The Babel of Capitalism
Some days it feels like we’re living in a tower built from manuals.
Every trade, every profession, every algorithm now speaks in tongues.
We’ve replaced conversation with interfaces.
Whether you’re a plumber, a coder, or a trader, you speak in symbols I can’t read. Every day brings new acronyms, dashboards, processes, and new dialects of efficiency. You don’t talk about what you do anymore; you talk about how your system does it.
And somehow, I’m expected to learn them all.
Between work, survival, and raising two little humans, the world keeps whispering: keep up or become obsolete.
It’s madness.
In a single lifetime, we’re now expected to master the collective language of all humankind: finance, code, compliance, psychology, nutrition, ethics – every field rebranded as self-improvement. And if you don’t, you feel stupid. Left behind. Unproductive.
This isn’t intelligence.
It’s exhaustion disguised as progress.
Capitalism, in its infinite creativity, has found a way to monetise confusion. It multiplies languages faster than anyone can learn them, not to connect us, but to separate us into markets. Every profession becomes a gated dialect; every product, another translator you have to rent.
Meanwhile, I’m standing in the kitchen, staring at my kids, wondering how the hell to prepare them for a world where the dictionary updates faster than their hearts can keep up.
We’ve built a civilisation fluent in code but illiterate in meaning.
We can parse ten thousand data points, but can’t ask each other how we really are.
We can automate speech, but not understanding.
Maybe that’s the true crisis of our age? Not climate, not politics, but comprehension. The slow erosion of shared language.
And yet, maybe there’s hope in that.
Because the answer isn’t learning every dialect; it’s remembering how to translate.
To sit with people who speak differently and listen long enough to catch the rhythm beneath the words.
That’s what I want my children to learn. Not fluency, but curiosity.
Not the speed of information, but the patience of understanding.
Because if we can teach the next generation to translate, not just transmit, we might yet rebuild something the machines can’t measure: meaning.
The Next Revolution Isn’t Linguistic. It’s Human.
So this is what I’m choosing to pass on to those two small, kiddos watching me stumble through adulthood:
1. Reclaim comprehension.
If something can’t be explained in human terms, it probably isn’t worth outsourcing your sanity to.
2. Protect untranslatable time.
The world will try to monetise every second. Guard the hours where nothing needs explaining.
3. Teach them to ask better questions, not produce faster answers.
The system rewards fluency. Life rewards understanding.
4. Build small circles of shared meaning.
Neighbourhoods, friendships, communities, spaces where language hasn’t yet been optimised or monetised.
5. Let curiosity outrank competence.
The world doesn’t need more experts. It needs more people who still wonder.
6. Keep technology as a tool, not a tongue.
If the interface becomes the language, you’ve already lost the plot.
7. Anchor identity in the unmeasured.
Laughter, friendship, craft, silence – the things that refuse to be captured in metrics, dashboards or KPIs.
If enough of us choose comprehension over complexity, conversation over jargon, and meaning over metrics, the system will bend. It always does.
Because the future won’t belong to the people who speak the most languages,
It will belong to the people who remember what language is for.
And that, I hope, is the inheritance I can give my kids:
not fluency in the Babel of capitalism, but the quiet courage to stay human in a world that keeps forgetting how.
