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How To Stop Mental Masturbation and Take Charge of Your Life
I first heard this term from an ex-boyfriend. He was responsible for a huge department in a bank and loved his job, except the intellectual masturbation part.
‘What does it mean?’ I asked him. He said it was a bucketload of verbal diarrhoea used by senior executives to appear important in meetings (using his exact words, not mine).
That included him as well. He hated it but a normal part of the job he said.We laughed about it and made fun of the jargon that people used.
I felt superior because I did not practice that.
Except I was wrong.
My entire life was marred by corporate jargon and during weekends I would carry out intellectual masturbation with my friends.
It made us feel good, that we were knowlegeable about politics, climate change, AI etc. And we would brainstorm ideas together about business and how we would make the world better.
Except it was empty words shouted at each other, validating our miserable existence, working our asses off during the week to spurt out intellectual verbose over lunch, brunches and dinners.
