It only took a late-night call with an old friend to realize how far we’ve slipped — a society so busy pretending to live that it forgot what living means. We run on wheels, scroll through feeds, buy careers like takeout, and call it progress, while the real essence of life — presence, debate, connection — gets quietly deleted
It’s a summertime affair … A song plays along from the web-radio { Shaggy , In The Summertime} while it’s 3 in the morning and I am in one of my “coffee break”, sitting in between the time-zones, somewhere between Weds night in Sicily and Thursday morning in Tokyo, more or less the same time when I take a break and leave my desk to make my way down to reach out my favorite coffee shop across the street.
A good excuse to come back to this blog, publishing a philosophical piece about ” societing“ , recruiting and how the order of things changed, drastically, nowadays. In a way, this post is strictly connected to the previous one, “Did Video Kill the Radio Star” posted months ago.
It started with a check-in call. A friend I hadn’t spoken to in years. You know the type of call — meant to be light, a bit of catching up, maybe laughing about old times. Instead it spiraled into one of those conversations where you suddenly realize the ground under your feet has shifted. We ended up debating society, isolation, the so-called “perfect model” of life, and how we’ve all become prisoners in what looks like freedom.
And we had to admit: people today don’t really live . They rehearse what REM called an “imitation of life.” It’s a copy, a performance. You’re not who you are, you’re what you belong to. Your job title. Your apartment. Your social rank. Your paycheck. Your LinkedIn summary. Life reduced to status paperwork — a bureaucratic survival kit disguised as identity.
The real essence — creation, reflection, connection, even boredom — is suffocated. And here’s the paradox: never so connected, never so isolated.
I call it hikikomori-ism . It’s not just the Japanese kid locking himself in his room. It’s the global condition of this century. Living in an apparently sociable environment — likes, chats, networks — while quietly retreating from reality. We are all hikikomori-ing in plain sight. Appearing social, active, productive, while cutting ourselves off from genuine presence. It’s the illusion of interaction without the reality of encounter.
Covid just fast-forwarded the tape. The street got replaced by the screen. Dating became swiping. Friendship became messaging. Shopping turned into a box at your door. Work shrunk into a rectangle on Zoom.
Efficiency won. Humanity lost. And the philosophers had already warned us.
Foucault gave us the panopticon — the prison where you behave as if always being watched. That’s Instagram today. Orwell gave us Big Brother — but Big Brother doesn’t even need to spy anymore, because we willingly feed him everything: photos, locations, status updates, confessions wrapped as captions. Baudrillard warned that we’d end up living in simulacra , copies of reality presented as the real thing — scroll through any social feed and tell me if that isn’t exactly it.
And then Byung-Chul Han , the prophet of burnout, said it all: we are not crushed by oppression, but by the endless performance of supposed freedom. We are exhausted by our own self-exploitation.
Meanwhile, society looks more and more like Calhoun’s rat experiment. Resources everywhere, and yet sterile lives. Hamsters on wheels — jobs, rent, bills, bureaucracy, survival. Round and round. We mistake the treadmill for life itself. But it’s not life. It’s mystification. It’s the same REM song on repeat.
And here’s where it hits me hardest — in recruiting.
Because all these dynamics are not abstract to me. I see them play out every day in the market. Candidates treat their careers like a pre-fixed menu. Click, add to basket, checkout the next job title.
” One VP with fries, please “
.They avoid real conversations: No coffee chats. No long debates about career choices. No discussion of life-changing factors. Just bullet-point expectations and a quick request to be “kept in mind” for the next opportunity, like ordering sushi on Uber Eats.
Post-Covid, this has infected the talent market. Employees put in less effort, employers lower their standards, and hiring becomes about filling seats instead of finding the right fit. The rules of engagement collapsed. The art of headhunting got squeezed into a cold process.
And yet, if there’s one role still fighting for humanity, it’s the headhunter who hasn’t given up on his craft. We are the last human piece of the puzzle. The only ones who look at the apathy and say: no, this isn’t good enough.
And maybe that’s the real antidote. Rehumanization.
We drag candidates out for coffee, push them to look beyond the career checkbox, remind clients that talent isn’t a spreadsheet. We’re the ones still stubborn enough to believe recruitment is about people, not processes.
Rehumanization means forcing presence back into the system. Meeting instead of messaging. Talking instead of ticking boxes. Cooking a meal together instead of ordering it separately. Creating because it matters to you, not because it trends. Looking up at the street, sky, sea, faces — instead of down at the algorithm.
In recruiting, it means remembering that a career isn’t a product. It’s a life. And the headhunter is not just a vendor. He’s an advocate. The only one still crazy enough to keep human capital human.
Because if we don’t switch soon, we risk becoming the first society in history that dehumanized itself willingly. Handing over reality in exchange for convenience. Handing over community in exchange for content. Handing over careers in exchange for career menus.
Social poisoning is the disease. The cure is us. Heads up. Eyes open. Voices unmuted. Hands extended.
And in the talent market, the cure is the headhunter who refuses to give in. The one still fighting to keep conversations alive, to keep choices real, to keep careers human.That’s how we rehumanize a socially dehumanized society.
The Banking Insider 