Language Exists to Disguise
Cal Newport argues in So Good They Can’t Ignore You that people who chase passion early in their careers often struggle financially. His implicit advice, as I read it, is subtler than “follow your passion” or “abandon it”: treat your day job not as the source of life’s meaning, but as leverage — a platform that funds and enables whatever you find genuinely meaningful.
That framing sounds clean. My problem with it is upstream of the advice: I don’t know what is meaningful to me. I don’t know what my priorities actually are. And sometimes I suspect I’m lying even when I claim not to know — because naming what you want makes it real, and real things can be lost.
Here is a darker thought underneath all of this: maybe language exists precisely to disguise. Reality is often too painful to state plainly, so we wrap suffering in words to make it carryable. If that’s true even a little, then words should never be trusted completely — not promises, not slogans, not even sacred texts read without humility. This is not a rejection of scripture; it’s a recognition that any text passes through human mouths and motives, and deserves to be approached with reverence and scrutiny. Reverence without understanding is just performance.
And performance is something I know about. There are rooms where I still perform devotion I don’t feel, because honesty would cost me an image I’m not ready to lose. Hypocrisy, it turns out, is rarely dramatic. Mostly it’s small and quiet: excusing yourself for ten minutes, returning with your face arranged correctly, saying nothing. Nobody notices, which is exactly why it stings.
The same disguise operates in reverse. When I can’t sleep, when exhaustion accumulates faster than I can recover from it, I reach for grand explanations — meaninglessness, burnout, some philosophical crisis. But often the honest sentence is smaller: I am tired, and tiredness has no elegant cure except rest, and rest requires letting go of control for a few hours. Language lets me inflate ordinary suffering into something that feels more significant, and therefore more respectable, than “I need to sleep.”
A friend recently shared Andrea Gibson’s poetry about death, and sitting with it moved me to tears. Gibson wrote about wanting to live fully. Reading someone face mortality directly does something no abstraction can: it strips the disguises off your own excuses. What am I actually doing with the time I have? The answer is usually embarrassing — hoarding digital possessions whose purpose I couldn’t explain, worrying about markets I don’t control, postponing decisions behind the fear of “ruining” things I haven’t even committed to yet.
Never-ending desire is a curse, and I say that as someone fully cursed. Every time I acquire the thing I was certain would bring peace, the peace fails to arrive on schedule. The wanting simply relocates. If language disguises reality, desire disguises itself best of all — it always presents itself as the last one, the one that will finally be enough.
So what remains? A modest practice: distrust fluent sentences, including your own. Notice when beautiful words are doing the work that honest action should do. Say the plain, unflattering version out loud once in a while. The truth underneath the packaging is usually smaller, duller, and far more fixable than the story we built around it.
Drafted with AI assistance from my personal journal (2026-03-05), then edited by me. See On AI Assistance.