To my eye, the entire fascination of unsafely injecting peptides in a desire to change your being is largely the opposite of sincerity.
No, it's really a form of sincerity permitted by a sort of willfully affected naivete—adopted in pursuit of the strategy of Twain's amateur:
> The best swordsman in the world doesn’t need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn’t do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn’t prepared for him; he does the thing he ought not to do: and often it catches the expert out and ends him on the spot.
— 1889, Mark Twain, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”
Hence why the "disruptors" so frequently, so irritatingly blast through Chesterton's Fence and/or market regulations.
Only one amateur in my portfolio need "catch" the incumbent "out".
The rest can live out the rest of their short degenerate lives as the failed experiments that they are. This does however have the side effect of turning the entire town into a society of failed degenerates...
The willful part turns the sincerity into nihilism, people who utter sentences like:
"I could fill a notebook of quotes from this conversation. “They change your personality, it’s literally made me less shallow knowing that we can just looksmax you.” “Ugliness is just a choice now.” “I shot up a twink with ozempic who did not need to lose any weight.”"
pretty obviously don't sincerely believe what they say, quite the opposite, it's just a giant joke they're consciously in that would go away they moment they ran out of venture money or whatever finances these parties and lifestyles. These people all sound like William Gibson characters which they are aware of because they're the type of people to register that, it's like the Great Gatsby but with cringy nerds
Is giving "guy who's only seen Boss Baby" vibes.
Of course we can warp the semantics and argue that these people are "sincere" in their desire to defraud retail investors or something, but that doesn't seem to be the author's argument.
Fundamentally, the vast vast majority of founders who exit successfully made society better somehow.
But ... it's also true that founders who exit successfully are like 0.001% of the Bay Area's population, but we talk about them like they're 10% ... so we should all stop talking about them so much ;)
"Useful" is quite the euphemism.
> Fundamentally, the vast vast majority of founders who exit successfully made society better somehow.
This is an extraordinary claim.
But there are lots of people with a sincere mission who we don't hear about, because they're quietly working toward their goals.
That doesn't say that their goals are worthwhile or that what they're doing is actually good for the world, but they can still sincerely believe it is.
Most of them fail, and we hear about precious few of them. That doesn't make them any less sincere either.