Opaque Professional Sanded to Death
When being consistently understood became more important than being yourself.
I changed my civil status this week. It didn’t change who I am.
But it changed how people see me. +10 points to social legitimacy. As a mother of 2 I am already ahead: +10 for each child, -30 to social life, -50 to sleep. Checking boxes I didn’t design, earning points in a game I never agreed to play, following outdated rules some man forgot to update on purpose. Apparently.
Nobody tracks the points you lose every time you swallow the sharp thing you were about to say. That column doesn’t exist on any scorecard. Never did.
This is the thing nobody warns you about. You don’t control how you are being perceived. You wish you ever did.
Roland Barthes declared the death of the author in 1967. The moment a text is published, the writer loses ownership of its meaning. The reader takes over. Intention becomes irrelevant. In the AI era, we’re obsessed with “alignment” and “clear communication.” God forbid you leave room for free interpretation. The machine has to be spoon-fed. But humans? Riders of wild thoughts. Living in the gap.
Most people read this as a statement about literature. It is and it isn’t. It’s a statement about every version of yourself you’ve ever released into the world’s production environment after hectic or no user acceptance testing. The moment it is out, you lose control.
Your LinkedIn profile. Your presentation. The opinion you shared in that meeting. The essay you wrote at 2am that said something you didn’t know you believed until you read it back. The moment it leaves you, it belongs to whoever receives it.
The other week three people described my writing. Three completely different perspectives. None of them were wrong. I started to think which one was right. None of them overlapped with what I had in mind. My motivation was crystal clear — identify the correct understanding of me and write more consistently toward it.
How silly of me.
Person who spends years optimizing for the correct read eventually gets there. Perfectly legible. Universally understood. Completely interchangeable with the next person who did the same. You didn’t close the gap. You erased yourself to fit through it.
Every time I publish here I step further from my corporate identity. Different voice. Different register. Different person, almost. My colleagues know one version. My readers know another. My (now) husband still doesn’t grasp on what exactly I am writing about. Neither is wrong. Neither is complete.
I am not my job. But hey, try explaining that to the algorithm that built your professional profile and brought you where you are today. Unless getting here cost you something. Then you know exactly what gets sanded off along the way.
Byung-Chul Han called it the transparency imperative. The pressure to be legible. Optimized for immediate comprehension. In The Transparency Society he describes a world where opacity is treated as a malfunction — where the self that is genuinely contradictory, hard to categorize, resistant to summary is not interesting. It’s inefficient.
So you sand the edges. Not consciously. Just because the feedback loop rewards it.
Social media started the woodwork. AI finished it. And the pace is no longer gradual — it’s violent. Every month a new model, a new capability, a new reason to repackage yourself for the current moment. To be legible to a landscape that rewrites its own rules faster than you can keep up. Stick that smile to your face and keep going.
Feed your work to an AI and it returns three bullet points with emojis and follow up questions you didn’t ask for. Feed it your LinkedIn, you will get “it is good but…” and it produces the version of you that processes fastest in rooms you want to enter. Feed it long enough and you start writing for the summary, not the thought. Presenting for the slide, not the argument. Existing for the profile, not the person. The joke is on you and you forgot to laugh.
We are not just being read anymore. We are being pre-digested. People-pleaser earns a new meaning — whether you fit the reader’s taste palette or not. De gustibus non est disputandum. Taste is a fine measure for wine or olive oil. It is a disgustingly inaccurate measure for a person.
And somewhere in that ultra speed of your home WiFi everyone starts to sound the same. Look the same. Think the same. The edges gone. The friction gone. The thing that made you specifically worth reading — gone. Not taken. Surrendered. Willingly. At a cost nobody warned you about.
The perception gap is not a problem to solve. The distance between who you are and how others receive you is proof that something real passed between two people. That you don’t fit an easy summary or a predictable model. That there is more there than any algorithm could flatten. When everything becomes transparent, it stops being a person and turns into a product on the shelf — one among many others in the same category.
Real professional identity is not spotless personal branding. It’s a unique personal record of lived experiences, impossible to replicate. A set of contradictions you haven’t resolved. Parts of you that don’t summarize easily and make a story for a long evening.
The reader who misreads you is not the problem. The reader who finds you completely, immediately, frictionlessly legible — that is the one who should worry you.
So here is the only question that matters:
Can you name one opinion you hold professionally that would cost you something to say out loud?
If the answer comes easily — good. If you have to think for a while — pay attention to that. If nothing comes at all, you already know what happened.
You will spend your entire career (perhaps your entire life) being misread. Partially understood. Perceived differently than intended.
This is not a miss. This is what it feels like to still have edges left in the era of cheap cognition.
If everyone understands you perfectly, you’ve already been sanded to death.
Stay opaque.
Fin
While you're here:
I was struck by the idea that the distance between who we are and how we are received is not a flaw to fix, but evidence that something real passed between two people. Some of the most living things always resist a summary.
This goes along with an idea I've come across which is, if your family and friends don't understand anything of what you are doing, then you are doing something right! I think it means, you are breaking patterns, trying different solutions, new ideas, away from average thinking, and people, especially family will judge, point fingers, pull you back into average. Stay opaque, it's great.