The Representatives
Most of our meetings are held by people who aren’t actually there.
Most days, I send a representative. He looks like me, sounds like me, uses my name. He shows up to the meetings, has the conversations, holds the eye contact, says what needs to be said. He is fluent, polite, well prepared. He is also not me.
Most of the people he meets are not the people they appear to be either. Their representatives have shown up too. The four of us sit down for coffee — two beings absent, two stand-ins very much present — and a conversation happens that everyone, afterward, agrees was real.
The representatives are very good at their job. They have years of training. They know the opinions to hold, the stories to tell, the right facial expressions for sympathy and amusement and concern. They listen — to a point — and they respond. They almost never say the wrong thing. They almost never say the surprising thing either.
If you watch closely, you can see them at work. Notice how, in any given conversation, most of what comes out of your mouth has come out before. A flicker of thinking, a half-considered reaction, a phrase you’ve used a hundred times. And while you speak, the other person isn’t quite hearing you. They are listening through their own running commentary — what to say next, how they are coming across, what you remind them of, whether they agree. Two minds, each mostly listening to itself, near each other.
That’s the representatives, doing what they do best.
Which leaves the question I keep circling. Where, then, is the human? Not the construct. Not the persona. The actual one, with breath and bones and a heart still working. Where am I, when my representative is doing all the speaking on my behalf? Where are you, when yours is doing the same?
The honest answer, most of the time, is: not in the room. The representatives are handling it. They are well-trained, fluent, and competent. They report back afterward — that went well, you were charming, here’s what comes next — and we believe them, because the report is detailed and the meeting did, in some sense, happen.
But the beings themselves? Somewhere else. Daydreaming, half-watching, vaguely tired. Sometimes not even that — just absent in a way no one notices, including us.
Maybe this is why the rare moments when someone actually arrives feel so disproportionately alive. A long silence that isn’t filled. A tear that wasn’t planned. A sentence that surprises the speaker as much as the listener. These are not better conversations. They are a different category of event entirely. Two humans, briefly, in the same room. The representatives, for a moment, stepping aside.
Mostly we don’t get there. Mostly we don’t even notice we weren’t there.
I’m not sure what to do with this observation, except to notice it. To catch the representative sometimes mid-sentence and ask, quietly: who is talking right now? Is anyone home, on either side?
Sometimes the answer is yes. More often, it is a long pause, and then a slightly more honest sentence than the one the representative was about to say.
Maybe that is the whole practice. Not silencing the thoughts. Not firing the representative — he is, after all, very useful, and most of the time the world is asking for him anyway. Just noticing that he has been doing the talking. And quietly, occasionally, taking the microphone back.
Richard Singer is CEO and Co-founder of Radically Human Ventures, the holding architecture for a portfolio of ventures restoring one billion lives to their fullest human potential by 2036. Through the leaders we form. Through the ventures we build. Through the integrity we hold.