The inbox has become a place where people talk past each other in the direction of an audience that has mostly already left.

This arrived at 5:00 PM Memorial Day. The sender is a financial planner. She seems like a decent person, and her name does not matter here because what she sent is not really about her, but the practice that has become so normalized that nobody in the industry notices it anymore.

Two sentences. That is how long the fallen get. “Not just in the military sense — although that’s the heart of this holiday.” One clause of concession, and then the pivot to financial legacy content is already underway.

I do not think they sat down this morning and thought: how do I use dead soldiers to sell retirement planning. That is not what happened. What happened is that somebody, somewhere, gave a talk or wrote a course or published a playbook that said: holidays are emotional moments, emotional moments are engagement opportunities, engagement opportunities drive clicks. And the sender, who is probably good at her actual job, followed the playbook.

That is the problem. Not the individual. The playbook.

• • •

Consider the phrase she used: “freedom is never free.” It is engraved into a wall at the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. The original attribution goes to Colonel Walter Hitchcock, a retired Air Force officer from the New Mexico Military Institute, who meant it as a specific expression of gratitude toward people who put their bodies between the country and its enemies. That is a serious idea stated with economy and weight.

Then came September 11, 2001. The phrase got picked up and amplified across two decades of war, and somewhere in that amplification it stopped being a specific thing said about specific people and became an all-purpose rhetorical lever. It appeared on bumper stickers, t-shirts, and cable news chyrons. More consequentially, it was used to justify the argument that protecting American freedom required Americans to surrender some of it. The USA PATRIOT Act passed 45 days after the towers fell. It authorized bulk telephone metadata collection, expanded surveillance of citizens without traditional warrant requirements, and gave federal agencies reach into the daily lives of ordinary people that would have been unthinkable the week before. The phrase “freedom is not free” did real work in that argument. It said: if you question this, you do not understand what freedom costs.

By the time the phrase lands in their email today, it has traveled from a Korean War memorial to a post-9/11 surveillance framework to a financial planning lead-generation sequence. It has been laundered so many times that nobody involved notices anymore. The phrase still carries the emotional weight of its origin. It just no longer carries the meaning.

• • •

The holiday itself has a similar story. Memorial Day started as Decoration Day, born out of the Civil War’s wreckage. More than 600,000 soldiers died in that conflict, and in its aftermath, communities across the country began placing flowers on graves before anyone had organized them to do it. One of the earliest recorded observances was organized by formerly enslaved people in Charleston, South Carolina, in May 1865, less than a month after the Confederacy surrendered. They gave proper burial to Union soldiers who had died in a Confederate prison camp on a former racetrack, held a parade, and decorated the graves. That is where this holiday comes from.

At the first formal national observance in 1871, Frederick Douglass stood at Arlington National Cemetery and warned the crowd that Americans were already beginning to forget what the war was actually about. He was right, and the forgetting has continued steadily since. By 1972, just one year after Congress moved the holiday to the last Monday in May to create a long weekend, Time Magazine was writing that Memorial Day had become what it called “a three-day nationwide hootenanny.” Congress moved the date. The barbecues followed. The meaning kept receding.

What they sent today is not an aberration. It is the logical end of a process that Douglass identified 155 years ago. When a serious thing gets converted into a cultural occasion, the cultural occasion eventually gets converted into a marketing beat. The pipeline is consistent. Only the product changes.

• • •

I spent years doing what you are supposed to do. Post consistently. Stay top of mind. Give value before you ask. Build the funnel. The advice is not wrong, exactly. It just describes a version of professional life that brings diminishing returns.

At some point business sites like LinkedIn stopped being a place where professionals shared things they had actually figured out and became a place where professionals performed the act of having figured things out. The distinction matters. While one produces signal, the other produces volume. And volume, it turns out, is the enemy of signal.

The people posting ten times a week are not wrong that it builds an audience. It does. But I kept asking myself: an audience for what? A steady stream of well-formatted observations about hustle and legacy and the lessons my grandfather taught me does not make me better at placing a $14 million commercial real estate loan or structuring a capital raise for a healthcare operator. It makes me better at performing the role of someone who does those things.

I opted out. I shut down the business pages. I stopped the calendar of content. The phone did not stop ringing.

• • •

What I kept was the writing I actually wanted to do. Notes From a Scribe started because I had things to say that did not fit anywhere else and I was tired of fitting them. I wrote an annotated response to a senator’s speech on Christian economics. I wrote an open letter to a county supervisor about water rights. I wrote about my father. None of it was optimized for anything. None of it was timed to a holiday news cycle.

That is not a meditation on authenticity. It is a description of what happens when you stop trying to stay top of mind and start writing because the thing actually needs to be written.

The person who sent me the email is not bad writing. The sentences are clean. The structure works. It just has nothing to do with Memorial Day. The holiday is a hook, not a subject. There is a version of this piece they could have written where they talked about a client who lost a spouse in service and what financial security actually meant to that family afterward. That would have been something. Instead they wrote a pivot, dressed it in a flag, and sent it at 5:00 PM on Memorial Day.

The inbox is full of pivots dressed in flags. We have hit peak email. I do not think the answer is better email. I think the answer is less of it, written by people who have something specific to say and are willing to let the calendar just be the calendar.

Colonel Hitchcock was writing about soldiers. Douglass was warning about memory. The women of Charleston were on their knees in the dirt over graves.

The least we can do is not use their work to book a discovery call.

Photo by sue hughes on Unsplash