Once upon a time, we built machines to make life easier. Then we taught them to talk. Then we gave them our tone, our rhythm, our wit … our voice and somewhere along the way, we started doubting our own.
At first, it felt like magic. Type a sentence. Press a button. Watch your thoughts return smoother, sharper, smarter.
It wasn’t cheating; it was optimization.
Why wrestle with words when an algorithm could make them sparkle? But something shifted.
Under every thoughtful post, you now see it:
“Sounds AI.”
The new scarlet letter of the internet … three syllables that erase sincerity with a smirk.
We wanted machines to sound like us. Now we accuse each other of being them.
Everyone’s using AI, it’s 2025, that’s the secret nobody admits. Writers, strategists, students, politicians, poets.
We ask it to polish, reframe, clarify. We give it our outlines, then call the final draft “ours”, and so we end up in the strangest paradox of modern life: We all use AI, and we’re all suspicious of everyone else for doing it.
Every post feels immaculate. Every sentence sounds curated. Every human voice hums at the same clean, hollow frequency.
We’ve ironed out the flaws and with them, the fingerprints.
There was a time when layoffs felt like failure. A bruising, reluctant move. A last resort. Now? They’re a business model , a recurring ritual in the quarterly earnings liturgy. A cleansing ceremony to reassure investors that “discipline” still rules.
Millions were laid off “for the greater good.” That “good” turned out to be the balance sheet. When markets rebounded and stock valuations hit record highs, the same companies discovered a new crisis: “overhiring.” The solution? Another wave of layoffs.
Corporate resilience, it seemed, meant the CEO’s yacht stayed afloat.
The list goes on and on. The paradox became routine: profits up, payroll down. Somewhere, HR pressed send on another “Exciting Changes Ahead” email.
Growth, it turns out, is only good news for shareholders.
The AI Renaissance “Efficiency Will Set You Free”
2025 brought a shiny new excuse: artificial intelligence. Executives announced “transformative investments in AI,” often right before announcing job cuts.
IBM, Dell, and Google cited “AI-driven efficiencies” across multiple reports. But in practice, AI wasn’t replacing tasks … it was replacing justification. PowerPoints got smarter; human beings, redundant.
As one HR chief joked at an investor meeting, “We’re not downsizing … we’re future-sizing.”
The Circle of Corporate Life
Bad economy? Layoffs. Booming economy? Layoffs. AI revolution? Layoffs. Solar eclipse? Pending.
Corporate America doesn’t need a crisis anymore. It just needs a quarter.
Corporate Enlightenment
The language evolved. Layoffs became “rightsizing.” Cuts became “strategic agility.” Suffering became “efficiency gains.”
Executives now speak with Zen minimalism about “optimizing workforce alignment,” as if people were spreadsheet cells misbehaving. They talk about “doing more with less.” Mostly, the less is us.
The Forgotten Equation
Somewhere along the way, we lost basic math:
People are the economy. Consumers need income. Income comes from jobs … the ones being systematically deleted.
You can’t fire your way to prosperity. You can’t automate empathy. And you definitely can’t build a thriving society by erasing its workforce one “optimization” at a time.
Still, somewhere at sea, a CEO raises a glass aboard his yacht … Synergy II ….smiling as he tells investors, “We’re doing great things with less.” He’s not wrong. They’re doing great things. With less of us.
