Everything is blurry right now, mostly because I managed to get a dollop of peppermint shampoo directly into my left cornea about 11 minutes ago, but also because I’m reading a company-wide memo that feels like it was written by a ghost trying to haunt a spreadsheet. The sting in my eye is physical, sharp, and honest. The sting in the memo is existential. It says we are going to ‘leverage synergies to optimize core competencies moving forward,’ and as I blink through the suds, I realize that not a single person in this 201-person building actually knows what that means. We all just nod. We nod because to ask for clarity is to admit you aren’t part of the tribe, and in the modern workplace, being part of the tribe is often more important than actually doing the work. This is the great tragedy of corporate communication: it has stopped being a bridge between minds and has become a series of moat-building exercises designed to keep anyone from seeing that there’s nothing inside the castle.

The Mechanics of Evasion

I’m currently leaning against the bathroom counter, squinting at my phone. The memo has 41 bullet points. Each one is a masterpiece of linguistic evasion. We don’t ‘fix’ things anymore; we ‘implement remediations.’ We don’t ‘talk’; we ‘socialize concepts.’ If I treated my plumbing the way these people treat their sentences, my house would have flooded 31 days ago. But in an office, you can flood the basement with jargon and everyone will just bring their own scuba gear and pretend the water isn’t there. It’s a defense mechanism, plain and simple.

If you use vague language, you can never be held accountable for a specific failure. If the ‘synergy’ doesn’t ‘leverage’ the way it was supposed to, it’s not because you had a bad idea; it’s because the ‘ecosystem’ wasn’t ‘aligned.’ It’s a way of hiding in plain sight, using a wall of words to obscure a total lack of clear thinking. If you can’t describe what you’re doing to a 11-year-old, you probably don’t know what you’re doing yourself, yet we’ve built entire billion-dollar industries on the backs of people who couldn’t explain their job to a goldfish.

The Precision of the Welder

Take my friend Theo J.P. for example. Theo is a precision welder. He spends his days working with tolerances that would make a corporate vice president have a panic attack. When Theo talks about his work, he says things like, ‘The bead didn’t take because the surface tension was off by a fraction.’ He doesn’t say he’s ‘optimizing the structural integrity through a holistic heat-treatment paradigm.’ He just says the weld is good or the weld is bad.

There are 51 different ways to mess up a T-joint, and Theo knows every one of them because he has to. If he’s vague, something breaks. If he’s imprecise, someone might actually die. He lives in a world of 101-percent accountability. But as soon as you step away from the workbench and into the carpeted zones of the world, the language starts to soften. It becomes a velvet fog. We use passive voice-‘decisions were made’-to ensure that no human hand is ever seen holding the metaphorical smoking gun. We’ve traded the precision of a welder’s torch for the smudge of a bureaucrat’s eraser.

The Accountability Spectrum (Welder vs. Bureaucrat)

The Rot of Language

I’ve spent at least 81 minutes this week trying to translate one email from the marketing department. It shouldn’t be this hard. But the degradation of language is a direct reflection of the degradation of thought. When we lose the ability to speak clearly, we lose the ability to think clearly. We start to believe our own buzzwords. We start to think that ‘curating a journey’ is the same thing as selling a decent product. It’s a slow rot. It starts with one ‘moving forward’ and ends with a 21-page slide deck that contains exactly zero actionable information.

This is why people are so starved for anything that feels real. We are tired of the ‘pivot’ and the ‘bandwidth’ and the ‘deep dives.’ We want the truth, even if the truth is that we don’t know what we’re doing yet. There is a profound power in simplicity that most corporate leaders are too terrified to use. They think that if they don’t sound ‘professional’ (which is just a code word for ‘boring and opaque’), they won’t be taken seriously. But the most serious people I know are the ones who speak the least. They have the confidence to be brief.

When you look at something like Slat Solution, you aren’t being hit with a barrage of ‘spatial optimization narratives.’ You’re looking at a product that does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s about the material, the design, and the result. There is no jargon required because the quality is the argument. That kind of directness is a rare currency in a world that prefers to hide behind a screen of ‘deliverables.’

The Inefficiency Loop

I’m finally getting the soap out of my eye, and the world is coming back into focus, though it’s still a bit red around the edges. It’s funny how a little bit of pain can make you realize how much time we waste on nonsense. I have 111 unread emails in my inbox, and I’m willing to bet that 91 of them could be deleted without any negative impact on the global economy. We are obsessed with the ‘process’ of communication rather than the ‘purpose’ of it. We send emails to confirm that we received emails. We schedule meetings to discuss when the next meeting should be. It’s a 1001-loop of inefficiency, all wrapped in a layer of polite, professional garbage.

That’s the core of it, isn’t it? If I am perfectly clear with you, I am vulnerable. If I say, ‘I failed to finish the report because I got distracted,’ you know exactly who to blame. But if I say, ‘The report timeline was impacted by unforeseen shifts in the project scope and a lack of cross-functional bandwidth,’ I’ve suddenly turned my personal failure into a weather event. I’m not a person who messed up; I’m just a leaf being blown by the winds of the ‘ecosystem.’ We use jargon to erase ourselves.

Stripping to Bare Metal

I remember one time Theo J.P. was working on a custom gate. He had 31 different pieces of iron laid out on the floor. He didn’t have a manual. He just had an eye for the way things ought to fit. He told me that the hardest part isn’t the welding itself; it’s the prep work. It’s making sure the edges are clean. If there’s even a little bit of grease or rust, the weld won’t hold. Corporate writing is full of grease and rust. It’s full of the leftovers of previous failed projects and the oily residue of ego. We try to weld these rusty ideas together with the high-heat of buzzwords, but the joints are weak. They break the moment any real pressure is applied.

The Anatomy of a Joint

If we want our businesses-and our lives-to hold together, we have to start by cleaning the surfaces. We have to strip away the jargon until we get down to the bare metal of the truth.

The Final Reckoning

It’s now 121 minutes since I started this rant, and my eye is mostly fine, though I’m still a bit agitated. Maybe it’s not the shampoo. Maybe it’s the realization that I have to go back to that 41-bullet-point memo and pretend I understand what ‘actioning the paradigm’ means. We will spend 1 hour (which is 61 minutes if you count the time it takes for everyone to figure out the Zoom link) discussing ‘alignment’ while the actual problems remain untouched. It’s a strange way to spend a life.

Because if we lose the ability to speak the truth to each other, we’re just a bunch of people standing in the dark, throwing ‘deliverables’ at each other and hoping one of them sticks. And that, more than any peppermint shampoo, is a reason for your eyes to sting.