Before getting into the point, it is hard not to admit how exhausting social feeds have become. Ever since WeChat took off, timelines have been flooded with every kind of attention grab: endless selfies, photos of children, pictures of meals, vague emotional updates about feeling low today and sunshine tomorrow. Scroll after scroll, it all starts to feel like noise.
Among the kinds of people many say they would block without hesitation, three are mentioned again and again: those constantly selling products, those obsessed with posting selfies, and those addicted to posting feel-good life advice. The first two are usually easy enough to judge over time. The last type is trickier. Inspirational messaging can blur judgment, make bad ideas sound profound, and draw people in before they realize what they are consuming. That is why it can be more harmful. Some have even argued that reading too much of this kind of material lowers intelligence. That sounds exaggerated at first, but not entirely unreasonable.
A lot of people first encountered this genre through writers such as Dale Carnegie. There really were useful insights in some of that early material. But once the format became industrialized, the quality changed. It is like replacing a free-range bird with a mass-produced broiler and expecting the same soup. Once too many writers start manufacturing these messages, what comes out is no longer wisdom but a stale mix of shallow success worship and fake encouragement.
That backlash gave rise to what might be called the anti-chicken-soup movement. It became especially visible around the previous year. These pieces used many of the same techniques as the material they attacked, but with irony and a final twist. They would build toward one familiar uplifting lesson and then suddenly flip it, exposing what they claimed was the emptiness or hypocrisy underneath.
But anti-chicken-soup has not remained immune to the same habits. After a while, some of it began opposing for the sake of opposing. It hardened into its own formula and started walking down the very path it once mocked.
One of the most widely circulated stories in the tech world is the one about Bill Gates, still a teenager, meeting IBM's chairman and successfully pitching Microsoft's operating system. Critics of inspirational mythmaking responded with a counter-story: Gates succeeded not because of extraordinary talent or courage, they said, but because his mother was on IBM's board and helped secure the deal. Then came a second round of correction. Researchers later pointed out that Mary Gates was not, in fact, an IBM director. At the same time, she was hardly just an ordinary housewife. She had served on the board of the University of Washington and had worked with IBM CEO John Opel through United Way. So the simple inspirational version was questionable, but so was the simplistic debunking.
Another familiar example is the Einstein quote nearly everyone grows up hearing: success comes from 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration. Anti-chicken-soup writers insisted that the famous saying had been deliberately cut short, and that the missing second half was: "But the most important part is that 1 percent inspiration." That correction, too, was later challenged. According to further examination, what Einstein more likely meant was something closer to this: none of his inventions came about by accident; they ultimately owed something to 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration, and genius is simply a smart person who regularly gets their work done. Seen this way, the meaning is not very far from the popular version after all. After all the attacking and counterattacking, things circle back to where they started.
And that is the unsettling part. When the ideas one was taught are denied one by one, and then those denials are themselves denied, it becomes hard not to feel uneasy. What is actually true? What drives these cycles of fabrication, debunking, and re-fabrication by the chicken-soup crowd, the anti-chicken-soup crowd, and then the anti-anti-chicken-soup crowd?
Poirot once suggested that for a genuinely scientific mind, truth is the first priority. Unfortunately, detectives devoted purely to truth are easier to find in fiction than in real life. Yet fiction may still point to something important: what genuinely strengthens a person is not a polished conclusion that arrives already packaged as wisdom, but the judgment one forms while reading, questioning, and thinking through things alone.
In the end, perhaps the only workable rule is this: doubt everything, and trust your own mind.