Missing the obvious because we're too wrapped up in trying to look smart

As I have done for most of my career, I am trying to help people tell a complicated story that (they hope) will justify their existence.

It's not working out very well.

Because to be an effective explicator, one needs actual substance to explicate.  Oh, I can spin things 'round and 'round for a good long time, but eventually the spin cycle has to end. You either wear out the workings of your washing machine, or you realize you never had any laundry in the washer to begin with.

When this happens, and it happens often, I spend a lot of time beating myself up.  "I just don't get it.  I'm not smart enough to understand this.  Why doesn't this make sense, why isn't it connecting in my brain, what is wrong with me?"  I actually get depressed.  I live in fear every day that they will figure out I'm a moron and fire me.  (They haven't -- yet -- in 20 years, but it's still my fear.)

Then the light bulb comes on and I realize it's not me at all.   Maybe I'm not very smart, being just a has-been liberal arts major from several decades past, but I'm not a complete moron.   CEOs have listened to me.  PhDs have listened to me.  Hell, teenagers have listened to me.  The obvious hits me squarely in the face, always a little too late:  everybody is so wrapped up in fear and in justifying their existence, we ourselves are spinning 'round and 'round, going nowhere.

Sometimes I sit back in wonder and awe at the amount of money they pay us to spin nothing; to build nothing; to create nothing.  I watch myself and others complicate things to the point of sheer agony, because the more complicated this stuff seems, the smarter we seem. 

I participate in the dance because I have bills to pay, and people to take care of.  Many of the others are doing the same thing; but I think far too many come to believe the empty words I help them spin. 

My grandfather could point to a building he laid the brick for and say, "I built that courthouse." 

He wasn't a rich man, but he knew what he did.  It was obvious to him.
(And the courthouse is still there, 96 years later.)