I used to think fluency would make life easier. It doesn’t. It just makes silence louder. The more precisely you can describe something, the fewer people want to talk about it.
Say “obtuse” once, and someone accuses you of using big words. Six letters. Meanwhile, the same crowd will happily use “literally” to mean its opposite and consider that perfectly normal. Words are currency, and inflation has hit hard.
School never helped. It wasn’t designed to. The whole system felt less like education and more like crowd control — keep the bodies in the room until the bell goes, file the edges off their curiosity, and send them home compliant. I didn’t fail school. School failed to be interesting.
So I went and taught myself. I’m an autodidact. Not out of ambition, but boredom. Curiosity is a sort of infection: once you catch it, you can’t go back to small talk about weather or influencers without feeling like you’ve left the gas on.
And yet we live in the most text-based era in history. Words everywhere—on screens, in messages, comments, bios, endless chat windows. You’d think literacy would be thriving. Instead, we’ve collectively decided grammar is optional and punctuation elitist. Every message a mind-dump from minds unfit for human habitation. The tools of language have never been more accessible, and yet people wield them like spoons in brain surgery. Text is all we have now—tone, nuance, emotion—and still we choose to use none of it. Laziness dressed as authenticity.
The price of caring about that stuff is solitude. Eloquence has a way of scaring people off. The moment you treat language as art rather than utility, you start building a wall—not a tall one, just soundproof glass. You can see everyone else, but you can’t quite join in without shouting through it.
Sometimes I joke that what we need is a dating app for sapiosexuals — call it Turing, not Tinder. You’d flirt through syntax instead of selfies. “What’s your favourite image file format?” I’d ask. “PNG,” she’d say, “transparent intentions.” The dangerous JPG girls would be all artefacts and glamour compression. The TIFFs? Beautiful, detailed, and worth every megabyte. The vectors — infinitely scalable, gorgeous curves.
Me, I’m a PSD — layers, masks, non-destructive editing. Never really flattened.
Maybe that’s what we all are: half-finished files waiting for someone with the right software to open us properly.
We talk more than ever, but we rarely communicate. All the language in the world, and somehow we’ve made silence louder. Maybe that’s the real tragedy of modern connection — not that we can’t find each other, but that we no longer know how to listen once we do.