The Inner Monologue

Language, like civilization itself, is a soft blanket thrown over something cold and hard beneath. It comforts us, disguises the bones of reality, and turns sharp truths into phrases smooth enough to repeat in polite company. Yet, beneath our everyday speech lie graves of meaning — phrases that, taken literally, are horrifyingly honest.

Take “cost of living.” It sounds like a neutral economic metric, something for actuaries and policy wonks to debate. But parsed literally, it’s the price one must pay to continue existing — a subscription fee for life itself. Stop paying, and you stop living. It is capitalism’s most distilled confession: survival has a price tag.

The Sanitized Abyss

We tend to think language evolves toward efficiency. In truth, it evolves toward anesthesia. We invent euphemisms not to communicate more clearly, but to hide what would otherwise be unbearable.

“Human resources” doesn’t mean “people” — it means “the parts of people that can be used.”
“Work-life balance” is a quiet admission that life and work are opposing forces.
“Killing time” sounds harmless, but it’s an act of self-destruction disguised as boredom.

Our metaphors turn murder into management. “Deadline.” “Crushing it.” “Slaying the competition.” “Nailing the presentation.” “Destroying the market.” The vocabulary of success is indistinguishable from the vocabulary of violence — yet we speak it without a hint of alarm.

A Culture of Comfortable Death

Consider how our idioms mirror our collective neuroses. “Climbing the corporate ladder” is an image of progress built on the backs of others. “Rest in peace” is how we domesticate the concept of oblivion. Even “living the dream” often means enduring the nightmare with a smile, pretending you wanted it this way.

We treat language as decoration, but it’s more like infrastructure — the plumbing of our perception. When the words themselves are corroded, our moral imagination leaks. If we describe exploitation as “the cost of doing business,” if we call surveillance “data collection,” if we name layoffs “right-sizing,” we are not simply lying — we are building a world where lies feel like truth.

Literalism as Rebellion

To take words literally, then, is an act of rebellion. It is a way of stripping the varnish off our civilization and forcing ourselves to look at the splinters underneath.

If we spoke plainly — “You pay to stay alive,” “Your boss owns your daylight,” “Your attention is a resource being mined” — we might become uncomfortably aware of how much we’ve surrendered. We might ask better questions. We might even stop pretending that the absurdities of modern existence are normal.

Literalism is not naivety. It is clarity. It is the linguistic version of opening the curtains and realizing the light you thought was morning is actually fire.

A Dictionary of Doublespeak

Perhaps what we need is a new lexicon — one that matches our reality instead of masking it.

“Cost of living” → The ransom paid to remain alive.

“Work-life balance” → A negotiation between slavery and breath.

“Human resources” → Meat with résumés.

“Paying attention” → Leasing your consciousness.

“Deadline” → The date by which your worth expires.

“Social network” → Marketable loneliness.

“Rest in peace” → The only form of rest we still honor.

By reading our language literally, we confront the moral infrastructure we built without blueprint. Each phrase becomes a mirror, reflecting the transaction beneath the metaphor.

The Final Word

We are a species that hides behind its words. We have found ways to make death sound restful, poverty sound temporary, and despair sound productive. But every now and then, it is worth peeling back the idiom and seeing what bleeds underneath.

The truth isn’t that our language is dark — it’s that our reality is. The words only tell us what we’ve been too polite to say out loud.

And that, perhaps, is the real cost of living.