Life & Wisdom Quote by Terry Prachett

Pratchett turns vanity into a systems joke: the dream of modelling is kept intact while every inconvenient part of actually modelling is outsourced. The line works because it’s built like a perfectly balanced piece of comic accounting. He admits incompetence upfront ("wouldn't be any good") not to show humility, but to clear the runway for the real target: the absurdly elastic idea of identity in a world that sells surfaces.

The punch is in the bureaucratic phrasing of self-delusion. "Employ someone" sounds like sensible management-speak, the language of delegation and efficiency, applied to something that can’t survive delegation without becoming nonsense. Modelling is the performance of a body in public; hiring a proxy reveals how much of celebrity culture already functions this way. We consume "the brand" and accept that teams of stylists, ghostwriters, and handlers manufacture the person we’re meant to believe is singular. Pratchett pushes that logic one step further until it snaps: if someone else walks, is it still you?

"It would still be me, of course" lands with that signature Pratchett deadpan, pretending the conclusion is obvious when it’s plainly deranged. Subtextually, he’s skewering a culture that treats representation as reality and treats reality as an inefficient backend. Long before "influencers" became job titles and avatars became assets, Pratchett saw the loophole: the self as a legal fiction you can subcontract.

It’s also a writer’s joke about authorship. You can’t physically be in the scene, so you build an agent, a voice, a character to act for you. The laugh is recognition - we’re all already outsourcing ourselves, then insisting the output counts as the original.