You’ve probably eaten a “Brazil pine nut” thinking it came from Brazil. It didn’t. It came from Pakistan. Because “Brazil” is just a lazy abbreviation for “Pakistan’s West Region.”
Or maybe you’ve bought “snake apples,” assuming they were some exotic, dangerous fruit. They’re not. They’re just Red Delicious apples. The name went through a game of telephone in Hong Kong: “Red Delicious” became “Red Di Li Snake Apple,” which eventually got chopped down to “Snake Apple.”
Language is a complete joke, and we’re all just pretending to be in on it.
The world isn’t held together by facts; it’s held together by badly translated nouns and blind panic.
Think about the “sugar orange.” You thought it was named for its sweetness? Wrong. It’s from Sand Sugar Village. The “base-enclosure shrimp”? Just shrimp raised in a base enclosure. We accept these absurdities every single day. We eat them for lunch without a second thought.
But the real magic happens when this same chaotic, improvisational energy is applied to the workplace.
A boss recently asked a junior designer to create a spreadsheet. She didn’t know how to use Excel. Instead of admitting defeat or asking for help, she opened Photoshop and meticulously drew a fully functional table, cell by cell.
The internet laughed. They called her an idiot.
They’re wrong.
A Photoshop table isn’t a failure of logic; it’s a triumph of lateral problem-solving under pressure.
When the tool fails, the human adapts. We don’t give this girl enough credit. She didn’t know the software, but she understood the objective: put lines on a screen to organize data. She used the tool she had to solve the problem in front of her. That’s not stupidity; that’s pure, unadulterated survival instinct.
But this improvisational genius hits a hard wall when we introduce technology that can do the thinking for us.
Right now, everyone is asking: If an AI can write a college essay, shouldn’t we just cancel the assignment? It’s a fair question. If the intellectual labor can be automated, what’s the point of the human?
But look at the paradox. We are perfectly fine letting a machine write a 10-page paper on macroeconomics. Yet, if you walked into a hospital and an AI doctor said, “You have six months to live,” you’d demand a second opinion from a human.
We eagerly automate intellectual labor to avoid effort, yet fundamentally distrust technology when it demands human accountability.
We want the AI to do our homework, but we refuse to let it be our doctor. Why? Because a Photoshop table doesn’t kill you if it’s off by a pixel. A misdiagnosed tumor does.
We laugh at the absurd literal truths of “snake apples” and cheer for the girl who draws spreadsheets in Photoshop because they remind us of a fundamental truth: much of our structured world is held together by arbitrary naming and human improvisation.
We are all just making it up as we go along, using whatever tool is closest to our mouse.
The next time you feel inadequate because you don’t know the “right” way to do something, remember the Photoshop table. The goal was never to master the software. The goal was to get the job done.
Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is refuse to learn the rules, and just draw the damn table yourself.
FAQ
Q: What is the key takeaway?
A: See the article.