The Translation Tax
We’ve built an entire professional culture around describing effort and work and achievement in a language that has almost nothing to do with how work actually happens.
There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from constantly translating your life into bullet points.
Everything must be quantified. Our work. Our successes. Our careers. We are involved in constant self-measurement and self-optimization - and it creates a strange mental load. The feeling it generates is that you aren't just a person doing good work, but a product that needs to be curated, polished, and marketed at all times.
So we spend enormous energy ensuring our narrative is seamless, our impact properly and accurately quantified, our skills keyword-optimized for an algorithm that doesn't actually know us.
And then we send in the resume.
And hear back exactly nothing.
So we start again.
We have become experts at this performance. We have learned to translate everything we have done into the language of "quantifying achievements," "scalable solutions," and "optimized workflows" - even when, in reality, almost all of our best work happens in the messy, unquantifiable moments in between.
Think about what real work actually looks like.
It's sitting at your desk at 10 PM, dealing with a problem you can't quite name (and don’t have the time to). Or making a judgment call with incomplete information and limited time or navigating relationships that don't even fit in a flowchart. Or holding competing priorities in your head and making the best call you can with what you have, uncertain, unsure and uncomfortable, hoping you're getting it right, worried you might be wrong, wondering how to manage the stakes. Or the difficulty in breaking down a knotty issue into parts and solving one at a time, wondering if there is a faster way to do it. Or wondering why no one recognizes the options you see as possibilities and if you’re defining the problem correctly or missing something.
That is the work. That is most of the work.
None of it makes it onto a resume.
Instead, we compress it. We brush off the uncertainty, remove doubt, and translate the whole messy truth into something clean and confident and easily skimmed. We do this so often and automatically that we forget the original version - that it is always messy and always iterative when we’re doing something hard, in real time.
We’ve built an entire professional culture around describing effort and work and achievement in a language that has almost nothing to do with how work actually happens.
That’s the translation tax and we are all exhausted from it.