Transcription
[Music] [Applause]
So let's start with a little exercise. Imagine you had to write down five words buzzing around your ears lately, whether at the office coffee machine or by looking at your friend's Instagram story. Which one words would you choose? Let me take a wild guess: sustainable, diversity, equality, leverage, growth, inclusion, pivot, synergy, mindfulness, shift. Any hits?
Now throw these words into a blender, and what you get are statements like, "Let's harness sustainability to drive equality," or "Let's drive equality to harness sustainability." Sounds impressive, right? But what does it actually mean? Leaves you clueless.
And what about these renamings of everyday items by very famous brands? So it's not made up, it's from famous brands: life performance solutions, portable lifestyle systems, reading containers. Any guess what they stand for? We'll find out later on.
How comes our language has moved into the circus of unclarity and grandiosity? And what does this talking do to us? Having spent the past 15 years juggling words as a journalist, teacher, consultant, and author, I've spotted a varying trend. While we exchange sounds and letters in an increasing manner, we also increasingly talk in buzzwords devoid of meaning, leaving others clueless. With this, we aren't building bridges; we're crafting walls that tear us apart. So it's high time we call it quits.
But first, let's go back to the opening credits. What sort of past are we dealing with when we hear sentences like, "Let's harness sustainability to drive equality," or when a company is trying to sell "life performance solutions"? This fancy talk, once the exclusive lingo of 90s boardrooms, has spread into our everyday lives, making our words bigger and more complicated than they need to be, and often far from what's real.
Philosophers, those guardians of clarity in thought and language, have coined the term for this phenomenon. And we're not talking about the kind that's useful in the gardens. This variety of has a special trait: a profound indifference towards truth. Like your CST, your needs, and some kind of bluff. A bullshit's primary ambition isn't to educate you, but to dazzle with a barrage of words, hoping that something, anything, will stick. It's like throwing spaghetti at the wall, except that the spaghetti are made of words, and the wall is you. So, it isn't about how things are, but how things appear. It's not about clarity, but an agenda.
"Considered a corporate classic: 'Together, we're changing the world for the better.'" Statements like this aren't meant to inform us, but to sprinkle feel-good fairy dust onto us, making us feel like we're part of some big plan, even though it's not really clear what the plan is. What truly elevates the art of is its commitment to being as abstract as possible.
Social media is full of examples of this. Let's take the inspirational quote that says, "We are not an emerging property of a mechanical universe, but the seasonal activity of a living cosmos." Sounds profound, almost mystical. But again, what does it mean?
And then there's the coffee corporation, a very famous one, promising to deliver an "immersive, ultra-premium, wait for it, coffee-forward experience." What exactly is a coffee-forward experience? What does it entail? An extra shot of espresso? A barista whispering sweet nothings to the beans before grinding them? The truth, as is often the case with, is out there. So flourishes for looking good is more important than being honest. Aiming to confuse rather than to clarify is a maze of unclarity where every turn brings us further from understanding.
Now, let's be clear. We've all been guilty of thinking a little every now and then. Sometimes it's just easier to say, "I'm leveraging my skill set," instead of, "I'm just trying to do my work without crying in the [Laughter] bathroom." But then becomes the main cause rather than just the seasoning. It's a problem. It's like eating marshmallows for every meal. It looks fluffy and exciting, but leaves you bankrupt on the inside.
But why, you might ask, does it matter so much? Let's paint the picture. You're in dire need of some life advice, so you text a friend. In return, you get this: "You have to be true to your inner self to follow your path." Great. What does it mean? This kind of advice doesn't pull us closer. Rather, it's like a mwah-high five: awkward and unfulfilling, driving a wedge between us like pineapple on pizza.
Diving deeper, we'll find that isn't just a separator; it's a black hole. Our brains, bombarded with this fluff, start to reflect the void. Take "sustainable." Once a beacon of hope, now a word so overused it's like telling someone you're fine. It means everything and nothing all at once. Every time we encounter these words stripped of their meaning, a little part of our cognitive landscape turns into a wasteland.
"Let's harness sustainability to drive equality." What do you think when you hear that? What images come to your mind? Let me guess: at best, a shapeless, colorless mush. More likely, though, nothing. But that's not the whole picture. also steals our time, our most precious asset. Yet here we are, sinking hours, days, lifetimes into a quagmire of nonsense when we could just be, I don't know, engaged in something more meaningful.
So, what's the game plan? Step one: we need to become FP agents. Whenever something smells fishy, it probably isn't just the office microwave; it's linguistic pollution. So call it out whenever you see it. Step two: Purge the from your own language. If you can't explain something to your six-year-old nephew, maybe it's not worth saying. Instead of saying, "Let's foster mindfulness for a more inclusive society," just say, "Let's be nice to each other." See? Breathe in, breathe out, and let the float away.
So that we've ditched the fluff, we've taken the first step towards verbal sanity. But how do we keep our feet on the ground and not get swept away by a tidal wave of? Here's the golden key: incessantly asking, "What does this mean?" This isn't just any question; it's *the* question. It's about pushing for clarity in every word we speak, in every sentence we hear, ensuring our time isn't wasted navigating through a fog of fancy words that, at the end of the day, just evaporate into thin air.
Socks are socks, not "life performance solutions." Water bottles aren't "portable lifestyle systems," and books, those beautiful, bound collections of words, they're not "reading containers"; they're books. Yes. So let's not be dead fish floating down a stream of. Let's be salmon, fearlessly swimming upstream towards the spawning ground of clarity.
To wrap this up, let's take a quick trip back to 50,000 years ago. Back then, language was about surviving, not about who could sound the most like a LinkedIn influencer. It was about passing on knowledge, for example, how not to get eaten by a saber-tooth tiger. My hope for us is that we reclaim language with the same purpose and clarity: to connect, inspire, and maybe, just maybe, make our world a tad less confusing. And with that, let's drop the mic on [Applause].