I remember that cursed day, trapped at an afterwork event sponsored by the startup nation, when a stranger with a moustache as finely trimmed as his OKRs dropped the dreaded social guillotine:
“So, what do you do for a living?”
Like an idiot, with vinegar chips still in my mouth, I answered:
“I run a tech company.”
Fatal mistake. I felt the atmosphere tighten, like I’d just confessed I collect corks to make myself underwear. No one dared meet my eyes, afraid of catching my salaried condition. It was over. Socially burnt. In their minds, I was already filed away under “people who sort paperclips by size in a Formica drawer.”
I had violated the sacred rule of the professional world: never say what you actually do. You have to embellish, obscure, dramatize.
What I should have said was:
“I catalyze innovative synergies within a high-disruption tech ecosystem.”
Or even better:
“I deploy tech-driven growth strategies in regenerative hybrid environments.”
But no. Like an idiot, I just told the truth: I’m a boss. And today, truth is vulgar.
Because nowadays, being a boss isn’t enough. You need to be a Chief Visionary Evangelist, CEO of Complexity, or Founder in Residence of Nothing But Air. Otherwise, you’re not credible. If you don’t have a spiral roadmap or an inspirational framework, you’re just a boss, basically a washed-up boomer with a savings plan.
In the start-uposphere, we don’t create companies, we “incubate hubs of fractal potential.” We don’t make revenue, we “scale service capture models in agile verticals.” And above all, we don’t sell anything. We “offer symbiotic solutions for enhanced user journeys.”
In this era fueled by LinkedIn stories and open-circle brainstorming, the vaguer it is, the more powerful it sounds. We no longer sell skills, we sell “capacitating soft-power” and “regenerative posture.” Anything concrete is suspicious. It reeks of job descriptions.
We live in a time when, if you don’t have an obscure job to brag about at parties, you simply don’t exist. Telling the truth about what you do is vulgar. It’s like farting in an elevator. Just not done. You need polish, ambiguity, some “co-” something, or you’re socially unfit.
Even the guy who takes out the trash in the open space is forced to say:
“I manage the circularity of residual material flows within the tertiary ecosystem.”
And his colleague from accounting?
“I drive budget sustainability across strained value chains.”
Even I get lost in it. Last week, I almost wrote on my CV that I “generate symbiotic value through irritating feedback engineering.” When really, I just tell clients: yes, for it to work, you need to turn on your computer.
We’re all floating in a bubble bath of bullshit delicately scented with interdisciplinary synergy. We don’t work anymore. We “co-construct holistic acculturation roadmaps.” We don’t solve problems. We “deploy co-experiential solutions within agile environments.”
Even getting fired sounds elegant now:
“We’re repositioning you within your path of meaning inside an external ecosystem.”
And I admit it, sometimes I join the masquerade. Out of shame. Pavlovian reflex. I say I “streamline relational chains in hybrid contexts.” Sounds professional. Impresses the crowd. Even I’m impressed. Then I go home and fill out an Excel sheet with a pie chart.
Maybe one day, we’ll have a plugin to translate all jobs into corporate doublespeak. We’ll say “Alexa, tell Grandma I’m a capacitary path consultant” and Grandma will answer “oh, okay, he’s unemployed.”
In the end, we all just want to be left alone. To be able to say:
“I work.” “Sometimes it sucks.” “But it pays the rent.”
And for the person in front of us, instead of looking like we licked a subway handrail, to just say:
“Yeah. Same here.”