Why everyone’s playing a game they hate?

Scroll through any platform, and the pattern repeats. Motivational lines. Dopamine hacks. Everyone building a brand. It’s not surprising right? Obviously, the system rewards visibility.

What gets seen, grows. And that’s shaping how we understand disruption too. Disruption has become synonymous with speed, noise, and surface-level traction. It’s not about depth. It’s about how fast you can signal innovation and how loud.

But often, real innovation is slow, quiet, and deliberate. It solves real problems but gets buried because it doesn’t perform for the algorithm.

And here’s the trap: everyone’s acting rationally inside a broken system.

• Community builder thinks: If I don’t post regularly, no one will see the real work.
• Media thinks: If we don’t publish what gets clicks, we’ll lose reach.
• Platform prioritizes engagement, not depth because that’s what keeps people scrolling.
• Audience thinks: I’m just trying to keep up with the latest trends.

Individually, no one’s wrong. But collectively, this creates a feedback loop where perception becomes reality, fast, loud, and shallow gets mistaken for valuable, disruptive, and important.

It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. The system pushes what performs. We start copying what the system pushes. Eventually, what could have mattered gets buried because it didn’t look like what people expected disruption to be.

There’s also a speed mismatch. True change takes time. Trust takes time. But the system moves in seconds. So we shrink big thinking into quick content. We oversimplify to stay visible and in doing so, lose the nuance that real work needs.

We’ve outsourced our sense of value to metrics, virality, and perception. That’s the real problem. So the question is

How do we build systems that reward the right kind of innovation?

Because as long as attention is the currency, we’ll keep optimizing for the illusion. And even the push for better systems won’t survive if no one sees it.

And here’s the tricky part! Even the transition to a better system needs visibility to work. Pure quiet revolution isn’t enough. To actually shift things, we’ll have to play the game just enough to change the rules.

Cheers!

PS: Different ecosystems, same trap!

Check out the other post: #DecodeAgri02: Who Shapes the System?

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