The cursor is blinking, a rhythmic, taunting pulse against the white void of slide number 13. It’s exactly 3:03 AM, and the blue light of the monitor has begun to feel like a physical weight against my retinas, a phantom pressure that no amount of caffeine can lift. I am currently staring at a text box, trying to decide if ‘leveraging cross-functional synergies’ sounds more impressive than ‘optimizing holistic workflow integrations.’ Outside, the world is silent, but inside this 14-inch screen, a battle of semantic attrition is being fought over the alignment of 43 different vector icons.
Earlier tonight, I tried to open a simple jar of pickles-the kind with the ridged lid that should be easy to grip-and I failed. My hands, softened by years of clicking and dragging, couldn’t find the purchase. It was a pathetic moment of physical impotence that underscored a larger, more terrifying reality: I spend my life building monuments to work, but I don’t actually do any work.
I’m Jackson A.-M., and usually, my life is much wetter than this. I’m an aquarium maintenance diver. My day job involves scrubbing calcified algae off the acrylic walls of 233-gallon reef tanks and checking the salinity levels in systems that house creatures far more honest than the people I meet in boardrooms.
– Physical Reality
But even in the world of professional fish-keeping, the PowerPoint Class has begun to creep in. I recently spent 63 hours-nearly three full days of my life-designing a presentation for a municipal zoo board about ‘Filtration Efficacy and Bio-Load Mitigation Strategies.’ The board didn’t want to see the actual filters. They didn’t want to smell the ozone or hear the hum of the pumps. They wanted a deck. They wanted the artifact of work to replace the reality of it.
MAP
We have entered an era where the map has not only replaced the territory but has become more valuable than the land itself.
TERRITORY
The Alchemy of Abstraction
In almost every major industry, we are seeing the rise of a professional tier whose entire value proposition is the translation of simple tasks into complex abstractions. These are individuals who couldn’t tell you how to fix a leaky valve if their lives depended on it, but they can create a 33-slide deck explaining the strategic importance of ‘Fluid Management Optimization.’ It is a form of corporate alchemy, turning the lead of mundane execution into the gold of high-level strategy through the sheer force of jargon and Calibri font.
“
The slide is not the work; the slide is the shadow of the work.
– The Artifact
Hollow Fatigue
There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from this. It’s not the healthy, bone-deep tiredness I feel after a 103-minute dive in a cold tank, where my muscles ache but the water is clear and the fish are breathing. It’s a hollow, intellectual fatigue. You realize that if your laptop were to vanish into a black hole tomorrow, nothing of substance would be lost. The PowerPoint Class exists in a feedback loop where they produce decks for other people who produce decks, a closed circuit of 73-page PDF attachments that serve as the primary currency of the modern office. We reward the person who can visualize the problem most elegantly, rather than the person who actually picks up the wrench.
The Shift in Focus Over Time
Execution
Cleaning Algae, Checking Flow
Abstraction
Deck Building, Synergy Alignment
The Crisis of Consequence
I remember a specific instance at the aquarium where we had a pump failure in the main quarantine tank. It was a crisis. We had 13 juvenile blacktip reef sharks that needed oxygenated water immediately. I was down there, covered in salt spray, manually bypassing the manifold to keep the flow moving. Meanwhile, the ‘Project Lead’-a man who earns roughly $233,000 a year to oversee ‘Operational Continuity’-was standing on the dry deck with an iPad, taking photos of the broken pump so he could ‘contextualize the failure points’ for the Monday morning briefing. He wasn’t helping me move the hoses. He was preparing the narrative. To him, the shark’s survival was a secondary data point; the primary objective was the post-mortem presentation. It’s a sickness of the modern soul, this need to distance ourselves from the tactile, messy reality of existence.
🧲
When you spend all your time in the realm of abstraction, you lose your ‘grip’ on reality-both literally, as my pickle jar incident proved, and metaphorically. You start to believe that problems are solved by changing the color of a bar chart from red to green.
This is why I’ve always been drawn to companies and cultures that prioritize the tool over the talk. There’s something inherently honest about a piece of equipment that either works or it doesn’t. You can’t ‘synergize’ a broken holster; it either holds the tool securely or it fails.
When you’re out in the field, whether that’s a construction site or a 53-foot deep dive tank, you learn to appreciate the gear that doesn’t require a manual or a mission statement. You want the physical reality of something like a Concealed Carry Holster, not in a bulleted list. It’s about the return to the tangible. We need more people who are proud of what they made, not what they presented.
The Cost of Abstraction: Competency Gap
Slides Created
Working Wrench
I often think about the 2,403 hours I’ve spent in meetings over the last decade. If I had spent those hours actually cleaning tanks, the world’s oceans might be marginally cleaner. Instead, I’ve contributed to a global surplus of ‘Executive Summaries.’ The PowerPoint Class has mastered the art of the ‘Pre-Read,’ a document sent out 23 hours before a meeting that everyone pretends to have read, but which really just serves as a defensive perimeter against actually having to make a decision. If the slide deck is long enough, no one will notice that there’s no actual plan. Complexity is the ultimate hiding spot for the incompetent.
We are drowning in the digital representation of things we have forgotten how to touch.
The Dignity of the Bolt
There’s a guy I work with sometimes, let’s call him Miller. He’s 73 years old and has been fixing boat engines since the Nixon administration. Miller doesn’t own a computer. When he explains a problem, he points to a sheared bolt or a clogged fuel line. There is no ‘deep dive’ into the systemic root causes. There is just the bolt. And the bolt is broken. There is a profound dignity in that clarity. When Miller finishes a job, the engine starts. There is a beginning, a middle, and a physical end. Compare that to a corporate ‘initiative’ that lasts for 13 months, involves 433 Zoom calls, and ends with a ‘lessons learned’ deck that is promptly archived and never opened again.
I’ve seen it in the aquarium industry-consultants who suggest we ‘outsource the biological maintenance’ to save $53 on the monthly budget, not realizing that you can’t ‘outsource’ the relationship between a diver and a delicate ecosystem. You can’t automate the way a moray eel looks at you when you’re hand-feeding it, and you certainly can’t capture that in a pie chart.
– Ecosystem Trust
The Moment of Silence
Sometimes, late at night, I imagine a world where PowerPoint is suddenly deleted from every server on earth. What would happen? Half of the workforce would stand paralyzed, unable to communicate their thoughts without the crutch of a smart-art graphic. The ‘Strategy Directors’ would wander the streets, clutching their empty hands, wondering how to explain their value without a laser pointer. But the people who make things-the plumbers, the divers, the engineers, the holstermakers-they would just keep working. They might even work faster, unburdened by the need to document every 13th step for the benefit of an oversight committee.
I finally got that pickle jar open, by the way. I had to use a rubber strap wrench I keep in my dive bag. It was a humble reminder that for every abstract problem, there is usually a physical solution. My hands are still a bit sore from the effort, but it’s a good soreness. It’s a reminder that I still exist in a world of three dimensions, even if my paycheck often depends on me pretending I live in a world of two. We have to fight the urge to disappear into the slides. We have to remember the weight of the wrench and the smell of the salt.
Because at the end of the day, when the power goes out and the monitors go dark, the only thing that will matter is what we actually built, not how we presented it to the board.
Are we the people who do, or the people who describe?
I know which one I’d rather be when the tank starts to leak.
