I am staring at the fluorescent light reflecting off the mahogany table, and I realize my fingernails are still slightly raw from pulling at the green plastic wiring of the Christmas lights I spent all afternoon untangling. It is July. The heat outside is a punishing 94 degrees, the kind of humidity that makes your skin feel like it was applied by a clumsy wallpaper hanger. Inside, however, the air conditioning is a surgical chill, humming at exactly 74 degrees. My manager, a man who wears expensive vests regardless of the season, is leaning forward. He says, “We need to leverage our key learnings to operationalize a paradigm shift in our go-to-market strategy.” He looks around the room, chin tilted, as if he’s just recited a lost stanza of some grand epic. 44 eyes stare back at him. Everyone nods. I nod too, even though I have no idea if we are selling software or starting a revolution.

We use these words as a kind of linguistic camouflage. If I sound like a textbook, you can’t see the person underneath who is currently wondering if they left the stove on or why they spent 234 minutes of their weekend untangling lights for a holiday that is still five months away.

I’ve been in this industry for 14 years, and I still find myself falling into the trap. Yesterday, I told my spouse that we needed to “optimize our domestic logistical throughput” when I really just meant we needed to buy more milk before the store closed. I’m part of the problem. I’m a high-functioning addict of the abstract. We all are. We’ve been conditioned to believe that clarity is a sign of simplicity, and simplicity is a sign of a lack of intelligence. If I can explain my job to a 4-year-old, then maybe my job isn’t worth the $104 an hour the company bills for my time. So, I complicate. I add layers of verbal insulation. I transform a simple “we made a mistake” into “there was a misalignment in our strategic execution which resulted in a suboptimal outcome.”

This obsession with obfuscation signals a deeper rot in the culture. It’s a move toward an artificial in-group. If you know what a “verticalized integration” is, you’re one of us. If you don’t, you’re just a guest. It creates a barrier that prevents genuine feedback. How can you criticize a plan that you don’t actually understand? You can’t. You just nod and hope that by the time the “go-to-market strategy” fails, you’ve moved on to a different “ecosystem.” It’s a defensive crouch. By using words that are non-falsifiable-words that have no fixed meaning in the physical world-you can never truly be wrong. You can only be “re-contextualizing.”

I think back to those Christmas lights. They were a mess of 334 individual bulbs, tangled in a way that defied the laws of physics. I sat on my porch, sweating, and I didn’t use any fancy words. I just looked at the knots. I saw where the green wire went under the red one. I applied tension. I waited. It was honest work. There was no way to “leverage” the tangle. I just had to touch it.

Corporate life is an attempt to live without touching the tangles. We want to solve the problem with a slide deck of 24 pages rather than getting our hands raw on the plastic. We want the result without the friction of the process.

Clarity Over Mission Statements

This is why I find myself gravitating toward things that are intentionally, stubbornly clear. There is a certain honesty in architectural elements that do exactly what they say they do.

For instance, the tactile reality of Slat Solution offers a clarity that no mission statement can match; it manages sound because of its physical properties, not because it “socialized a document” about acoustics.

In our meeting, the manager is now talking about “unlocking hidden value.” I look at Carlos J. He is looking at his notes. He has written the number 44 and circled it 4 times. I realize later that 44 is the number of minutes we’ve been in this room. That’s 44 minutes of human life, of potential, of breath, traded for a series of sounds that mean nothing. We are burning our most precious resource-time-on the altar of looking professional. I once wrote a 34-page manual for a department that used the word “alignment” 74 times. I went back and read it recently. I realized that if you deleted every sentence containing jargon, the manual would have been 4 pages long and twice as useful. I had committed a crime against the English language, and I did it because I was afraid. I was afraid that if I wrote simply, people would see that the project I was leading was actually quite small and unimportant.

And at the end of the day, you go home and you’re tired, but you don’t know why. You’re tired because you’ve spent 8 hours translating your thoughts into a language that doesn’t have a word for “I don’t know” or “This is hard.”

The Desire for the Plug

I want to break the cycle. I want to stand up in the next meeting and say, “I have no idea what you just said, and I think you don’t either.” But I probably won’t. I’ll probably just check my phone and see that I have 84 new emails, most of which will ask me to “circle back” or “deep dive” into a “strategic initiative.” I’ll reply with a thumb-up emoji, the ultimate jargon of the modern era-a symbol that means everything and nothing at the same time.

Carlos J. catches my eye as the meeting finally breaks at 4:14 PM. He smiles, a slow, sad smile that reaches his eyes. He leans over and whispers, “I think the paradigm has been sufficiently shifted, don’t you?” We both laugh, a sound that is dangerously clear in the quiet room. It is the only honest thing that has happened in the last 64 minutes.

I walk out into the July heat, the 94-degree air hitting me like a physical wall. It feels wonderful. It’s hot, it’s oppressive, and it’s real. There is no jargon for the sun. It just burns. And as I walk toward my car, I think about those 234 minutes I spent on the Christmas lights. I think about how they are sitting in a box right now, perfectly straight, waiting for their turn to shine. They don’t need a go-to-market strategy. They just need a plug. They just need to be turned on.