I caught myself doing it again this morning.
I wrote a sentence, looked at it, and thought: “That sounds a bit clunky. Let me smooth it out.”
I am literally writing an article about The Coherence Trap—our dangerous obsession with smooth, frictionless narratives—and I am still instinctively trying to optimize my own roughness out of existence.
It is a hard habit to break. We are conditioned by school, by corporate culture, and now by algorithms to believe that “Smoothness = Competence.”
The Classroom “Bot” Problem I see this in my students every day. They are terrified of the “rough draft.” They use tools to scrub their essays until the grammar is flawless and the structure is perfect. The result? Their work is technically perfect and completely dead inside.
They are falling into the trap of believing that if something flows well, it must be true. But as I argue in my latest research for Reality in Beta, Smoothness is usually a lie.
Why I’m Embracing the Clunkiness When we smooth out the edges of our work, we delete the data. We delete the nuance. We delete the very things that make a story real.
So, I’m trying to get better at Intentional Roughness.
- I’m trying to leave the logic slightly jagged if the reality is jagged.
- I’m trying to resist the urge to wrap everything up with a pretty bow.
It feels wrong. It feels “unprofessional.” But at least it feels human.
(Read the full theory on The Coherence Trap over on LinkedIn)
