Whoring

On the People Led Astray by “Market Reasoning”

Mar 09, 2026

“all beautiful people remain optimistic”

—Pavlo Petrychenko

Again, that’s obvious. It’s very, very important to create human systems that are hard to cheat. Otherwise, you’re ruining your civilization because these big incentives will create incentive-caused bias and people will rationalize that bad behavior is okay.

—Charlie Munger, Poor Charlie’s Almanack

They’ve come to that threshold beyond which words lose their utility.

—Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water

Whenever I check back in with social media, I always find the same people doing the same whoring. Because of capitalism, people get defensive about that metaphor, which does not surprise me. Corporations would have us all enslaved by the seductive mechanisms of fame and attention-seeking if they could. That they haven’t yet is not for lack of trying.

The responses from the people captured by market reasoning tend to run the gamut from:

“Who are you to denigrate whoring?”

“Everybody’s a whore if you think about it.”

After the dissembling and semantic games, we come eventually to some version of:

“What’s wrong with whoring in the first place?”

Nothing.

I don’t judge.

There’s nothing wrong with whores or whoring except that whores lack scruples. In a whore’s mind everything has a price, everything can be bought. Life teaches whores that nothing is sacred, that everything is transactional. So they wind up like Larry Wheels on Matan trying to justify why it’s okay to work exceptionally hard across multiple domains and achieve status and fame most men will never experience just to be allowed to purchase a plastic wife who neither loves nor respects him. That’s such a sad fate for ambitious men. Surely that’s not the best that men have to look forward to. Is it?

If capitalism has been unsuccessful at convincing you that ethics and morality are the exclusive provinces of the naïve, or that life is best spent on your knees on a hamster wheel chasing cheese, or that adhering to principles external to yourself is the same as being weak...

By which I mean: If you happen not to be a whore, you understand that by definition some things can’t be bought. You can’t buy love. You can’t buy loyalty. You can’t buy integrity or discipline. You cannot purchase respect, serenity, or peace. The closest you will come is to eventually amass enough resources to be able to purchase property and fealty. But those are not the same. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, which is only right since the only place the monarch can find love or understanding is by looking down. You can buy things that look like love, things that feel like love, but you cannot purchase love because intimacy with a price tag is prostitution not love, and companionship with a price tag is conditional and therefore either parasitic, employment, or worship.1

What you read reveals a lot about who you actually are. What you read, and your ability to reason, marks you as someone shallow, or someone comfortable at depth. What you read defiles you as surely as what you write, as surely as what comes tumbling from your brain’s metaphorical mouth. As surely as what you make legible in the world with your actions.

I read more manuscripts than can be considered glamorous. Manuscripts submitted to me by executives, by religious leaders, by entrepreneurs, by influencers, by politicians, by world champions, by scorned housewives, by successful diplomats. I learn a lot about people’s character because of it. It’s harder to hide when you write. People wear all sorts of masks on socials and in person. It’s instinctive given the Machiavellian habitats that form their ecosystems. But your true self leaks out in a manuscript like it does when you are being tested.

Like policemen, like teachers, like psychologists, like investors, like lawyers, like bouncers, like any cashier in any liquor store, editors see the same people repeated. Lots of people come to me with what they think are profound quotes the world hasn’t heard enough of. Quotes that inspired them. Quotes they may even have engineered an entire reason for living from.

And then they meet me. A man who has told thousands of aspiring writers that the profound quote they fenestrated themselves such that they could absorb the errant principle into their bloody insides was never said by the person they imagine said it. And who can prove it.

I get to look at their social media. I get to take stock of their character by whether they accept they were wrong, whether they issue a correction or retraction to their followers or fans, or whether they get irate and attack me for the apparently unforgivable sin of knowing too much. Or maybe the sin of being able to prove what is true. Who knows which of these offends their egos most?

Your pity here is misplaced. The philosophy that birthed the assembly line—that birthed tract homes, franchise restaurants, corporate office interiors, endless sequels, and seasonal fashion—can hardly be faulted for being prejudiced against anything unique.

Whenever you meet someone pretending that these platitudes have meaning or that they were written by someone influential, know that you are in the presence of someone captured by market reasoning. You are in the presence of a liar or a victim. Likely both.

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts,” cannot be attributed to Winston Churchill because he never said it.2

“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled,” cannot be attributed to Samuel Clemens or his much more famous nom de plume, Mark Twain, because he never said it or wrote it down anywhere.3

Some of these people who have large audiences and follower counts, people whose very identity hinges on a continued public performance that they are successful and more importantly that they can communicate the process of success to an audience who should then be able to reliably replicate it (since that is the supplement or course or mastermind they’re selling) reveal to me quite early that they are liars. I understand why angel investment return rates are so low, despite never having been an angel investor.

I understand why all these leaders pantomime competence despite the world being a tragic, disastrous reflection of the best they were able to accomplish.

Lots of people pitching, lots of people claiming expertise, lots of people aspiring to leadership didn’t even read the books they claim to be inspired by. It’s not just that they’re lying. They are actors, acting. Their very persona is a lie. For them, selling, branding, and pitching is indistinguishable from lying. They’re always selling, so they’re always lying. And they didn’t fact-check the quotes they posted to “inspire” you to get good at selling either.

Let’s you and I do a bit of easy math. If they’re not good at lying, what’s the odds they’ll actually be good at the thing they’re saying will benefit the economy such that investors will receive high return on their investment? What’s the odds the thing they’re selling benefits you?

The rot is systemic, you see? It spreads, it is communicated virally, like venereal disease.

What’s the point of even hiring whores who are better at lying than they are at whoring? Especially when they’re clearly not that good at lying.

Thanks for reading The Space Before Epiphany! Share with a friend. Or an enemy. 😈

Too many people with access to the internet fall victim to “market reasoning.” They adopt a worldview dominated by economic frameworks and project this framework onto everything they see or think about. You see this on the internet everywhere:

High value men / High value women
Relationship marketplace
Attractiveness rated solely by appearance
Competence / success rated by the appearance of wealth

All of this is just status competition arbitrated by capitalist metrics. It is presented as objective when it isn’t. It is also usually presented as amoral when it is immoral. This is precisely how people justify human slavery. When market reasoning becomes the dominant interpretive frame, people begin treating things that previously had intrinsic value as tradable goods. Social media intensifies market framing. Behavioral economics documents how attention platforms convert “identity” and relationships into currency.

Quantification of status (followers, likes, impressions)
Algorithmic reinforcement of attention-seeking behavior
Creator economies where personal identity becomes monetizable product

Shoshana Zuboff calls this “surveillance capitalism.” Attention is captured, measured, and sold to advertisers. The incentive structure is simple:

Visibility → attention → monetization.

Once this becomes a primary pathway to success, people begin treating themselves as brands. And they and their followers suffer the knock-on downstream effects. Malaise, burnout, dissatisfaction, depress+ion, anxiety, feelings of worthlessness, a decline in supportive, nourishing relationships. They live in a ruminative thinking feedback loop of perpetual suffering where pretty much the only time they feel good in life is when their team is “winning.” And their team only ever wins at the expense of the people on the other side. This is a good way to manufacture perpetual conflict that can be endlessly monetized. And with all these “teams” constantly pitted against each other, society eventually dies.

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