At work, you're headcount.
When they add you, it's headcount. When they cut your friend, it's a reduction in headcount. Nobody got fired last spring. Positions were eliminated. The team wasn't gutted. It was restructured. You aren't people. You're resources, and there's an entire department for humans as resources.
None of that language is an accident. Every one of those words was built to do one job: make sure nobody has to picture a face.
You can't say "we cut Dave, who coaches his daughter's softball team" in a quarterly update. So Dave becomes headcount, and the sentence goes down easy.
Here's the part worth sitting with. You've started using the words on yourself.
You call your time "bandwidth." You "don't have the capacity" for your brother's phone call. You gave your family "an update." Somewhere around year six or year ten, the language crossed the parking lot and followed you home.
The words were designed so nobody had to picture you.
Be careful speaking a language where you stop picturing yourself, too.
The one thing:
Catch one work word on your tongue tonight, at home. Notice what it keeps you from picturing.
Josh
P.S. I finished my 30-day Ash Journal run on July 30. In public, one page a day, no edits, all thirty.
Five minutes. One prompt. One line of ash. The first seven days are free: truevitalyou.com/journal