The blue light from the monitor is currently drilling a hole through my retinas, a sensation made worse by the fact that I just spent 44 minutes clearing my browser cache in a fit of desperate, digital house-cleaning. It didn’t fix the lag, but it gave me a sense of control for exactly 4 seconds. Now, I am back in the 104-person Zoom meeting, and a Vice President whose name I can never quite remember is explaining that we need to ‘socialize the holistic framework to ensure we are properly leveraging our cross-functional synergies.’ I look at the grid of faces. Everyone is nodding. I am nodding. We are all participating in a collective hallucination where these words actually mean something. I’ve spent the last 24 minutes trying to translate that sentence into English, and the best I can come up with is: ‘Talk to people so we can do our jobs.’ But you can’t say that. If you say that, you aren’t a visionary; you’re just a person with a desk.

If a project fails, but you ‘realigned the strategic pillars to better serve the stakeholder ecosystem,’ did you actually mess up? Or did you just perform a complex maneuver in a language nobody actually speaks?

The Precision of Reality

My friend Sam F. doesn’t have this problem. Sam is a playground safety inspector. I watched him work the other day at a park that had seen better decades. He didn’t walk up to the rusted climbing frame and talk about ‘mitigating the risk profile of the recreational infrastructure.’ He knelt down in the dirt, pointed at a jagged piece of metal at the 14-inch mark, and said, ‘This bolt is going to rip a kid’s leg open.’

There is a terrifying, beautiful precision in that kind of language. Sam has to be precise because if he isn’t, 4 or maybe 14 children end up in the emergency room. In his world, words have weight. They correspond to physical things-rust, torque, gravity, impact.

Complexity is often just a shroud for incompetence.

But in the climate-controlled offices where we spend our 44-hour weeks, we’ve traded that precision for a kind of intellectual safety. If I tell you that our product is ‘bad,’ I’m making a claim that can be tested. If I tell you it ‘lacks the necessary value-add to achieve market-leading penetration in the current fiscal climate,’ I’ve built a fortress of syllables around my opinion. You can’t attack the fortress because you can’t even find the door. This erosion of language is, at its core, an erosion of thinking.

Craving Provenance Over Polish

I find myself craving the opposite of this fog. I want things with provenance. I want things that haven’t been ‘curated’ by a committee of 24 people who are all afraid of their own shadows. This is why, after a week of being ‘aligned’ and ‘synchronized’ until I feel like a gear in a machine that doesn’t actually produce anything, I find myself looking for authenticity in places where language still has to mean something.

It’s the same reason people have such a visceral reaction to something like Old rip van winkle 12 year. There is no verbal fog thick enough to hide a bad spirit. In that world, ‘provenance’ isn’t a marketing term; it’s a map of where the grain grew and who watched the fire. We need more of that in our spreadsheets.

I went back to my desk and looked at the 1004 unread emails in my inbox, and I realized that I was the problem. I was trying to use a scalpel in a room full of people who were only comfortable using hammers made of marshmallows.

The Irony of Automation

There is a deep irony in the fact that as our communication tools get more sophisticated, our actual communication gets worse. We have 44 different ways to message each other-Slack, Teams, Zoom, Email, carrier pigeon-and yet we understand each other less than ever. We’ve automated our vocabulary. We use ‘smart replies’ that suggest we say ‘Sounds great!’ or ‘Let’s circle back on this’ so we don’t have to actually think about what the other person said. We are becoming the AI we’re so afraid will replace us.

If I see the word ‘utilize’ one more time when the word ‘use’ would work, I might actually scream into my 4th cup of coffee of the day.

The Literal Cost of Abstraction

Sam F. told me a story about a playground in a wealthy suburb that wanted to install a ‘multi-generational interactive play-space.’ He looked at the blueprints and told them it was just a bunch of expensive plastic that would get too hot to touch in the summer. He told them the 104-degree heat would turn the ‘interactive zones’ into frying pans. They ignored him because his language wasn’t ‘visionary’ enough. They built it anyway.

Two months later, they had to shut it down because children were getting literal burns. That is the cost of the jargon monoculture. When you replace reality with words that sound good in a slide deck, people get burned. Maybe not literally in an office setting, but their spirits certainly do. Their brains go numb. They stop caring because it’s impossible to care about a ‘strategic pivot,’ but it’s very easy to care about a broken tool or a frustrated customer.

Speaking in Rust and Heat

I’m trying to be more like Sam. I want to point at the rust. I want to talk about the heat. I want to admit when I don’t know what a ‘leveraged asset’ is, even if it makes the VP look at me like I’m a prehistoric caveman who just discovered fire. Because at the end of the day-and I hate that phrase, but here we are-if we can’t speak clearly, we are just making noise in the dark. We are just 104 people on a Zoom call, nodding at a fog machine, while the playground outside slowly turns to rust.