The Great Flattening: Why Everyone Sounds Like a LinkedIn Post Now

Part 1 of 5 in the Unrepeatable Series

Everyone's business content is starting to sound like it came out of the same machine. That's because a lot of it did. Here's the fix — and it starts with you actually showing up as you, not the smoothed-out version.

I'll go first. I'm almost 50. I'm a mom hauling two kids between practices and games most nights of the week, and if I had one open Saturday with zero obligations, I would spend every hour of it at the barn, smelling like a horse, saying almost nothing to anybody. I'm an introvert who finds small talk mildly unbearable — genuinely, ask me about the weather and watch my soul leave my body — and I have zero interest in complicated. I want the simple version of everything: the simple system, the simple plan, the simple truth. That's not a bio blurb. That's the lens every single thing I write gets filtered through, whether I mention horses or not.

Notice I didn't smooth any of that out to sound more "coachy." That's the whole point of this post.

Scroll through ten small business accounts back to back and try to tell them apart without looking at the name. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Same font. Same "here's what I learned" caption arc. Same three-bullet listicle that says nothing in three tidy ways instead of one. Same headshot smile that's been optimized within an inch of its life.

I used to think this was a copycat problem — everyone borrowing the same successful person's format. It's worse than that now. AI didn't invent bland, it just made bland free, instant, and available to anyone with a login. The going rate for "competent and forgettable" just dropped to zero. Meanwhile, original still costs something. It takes a spine, and honestly, it takes not caring quite so much what the polished version of you would think.

That's good news, actually. The bar to stand out just fell through the floor. All you have to do is the one thing the software can't fake: be specifically, inconveniently yourself.

You Don't Have an Originality Problem. You Have a Permission Problem.

Almost nobody I talk to actually lacks a distinct voice. They lack the belief that the distinct voice is allowed anywhere near the business. So they sand it down. They write the caption a "professional" version of themselves would approve of, instead of the one they'd actually mutter under their breath while mucking a stall or sitting through yet another team snack rotation email chain.

That sanding-down is the flattening. It happens one hedge-y, could've-been-anyone sentence at a time, until the whole page reads like it was written by a very polite stranger who has never once wanted to skip a networking event to go stand in a field with an animal that also doesn't do small talk.

The Exercise: The 10-Second Gut Check

No spreadsheets, no printing out ten posts, no homework you'll "get to later." Just pull up the last thing you posted — right now, in your head — and ask one question:

Could literally anyone else in my industry have written this?

Not "was it good." Not "was it true." Just — is it mine, or is it a rental?

If the honest answer is "yeah, pretty much anyone could've posted that," you've found your Generic Index. It's not a number, it's a feeling — that flat, forgettable, could-be-anyone hum. Most of us live there more than we'd like to admit. That's not failure, that's just where the starting line is for basically everybody, myself included.

Why This Actually Matters

That feeling — the "anyone could've written this" hum — is a signal, not a verdict. It's telling you exactly where you quietly handed your personality over to "what's expected" instead of "what's true."

A reader scrolls past generic and feels nothing, because there's nothing there to feel. And in a feed full of AI-flavored sameness, forgettable isn't neutral anymore. It's expensive. It's the difference between someone remembering your name in six months and someone remembering "a woman who posted something, once, about mindset, I think."

The opposite feeling — the one where a post feels a little too you, a little too specific, maybe even slightly exposing — that's the thread. We're pulling on it for the rest of this series.

This Week's Action

Run the 10-Second Gut Check on your last post. Actually do it — right now, before you close this tab.

Then rewrite one sentence from it as bluntly-you as possible. Not more polished — less. Say it the way you'd actually say it if you'd stopped performing and just told the truth in as few words as possible, because let's be honest, you'd rather be doing literally anything else than wordsmithing a caption for twenty minutes.

One sentence. That's the whole assignment. We're not overhauling your brand voice in a weekend. We're just noticing, one honest sentence at a time, where you've been quietly disappearing into "professional."

Next up: Post 2, "Your Origin Story Is Your Moat" — where we dig up the specific, unrepeatable material only you have, and turn it into content that outlasts a trend cycle.

If this is something you're actively wrestling with — sounding like yourself again in a noisy, AI-flattened space, minus the small talk — that's a lot of what I do with my private clients. Send me an email if you want to chat.