Realism now: why words no longer matter.
Populism has infiltrated every part of your life: your work, your relationships, your future. And the worst part? It's been happening all along. The manipulation of perception over reality is nothing new. What is new is how extreme it has become.
I'm going to use the word "realism" in this essay in a specific way, and it's not the philosophical one. By "realism" I mean: the discipline of looking at what is actually in front of you, instead of what you've been told is in front of you. It's a posture, not a doctrine. And it's getting harder to maintain.
The reason it's getting harder is structural. We live in an information environment whose business model depends on us not doing this. The platforms are optimized for engagement, engagement is optimized by emotional response, emotional response is optimized by simple stories, and simple stories are usually wrong about complex situations. The result is a culture-wide drift away from realism, toward something I'll call preferred reality.
Preferred reality
Preferred reality is the version of the world that flatters the way you already see things. It's not necessarily false. It's just curated for emotional comfort, and the curation is invisible to you because it happens upstream.
Preferred reality, on the right, looks like: the country is being invaded, the elites are corrupt, the institutions are rigged, the only honest man is the one being persecuted by them. Preferred reality, on the left, looks like: every problem is structural, every disagreement is bad-faith, every villain is institutional, every hero is being silenced.
Neither of these is entirely wrong. That's the trap. There are real invasions, there are real corrupt elites, there are real structural problems, there are real bad-faith disagreements. Preferred reality borrows just enough from the actual situation to feel grounded, then leaves you with a story that makes you feel correct instead of curious.
Why words no longer matter
The title of this essay is a deliberate provocation. Of course words still matter. But they matter less than they used to, and the reason is that the link between the words and the things they refer to has been deliberately corrupted.
When a politician says "transparent," it can mean opaque. When a CEO says "we value our people," it can mean we are about to lay off thousands of them. When a leader says "the rule of law," it can mean the rule of the leader. The words are still being said. They've just been disconnected from any consistent referent.
The realist's job is to watch the actions and discount the words. Not zero them out. Words still carry information, just less than they did. The information they carry is now closer to: "this is the story the speaker wants to be in." The actual content is in what's happening underneath.
How realism looks day to day
Three habits, in case any of them are useful.
Watch the calendar, not the press release. Companies and governments say a lot of things. The thing they're actually doing is visible in where the leaders are spending their time, who they're meeting with, and what they're funding. Press releases lag the actual strategy by months. Calendars don't.
Watch the second derivative, not the first. "Things are good" and "things are bad" both describe a level. The thing you actually want to know is: are things getting better or worse, and at what rate? Most political and economic arguments collapse if you ask which direction the curve is bending. The curve bends slowly, then suddenly. Realism is noticing the bend before the suddenness.
Watch the people who disagree with their tribe. When someone disagrees with their political ally, their employer, or their own past statements, that disagreement is doing real work. It cost them something to say it. The reverse is also true: when everyone in a group agrees, the agreement is doing no work and tells you nothing about the underlying truth.
What this means for me
I run a company called DeMers IT, and a portfolio of products under AI4Outcomes. The reason I'm so insistent in my marketing about "outcomes" rather than "innovation" or "transformation" or any of the other empty signifiers, is exactly this: outcomes are a thing you can point at. They're either real or they're not. They either happened or they didn't.
The whole consulting industry is built on the gap between outputs (reports, slides, methodologies) and outcomes (things that actually changed in your business). Most consulting projects produce a lot of the former and very little of the latter. The realist client knows this and structures the engagement around the latter.
This essay isn't a manifesto. It's a reminder. The world is going to keep telling you stories that flatter what you already believe. The discipline is to keep asking what's actually happening, even when the actual happening is uglier than the story.
Realism is a chore. Preferred reality is a vacation. Most people are exhausted enough that a vacation is what they want. I get it. But the vacation is what's making us so easy to manage.