My face is on the screen, and I didn’t mean for it to be. I am staring at my own chin, which looks surprisingly soft in the blue light of the 29th floor’s afternoon sun, while our Director of Growth drones on about ‘leveraging synergies to operationalize key learnings going forward.’ I had joined the call thinking my camera was off, so I was currently mid-yawn, a wide, unvarnished expression of physical boredom that is now being broadcast to 49 people across three time zones. Nobody says anything. They just keep nodding, their own faces frozen in that polite, corporate masks of ‘active listening.’ It is a terrifying mirror. I see myself-not just my face, but my position in this machine-and I realize that the words being spoken have no weight. They are floating. They are cotton candy made of battery acid.

We have reached a point where language is no longer a tool for communication, but a shield against it. When my manager asks us to ‘realign strategic imperatives,’ she isn’t actually asking us to do anything specific. She is casting a spell. Jargon is a cognitive anesthetic; it numbs the part of the brain that asks ‘wait, what does that actually mean?’ because to ask for clarity is to admit you aren’t part of the tribe. If you don’t understand what it means to ‘socialize a deck,’ you are the problem, not the phrase. But the secret, the one we all keep while we stare at our pixelated reflections, is that nobody knows what it means. It is a linguistic ghost, a placeholder for an idea that hasn’t been thought through yet.

The Clarity Mandate

I think about Zoe C.-P. often. She is a friend who designs escape rooms for a living, a job that requires the absolute opposite of corporate obfuscation. In Zoe’s world, if a clue says ‘turn the wheel,’ and the player turns the wheel and nothing happens, the game is broken. There is no room for ‘optimizing the wheel-turning experience.’ She once told me over a $19 drink that the hardest part of her job isn’t the puzzles; it’s the language. She has to strip away every possible ambiguity. If she uses a word that could be interpreted in two ways, she has failed. In her escape rooms, 9 times out of 10, people get stuck because they overthink a simple instruction, assuming there must be a ‘deeper corporate meaning’ to a sign that literally just says ‘Pull.’ We have been trained to distrust directness.

This reliance on jargon is a form of intellectual laziness. It’s easier to say we are ‘leaning into a pivot’ than to admit that our original plan failed and we are currently panicking. It allows us to sound authoritative while saying absolutely nothing. I’ve seen 109-page slide decks where not a single sentence contained a subject, a verb, and a clear object that didn’t involve the word ‘ecosystem’ or ‘holistic.’ It creates a culture where the goal is to survive the meeting, not to solve the problem. We are all just trying to reach the end of the 59-minute calendar block without being found out.

And what happens when we can’t describe the problem accurately? We lose the ability to fix it. If you can’t say ‘the software is slow because the code is messy,’ and instead have to say ‘we are experiencing latency issues in our digital touchpoints due to legacy architecture integration challenges,’ you have effectively moved the problem into a realm where it cannot be touched by human hands. It becomes an abstract weather pattern, something that happens to us, rather than something we created and can therefore dismantle. It’s a way of avoiding accountability. You can’t fire a ‘strategic imperative’ when it fails to deliver; you can only ‘re-pivot.’

I remember one specific project back in 2019. We spent 9 weeks ‘veting potential avenues for disruption.’ We had meetings about the meetings. We had ‘syncs’ to prepare for the ‘alignment sessions.’ By the time we actually got around to looking at the product, the market had already moved on. We had spent $979 on artisanal catering for a ‘brainstorming retreat’ where the only thing we brainstormed was a new list of acronyms. It’s a feedback loop of nonsense. The more jargon we use, the less we understand. The less we understand, the more jargon we need to hide our confusion.

There is a deep, soul-level exhaustion that comes from this. It’s the feeling of being a ghost in a machine that only speaks in binary code made of buzzwords. We crave something that feels like it has blood in its veins. We want to be spoken to as if we are humans, not ‘human capital.’ This is why, outside of these sterile glass boxes, we seek out spaces where communication is direct, visceral, and unmediated. We want to be heard, not ‘processed.’ We want to feel something that hasn’t been ‘vetted for brand consistency.’

The Rebellion of the Self

This is why I find myself retreating more and more into personal expressions. In my spare time, I don’t want to ‘optimize’ my life. I want to live it. I want to use tools that allow for a level of creativity and personal resonance that my day job actively discourages. I want to build things that are weird, specific, and totally mine. This drive for authentic, personal creation is exactly what platforms like ai porn generator tap into. It is the antithesis of the corporate ‘we.’ It’s about the ‘I.’ It’s a space where you can generate images and personas that are based on your actual desires, not a focus group’s idea of what is ‘marketable.’ It’s a rebellion against the vague, the grey, and the ‘holistic.’ In a world where your manager is a series of jargon-filled emails, having a space for clear, personal, and imaginative expression is a necessity for staying sane.

I once spent 29 minutes explaining to a junior analyst why we couldn’t use the word ‘sad’ in a report. We had to use ‘sub-optimal emotional resonance.’ He looked at me with such genuine confusion that I felt a sharp pang of guilt. I was teaching him how to disappear. I was showing him how to bury his own observations under a pile of linguistic rubble so that if the report was wrong, he wouldn’t be the one standing there holding the shovel. It’s a defense mechanism, but it’s also a suicide of the spirit. Every time we choose a buzzword over a real word, a small part of our ability to think for ourselves withers away.

There’s a 49% chance that as I’m typing this, someone is scheduling a meeting to ‘discuss the optics’ of a project that doesn’t even exist yet. The sheer volume of non-thought is staggering. We are building cathedrals of air. I think back to my camera-on mishap. The most honest moment of that entire day was my yawn. It was a physical fact. It was an undeniable piece of data. It said more about the state of the company than the 199 slides that followed it.

We need to start being terrified of the word ‘utilize.’ We need to treat ‘synergy’ like a warning sign. If you can’t explain what you do to a 9-year-old without using words that end in ‘-ize’ or ‘-ation,’ you probably don’t know what you’re doing either. You’re just riding the wave of noise, hoping no one notices you’re not actually swimming. Zoe C.-P. has it right: if the door says pull, just pull. Stop trying to ‘reimagine the entry-way experience.’ Just open the damn door.

The most honest moment of that entire day was my yawn. It was a physical fact. It was an undeniable piece of data.

I’ve started a small experiment. In every meeting, I try to use one word that is ‘unprofessional’ but accurate. Words like ‘clunky,’ ‘boring,’ or ‘confusing.’ The reaction is always the same: a brief, 9-second silence where everyone looks around to see if they’re allowed to agree. It’s like a crack in a dam. For a moment, the jargon stops, and you can see the humans underneath, blinking in the light, remembering what it was like to actually say something that meant something. It’s a small victory, but in a world of ‘strategic alignments,’ it feels like a revolution.