The mouse clicks. The CSV file downloads. The same 15 columns of data you’ve looked at every day for the last 235 days. Your job, according to the official description, is to ‘spearhead blue-sky data initiatives’ and ‘champion a new paradigm of growth-hacking visionary.’ Your reality is exporting reports and pasting them into slide 45 of a deck nobody will read past slide 5.

This isn’t a complaint. It’s a diagnosis. The entire ritual of hiring is a carefully choreographed exchange of mutually agreed-upon fiction. We are all lying, and we all know it. The lie begins with the job description, a piece of corporate poetry engineered to attract a mythical creature who is both a ‘detail-oriented team player’ and a ‘rebellious, independent visionary.’ This person does not exist. The job, as described, also does not exist. It is an idealized projection of what a committee of 5 managers thinks the role should be, if they had an infinite budget and zero legacy systems to deal with.

Then comes the resume. Your counter-fiction. A document where ‘managed social media accounts’ becomes ‘executed multi-platform digital engagement strategies to drive brand resonance.’ Where ‘fixed printer jams’ becomes ‘provided critical infrastructure support in a fast-paced environment.’ We round up our years of experience. We inflate our contributions to team projects. We use action verbs that suggest we single-handedly saved the company from ruin at least 5 times. It’s not about what you did; it’s about how well you can describe what you did using the accepted language of the ritual.

I used to think this was just a harmless game. A bit of puffery on both sides. But it’s not. It’s the source of a profound and corrosive disconnect that plagues modern work. The problem is that the fantasy ends on your first day. Reality arrives, brutally and without apology. The ‘dynamic, fast-paced startup’ is a chaotic mess with no clear direction. The promise of ‘significant autonomy’ means your boss is too busy to answer your questions. The ‘blue-sky initiatives’ are, in fact, just making PowerPoints.

This is why we have the Great Disengagement.

It’s not about ping-pong tables or free snacks. It’s about the bait-and-switch. We sell people a dream job and then hand them a task list. It’s like buying a beautiful, sleek piece of Swedish furniture based on the glossy photo in the catalog, only to get home and find the box contains misaligned drill holes, 15 missing screws, and instructions written in a language from another dimension. You can still build something with the parts you have, but it will be wobbly, frustrating to assemble, and it will look absolutely nothing like the picture. That’s most jobs.

I’m not immune to this. I once hired a candidate whose resume was a masterpiece of corporate jargon. It spoke of ‘actualizing synergies’ and ‘leveraging cross-functional frameworks.’ I remember being so impressed. I thought, this person speaks the language of success. I always tell people to look past the buzzwords, to find the real person underneath. And yet, there I was, completely seduced by the fiction. He was hired to lead a team of 5. The project lasted 175 days. It was a slow-motion catastrophe. He was brilliant at creating documents about the work, but completely paralyzed when it came to actually doing the work. That mistake cost us at least $45,000 in lost time and morale.

Seeking Authentic Connections

We need to stop rewarding the best fiction writers and start looking for the best collaborators. We need job descriptions that read less like a movie trailer and more like an honest conversation. Imagine: “We’re looking for someone to help us fix our broken sales reporting process. It’s a mess. The data is dirty, the old system crashes twice a day, and the team is demoralized. You’ll spend the first three months just talking to people and trying to understand why things are so bad. It will be frustrating, but if you can make even a small improvement, you’ll be a hero here.”

Who wouldn’t want to apply for that job? It’s real. It presents a clear, honest challenge. It respects the applicant enough to tell them the truth. The person who is excited by that description is the person you actually need, not the ‘visionary ninja’ who thinks they’ll be presenting to the board on day one.

Take my friend Kendall K. He’s a sand sculptor. A brilliant one. He creates these massive, intricate castles and figures that last only until the next high tide. On his resume, he listed his skills as ‘expertise in granular material dynamics’ and ‘ephemeral architectural design.’ A large construction firm, seeing the keywords, hired him for a position titled ‘Lead Environmental Artist.’ He was excited. He imagined creating beautiful, temporary installations on their construction sites. His first day? They handed him a shovel and told him to join the crew filling sandbags for a flood diversion project. He lasted 5 days. They didn’t want an artist; they wanted a body. But ‘Sandbag Filler’ doesn’t attract ambitious applicants. So they created a fiction.

“expertise in granular material dynamics” and “ephemeral architectural design.”

– Kendall K.’s Fictional Resume

Sometimes, in the middle of a day spent navigating these layers of corporate abstraction, my mind just… drifts. It craves something solid. Something that is exactly what it claims to be. A simple, foundational truth you don’t have to decipher. You start asking yourself basic questions just to feel grounded in reality. You wonder about things completely unrelated to work, like sind kartoffeln gemüse. The question is less important than the act of seeking a real, unambiguous answer in a world of professional make-believe.

The Cost of Ambiguity

This is the core of the issue. We’ve built a professional world that runs on ambiguity. The language is designed to obscure, not clarify. It’s a performance. The problem is, we are spending the majority of our waking lives on this stage, acting out a part we didn’t audition for, in a play with no coherent plot.

I don’t believe this is a conspiracy. I don’t think hiring managers are cackling as they write misleading job descriptions. I think it’s a systemic habit born from a deep-seated fear. The fear of being honest. Companies are afraid that if they post what the job really is, no one will apply. Candidates are afraid that if they list what they really did, no one will hire them. So both sides retreat into the comfortable, sterile fantasy of corporate-speak. We continue the ritual because we’re afraid of what might happen if we stopped.

The strange thing is, I think we’re all desperate for it to stop. We want to be hired for who we are, not for the fictional protagonist on our resume. We want to show up to a job that reflects the description, warts and all. We want to spend less time translating jargon and more time solving actual problems. The exhaustion so many of us feel isn’t just from the workload; it’s from the cognitive dissonance, the psychic energy it takes to maintain the fiction day after day.

What would happen if you wrote an honest resume? Not a self-deprecating one, but an honest one. “I’m pretty good at Excel, but I still have to Google how VLOOKUP works every time. I led a project that failed, but I learned more from that than any of my successes. I can be quiet in large meetings, but I come up with my best ideas when I have time to think alone.”

And what if a company posted an honest job description? “Our last three product launches have been duds. We think it’s a marketing problem, but it might be a product problem. Or a leadership problem. We’re not sure. We need someone to come in and help us find the truth, even if it’s uncomfortable for us to hear.”

The Most Impressive Skill? Honesty.

It feels dangerous, doesn’t it? Vulnerable. But maybe it’s the only way to break the cycle. Maybe the most ‘visionary’ and ‘disruptive’ thing a company can do isn’t to invent a new app, but to simply tell the truth in a job description. Maybe the most impressive skill you can list on your resume is honesty.