Low diatribe

We've abandoned perfectly good words.

"Mindfulness" became corporate meditation apps. "Solutions" became everything from software to soap. "Best practices" became the thing you say when you can't explain why you do what you do. We threw these words away because they got overused, hollowed out, turned into marketing speak.

But what if the problem isn't the words themselves? What if it's that we stopped agreeing on what they mean? Or their over-saturation has washed their meaning away entirely?

I keep coming back to this phrase: mindful solutionism.

I first encountered it as the title to the opening track of Aesop Rock's album Integrated Tech Solutions — a tongue-in-cheek take on how technology develops a life of its own, solving problems we didn't know we had while creating new ones we can't escape. It sounds like buzzword bingo, I know. The kind of thing that makes engineers roll their eyes and consultants reach for their notebooks.

But I'm shamelessly reclaiming it for something different. Not the ironic critique of modern tech culture, but the practice it implies: slowing down to fully understand a problem before rushing to fix it. Recognizing that not every solution is the same size, and not every problem needs solving at all.

There's something here worth rescuing.

I learned about solutionism without mindfulness early in my career, working at a research institution when Apple first introduced wireless networking. The head of the genome center was a brilliant scientist who we affectionately called "The Big Cheese" or "El Queso Grande" or occasionally "Le Grand Fromage." One day BC asked me to upgrade his home network with the new AirPort technology. I installed base stations throughout his house, positioning them so he could use his laptop anywhere, including his back bedroom.

When I finished, there was one wireless card left over. "That's for the Cube," he said in his barely perceptible drawl, gesturing to his desk.

His Apple Cube sat literally next to the base station I'd just installed. Half a meter of ethernet cable connected it perfectly. But he wanted wireless. He was thrilled when I swapped the cable for the card and he got full signal bars — never mind that his network speed dropped by half. He was happy to ride the "cutting edge" as an early adopter. I was happy to play with cool technology, even if it solved a problem that didn't exist.

That's solutionism in its purest form: applying a solution because it's new and exciting, not because it's needed. We replaced something that worked perfectly with something that worked worse, and called it progress.

I think about that moment when I watch teams abandon perfectly good language because it's been corrupted elsewhere. I have a long-standing debate with a friend and mentor who prefers "Engineering Conventions" over "Best Practices" — and tries to avoid loaded terms entirely.

"Best Practices has become meaningless," he argues. "It's what people say when they can't explain their reasoning. It shuts down conversation instead of opening it."

He's not wrong. But I find myself leaning into the discomfort instead of running from it.

"'Engineering practices' runs the risk of falling into that same trap," I counter. "What if we reclaim the concept? What if we call it: 'Of all the things we've tried so far, these are the practices we've found that work best, and when we find something better, we'll do that instead.'"

He smiles. "That's a lot of words."

"It is. But once we agree on what we mean, 'Best Practices' becomes shorthand for that whole definition. The precision is attached."

Both approaches have merit. His avoids the corrupted term entirely. Mine tries to rehabilitate it through clarity. The choice itself reveals something about how we navigate meaning in a world that's constantly trying to sell us things.

The work isn't in finding new words. It's in being precise about the ones we have.

When I say "mindful," I mean the patience to sit with a problem long enough to see its shape, not just the fastest way around it. The willingness to ask: is this actually a problem? For whom? What are we optimizing for?

When I say "solutionism," I mean the reflex to fix everything, even when fixing might make things worse. The impulse to replace a working ethernet cable with wireless just because wireless is new.

Put them together, and mindful solutionism becomes something different: the practice of slowing down enough to ask why we're solving something, and who it's for. The discipline to distinguish between problems that need solving and solutions looking for problems.

This isn't glamorous work. You don't get applause for the conversation that prevents the wrong solution, or for listening longer than feels comfortable before jumping to answers. But I've seen that this is where leadership actually lives — not in having all the solutions, but in being careful about which problems we choose to solve.

The quiet revolution isn't in rejecting buzzwords, but in insisting they mean something again. In a world that profits from confusion, precision becomes an act of resistance. When we agree on what our words mean, we can finally do the work they describe.

And maybe that's enough: to take back the language, one careful conversation at a time.