Have you ever heard so much talk? The whole country is having a yarn. The whole world is having a yarn – every phone a broadcast studio, every second person a podcaster – and the supply, for the first time in history, is effectively infinite, and infinite things are worthless.

The most listened-to voices in the country are no longer singing top forty hits; now it is forty various men talking, for three hours at a stretch, about everything and nothing. That is the sound of the country in the background now. Not a melody. A monologue.

Talk was not always free. For most of history you had to have done a thing to earn the right to talk about it – the man who spoke about war had been to one, the man who told you how to build had built – and that kept the volume down, because most people, most of the time, had the sense to stay quiet about what they had not done.

You can still see the honest version. A special forces man did hard and unspeakable things in his twenties, in places he still cannot name, and now sits behind a microphone while millions listen. He is the real article. He paid for every word in advance, in a currency most people could never handle. He did the thing and then he talked about it – in that order.

Thousands of men listened to him and drew exactly the wrong lesson. They saw where it led and wanted to start at the end. Now they want the microphone. So, they begin crafting a personality – the sleeve tatts, the Freddie Mercury moustache, a fresh membership at a Brazilian jiu-jitsu gym. The special forces man did the thing and then talked about it. The posers skipped straight to the talking, because talking is free and doing is not.

And then what?

There are two ways to mistake talk for action and nearly everyone is caught by one.

The first is the talkers. The ones who narrate a life instead of living one, who hold a position on everything and have tested none of it, who have said the thing so many times they have started to believe saying it was the same as doing it. There are more of these every year, because the tools to broadcast keep getting cheaper and the audience for confident men rarely runs out.

The second is quieter, and far larger. The consumers. The men who broadcast nothing and would never dream of it, but who take it in three, four, five hours a day. Awake. Engaged. Across every subject under the sun. Who really built the pyramids. What actually happened on that island. What they are not telling you about what is in the sky. He finishes a session genuinely more informed – he does know more. He has assembled, at home, on the couch, a working understanding of the hidden architecture of the world.

And then what?

The pyramids were built thousands of years ago. Whatever the truth of them, it will not be settled by him and it will not change one thing he does tomorrow. He will wake up. He will go to work, or not. The lawn will need mowing. It needed mowing last week.

And then what?

He knows who really runs the world now. He listened to forty hours on it. The knowledge sits in him, complete and useless, because there is not a single action available to him that follows from it. Meanwhile the shed door still does not close properly. It has not closed properly for a year. He has watched more footage on global order than the door has ever asked of him, and the door is the only one of the two he can actually do anything about.

And then what?

This is the con at the centre of the whole economy of talk. It feels like doing. It lights up the same part of a man that real action would light up – the sense of being switched on, engaged, part of something that matters – and it asks nothing of him and changes nothing around him. It is action with the doing removed. A man can spend a decade like this and mistake it for a life.

Which brings us back to the word everyone is chasing and nobody can hold.

Authenticity is the currency now. Every politician wants it, every brand has focus-grouped its way toward the appearance of it, every man with a microphone is selling some version of the real, unfiltered him. And the harder they reach for it the more obviously it slips, because authenticity is the one thing that cannot be performed. The moment you perform it, it is gone. It is not a manner. It is not a voice you can practise or a jacket you can borrow. It is what is left of a person when the performance is stripped off them – and the only thing that strips the performance off a person is consequence.

Think of the people you actually trust. Not the ones you find entertaining – the ones you would want in the room when something goes wrong. The nurse who has watched a patient turn and knows, before the machine does, that this one is going the wrong way. The doctor who has to say the sentence nobody wants to hear and cannot outsource it. The police officer who walks toward the thing everyone else is running from and has about a second to get it right. The situation is real, the cost of getting it wrong is real and it lands on them with a name attached.

That is where the real is made. Not in the telling – in the standing there when it counts, with something at stake and no microphone between you and the consequence. You can hear it in a man in three seconds. You cannot fake it.

The talkers have none of it, and they know it, which is why they reach so hard for the sound. But the sound was never the thing. The thing is made one way only – out there, at cost, where the screen cannot follow.

So here is the question and it is the only one worth taking from any of this.

You have heard the confident men. You know who really built the pyramids and who really runs the world and what they are not telling you about the sky. You are, by any measure, extremely well informed.

The lawn needs mowing.