My son asked me what I do for work.
Not the vague version a five-year-old asks, where any answer will do because the question is really just "why are you at your desk instead of playing with me." The real version. The version a kid asks when he's old enough to notice that his dad goes into a room every morning and comes out tired, and he wants to know what's happening in that room that's worth the trade.
I opened my mouth and heard this come out: "I help businesses growlisten to people through strategic marketing."
I stopped. He waited. I felt the taste of the words, and they tasted like nothing. Like chewing on a paper napkin. Like every homepage I'd roasted in the last six months. I'd just spoken a LinkedIn headline at my own child, in my own kitchen, standing next to a sink full of dishes.
Something had gone wrong.
Here's the thing nobody talks about. The language of work has colonized the way we think about work. Not just how we describe it to strangers. How we describe it to ourselves. How we describe it to our kids. The corporate vocabulary is so deep in us that when someone asks a genuine question, the genuine answer can't get past the jargon. The jargon is the first responder. It shows up before the truth has its shoes on.
"Strategic marketing." What does that even mean? I've used those words in proposals. I've put them on websites. I've said them in meetings with a straight face. And standing in my kitchen with my son looking up at me, I realized that I could not explain what those words mean to a person who hasn't been contaminated by the language of business.
Strategic. As opposed to what? Accidental marketing? Random marketing? "We deploy haphazard campaigns with no particular aim." Nobody says that. Which means strategic doesn't distinguish anything. It's filler. Verbal sawdust. A word that exists solely to make the sentence feel weightier than it is.
I tried again. "I help companies figure out how to talk to the people who might buy their stuff."
Better. But still not true enough. Still too clean. Still the professional version.
My son said, "Like ads?"
"Sometimes. But mostly before the ads. I spend a lot of time figuring out what people actually want. Not what they say they want. What they really want. And then I help companies talk about that instead of talking about themselves."
He thought about it. "So you listen to people?"
Yeah. That's what I do. I listen to people.
I've been thinking about this for weeks now. About the gap between what we do and how we describe it. About how the people who do the most honest work often describe it in the most dishonest language, not because they're lying, but because the language available to them has been pre-ruined by a thousand LinkedIn posts and agency websites and conference talks where everyone agreed that we all "drive growth" and "create value" and "build partnerships."
Harold Bloom wrote about the anxiety of influence. How every poet lives in the shadow of the poets who came before, and the struggle is to find your own voice inside that shadow. The anxiety of business language is the reverse. There's no anxiety at all. There's total comfort. Everyone uses the same words, and the sameness is the shelter. You never have to be vulnerable about what you actually do because the jargon wraps around you like a blanket.
My son cut through that blanket with one question.
So I'm trying something. I'm trying to describe what I do in words my kid would understand. No jargon. No frameworks. Just the truth.
I listen to people. That's the first thing. I read what they write in reviews and forums and complaint threads and testimonials. I watch videos where they talk about their problems. I sit with what they say for a long time, longer than anyone thinks is necessary, until I stop hearing words and start hearing what's underneath the words. The fear. The hope. The thing they want but feel embarrassed to want.
Then I take what I heard and I help a company talk back to those people in a way that sounds like a person talking, not a company announcing. I write the words, or I help someone else write the words, but either way the words come from listening, not from a template. Not from what the competitor said. From what the buyer said.
That's it. That's the job.
It doesn't sound impressive. It doesn't sound strategic. It doesn't sound like a LinkedIn headline. Good.
I think about fatherhood and this stuff more than I probably should. About what it means to raise kids who can smell BS. Who hear "results-driven" and feel their stomach tighten because something about it sounds wrong even if they can't say why. Who know the difference between someone telling them the truth and someone performing the shape of truth.
Because that's the world, right? The world is full of people performing shapes. The shape of caring. The shape of expertise. The shape of confidence. And our kids are going to walk into that world and they're either going to learn to perform the same shapes, or they're going to learn to see through them. I'd like my kids to see through them.
Which means I have to stop performing them at home. I have to stop saying "strategic marketing" when what I mean is "I listen to scared people and then I write words that make them feel less alone." I have to stop using the boardroom voice when the kitchen voice is the honest one.
My son doesn't know he did me a favor. He asked a simple question and the simple question exposed a thing I'd been carrying without knowing it: the habit of describing my own life in borrowed language. Dead language. Language I've critiqued in others and practiced in myself.
I went back to the desk that night. Opened a client project. Read some buyer quotes. And for the first time in a while, I didn't think about positioning or messaging frameworks or competitive analysis. I thought about my son's face when I said "strategic marketing" and how his eyes went flat for a second. The same flat look I get when I read a homepage that says "we partner with ambitious brands."
That flat look is the only feedback that matters. It's the look of a human being who has been spoken at instead of spoken to. Who received information without receiving meaning. Who heard the noise but not the music.
I don't want to make that face happen. Not in my copy. Not in my kitchen.
It's late again. The house is quiet. My son is asleep. And I'm sitting here trying to figure out how to describe what I do in words that would make his eyes light up instead of go flat.
I listen to people. I help them be heard.
I'm still working on it.