u/mr_john_234

I think buyers have started filtering cold emails the same way people filter LinkedIn posts now.

Not technically. But mentally.

You see the first two lines and you already know what’s coming.

“Loved your recent post about scaling revenue ops…”

“Quick question…”

“Thought this might be valuable…”

Then some vague business advice that could apply to literally any company with a website.

The weird thing is that some of these emails are probably “good” by old standards. They’re clean, personalized enough, not full of obvious mistakes, and maybe even sent to the right person.

But they all have the same shape.

And once everyone has the same AI tools and the same outbound playbooks, that shape becomes the spam signal.

I don’t think the issue is just deliverability or targeting anymore. A lot of buyers can smell the template before they even process the offer.

The stuff that still gets my attention usually has one specific thing that proves a human actually looked at me or the company.

Not fake personalization like “I saw you’re hiring.”

More like a weirdly specific observation, a sharp one-liner, or something visual/custom that clearly wasn’t dropped into a prompt and mass-produced.

I’m starting to think AI is better used for research and finding the right hook, not for writing the actual message.

Let AI help figure out what might matter. Then have a human add the part that makes it feel like it was actually made for that person.

I think a lot of cold email personalization is just fake effort now.

A lot of it means finding some random detail about the prospect and using it as an opener. Their podcast. Their college. Their dog. Some LinkedIn post from months ago.

But if the pitch has nothing to do with an actual problem their company is dealing with, that’s not personalization. That’s just showing me you know how to stalk LinkedIn.

To me, real personalization is understanding what might actually be going wrong on their side and making the email relevant to that.

A random personal detail might get attention for a second. But that’s not the same as making someone care.

That’s the part I think people messed up. They started optimizing for “wow, they researched me” instead of “this is actually relevant to me.”

And AI made that even worse. Now it’s easy to generate a custom opener that sounds specific, but the actual message is still generic.

So the email feels personalized on the surface, but the core pitch is the same copy-paste stuff.

I’m not saying personal details are always useless. Sometimes they work fine as a light opener.

I just don’t think that should be the whole personalization.

If it doesn’t connect to a real company problem, timing, or priority, it mostly feels like decoration.

I used to think strength meant winning.

More money. More respect. More control over life.

But honestly, every time I got something I badly wanted, the satisfaction lasted like 2 days before my brain moved onto the next thing.

That’s what made me start noticing ketu differently.

Ketu energy feels less like “success” and more like being forced to sit alone with yourself after the noise dies down.

No distractions. No validation. No fake identity to hide behind.

And that’s where it gets uncomfortable.

Because most of us are trying to control the outside world while being completely controlled internally by fear, ego, comparison, jealousy, approval, etc.

People call ketu harsh because it takes things away.

But I’m starting to think it removes whatever had too much control over you in the first place.

What’s weird is that some of the calmest people I’ve met had objectively difficult lives. But they also seemed the least desperate. Like they already understood something the rest of us were still chasing.

Makes me think if the real battle was never external at all.