The hum is the first thing that gets you. Not the presenter’s voice, not the slide, but the low, mournful thrum of the projector fan working against the sealed-window silence of Conference Room 3. The air is stale with the ghosts of 13 prior meetings. On the screen, a title: “Q3 Synergistic Leverage & Forward-Looking Trajectories.” Below it, eight bullet points, each a complete sentence, squatting in a 10-point font so small it feels like an insult.

He clears his throat, a dry rustle of paper and regret. “As you can see from the first point,” he begins, and then proceeds to read the first point. Aloud. Word for word. A cold knot forms in my stomach, the same one I get after typing a password wrong for the fifth time, the system locking me out of my own digital life. This feels like that. Being locked out of a conversation, forced to watch someone read the key I can already see in their hand.

We’ve all been here. We are all complicit. We nod, we sip our lukewarm coffee, we pretend that this is a valuable use of human consciousness. But it’s not communication. It’s a compliance ritual. It’s the corporate equivalent of a priest mumbling Latin to a congregation that has long since forgotten the meaning, here for the ritual, not the revelation.

“

My first instinct is always rage. A quiet, simmering fury at the presenter. You dragged 23 people into a room to read to them? Do you think we’re illiterate? Do you have so little faith in your own ideas that they cannot survive the journey from your brain to your mouth without a script projected behind you? But the anger is a misdirection. I used to think it was about ego, a presenter who loves the sound of their own narrated text. I was wrong.

That slide, with its 43 lines of text, isn’t a tool for the audience. It’s a shield for the presenter. It’s a security blanket woven from jargon and bullet points. It’s a guarantee against the terrifying void of silence, the possibility of a question they can’t answer, the horrifying vulnerability of simply making eye contact and speaking from the heart. To stand without slides is to stand naked. To read from them is to wear a suit of armor so heavy you can barely move.

It infantilizes everyone. It tells the audience, “You are not capable of absorbing complex information through listening, so I shall provide this text for your simple eyes.” It allows the presenter to abdicate their true responsibility: to connect, to persuade, to tell a story. Instead, they become a narrator for a document. We could have all just read the document in 3 minutes and saved the hour.

“

This reminds me of a man I met a few years ago, Liam C.-P., a restorer of grandfather clocks. His workshop smelled of lemon oil and old brass. There were no projectors. No quarterly reports. Just the quiet, patient industry of a man who understands time on a mechanical level. I watched him for hours as he worked on a clock that was 233 years old. He didn’t give me a presentation on its history. He showed me.

He’d pull out a gear, no bigger than a thumbnail. “Feel the weight of that,” he’d say. “That’s English brass from before the wars. They don’t make it with that density anymore.” He’d point to a tiny, almost invisible scratch on the mahogany case. “That’s where the youngest son of the original owner, a boy named Thomas, tried to carve his initial in 1823. The father caught him.” He told the clock’s story through its scars, its weight, its very substance. He trusted me to get it. He didn’t bullet-point the clock’s features; he let me experience its soul.

“

Liam trusted his materials to tell their own story, and he trusted me to be intelligent enough to listen. The slide-reader trusts neither their story nor their audience. This abandonment of trust is what makes corporate communication feel so hollow. It’s a system designed to prevent error, but in doing so, it also prevents connection. The knowledge Liam shares is alive, passed down through apprenticeship and touch. It’s the kind of deep, communal knowledge you see in any true craft, from clockmaking to organic farming. It’s in the forums where people trade wisdom, not just data-the kind of rich exchange you see among dedicated growers discussing the subtle genetic expressions of different feminized cannabis seeds, sharing stories of successes and failures. They are building a living library of experience, not a PowerPoint archive.

I’m not immune to this fear. I once had to present a critical project analysis to a board of directors. The budget was $373,000, and my career felt like it was riding on this single 33-minute slot. I spent weeks crafting the perfect deck. It was a work of art, with elegant transitions and graphs that told a compelling story. I had my script, my armor, all polished and ready. I stepped up to the podium, plugged in my laptop, and… nothing. The projector bulb was dead. A collective sigh went through the room.

The board members were just looking at me. Expectantly. I had two choices: reschedule and admit defeat, or stand there and actually talk to them.

It was a mess. I stumbled over words. I forgot a key statistic. I went on a tangent about something barely relevant. But something else happened. I started making eye contact. I saw a flicker of understanding in one director’s eyes and leaned into that point. I saw confusion on another’s face and backtracked, explaining the concept in a simpler way. It stopped being a presentation and started being a conversation. I wasn’t transferring information anymore. I was building a case, right there in the air between us. At the end, the CEO said, “That was one of the most compelling arguments I’ve heard in years.” I had no slides. I only had a story and the courage to tell it naked.

Slides as Illustrations, Not the Book

I’m not saying we should ban PowerPoint. That’s like blaming the hammer for a poorly built house. It’s a tool. But we use it as a crutch so often we’ve forgotten how to walk on our own. I now think of slides as illustrations in a book, not the book itself. They should be sparse, visual, and powerful. A single, arresting image. A graph with one clear takeaway. A provocative question. Something that supports the spoken story, rather than replacing it.

The goal should be to create a moment, an experience. To make the audience feel something, not just process data. To build a campfire, not a spreadsheet. Because nobody ever changed their mind because of a bullet point. They change their mind because of a story that gets inside them, that makes them see the world differently, if only for the 23 minutes you have their attention.