (It did not change anything. It just changed how confidently people can be wrong in public).

Chapter 6: The Daily AI Hype Championship

At this point, AI stopped being technology. It became a daily competition for who can sound the most excited about nothing. Tech influencers wake up like it’s a live broadcast event: “BREAKING: New AI model just dropped.”

Dropped where? On a GitHub repo, and immediately onto 47 LinkedIn posts explaining why humanity is finished.

Meanwhile, reality is much simpler: People still copy code from Stack Overflow. They just do it faster now.

The funniest part is the 14-day lifecycle:

• Day 1: “This will replace engineers.”
• Day 3: “This needs human oversight.”
• Day 7: “Actually, it’s not that reliable.”
• Day 10: “Here’s how to use it properly.”
• Day 14: Abandoned. New model drops. The cycle restarts.

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The Ultimate Question

AI didn’t replace jobs. It replaced boredom. Now even hype is automated, optimized, and scheduled. And the influencers? They are just narrating updates like sports commentators who don’t understand the game but refuse to stop talking.

At some point, it stops being about technology, progress, or AI. It becomes a different question entirely:

• Are they building for the hype... or for the field?
• Are they creating because they see a real problem... or because they see an opportunity to sound impressive while solving nothing?
• Are they solving something that actually breaks in the real world... or just wrapping normal ideas in AI jargon so it feels like innovation?

Everything looks the same on the surface: AI-powered, revolutionary, game-changing. But underneath the noise, the question has never changed:

Is this built to last, or just built to be posted?