A Journey.

Ruggero Vann/Corbis, via Getty Images

I'm stealing this, fairly wholesale, from a subscriber-only newsletter by Frank Bruni of The New York Times. In the newsletter, Bruni quotes an Australian reader, Michael Hogan, who writes, “It feels like every damn thing I do is labeled a journey. I don’t buy a drill. I’m on a home improvement journey. I don’t see my doctor. I’m on a wellness journey. I don’t deposit money into my bank account. I’m on a wealth journey. Make it stop.” 

Bruni comments on this linguistic-tic this way:

"Maybe it’s a byproduct of the era’s narcissism, a companion to all the selfies and Instagram stories and a social media landscape in which people are always positioning themselves in the foreground, where they pose just so. It’s semantic self-aggrandizement, turning an errand into an adventure, a routine into a religion...And so humdrum activities become heroic acts."

If you use words for a living, and almost everyone does, don't use words you're used to seeing. Don't just repeat things. Don't play into the dominant complacency. Which is a obfuscator's way of saying don't be boring. 

Don't be a "story-teller." Don't promise "robust," or "agile," or "nimble." Don't look like everyone else. As Orwell told us in "Politics and the English Lanuage," "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print."

To my ancient eyes, Bruni's critique of "journey" is fine, but it doesn't go far enough. He misses at least two points.

1. When you use clichés, you're giving the viewer or the reader permission to ignore you. Like you ignore safety instructions when you're on a plane or the 29,000 emails you get that toggle between a total of about fourteen or eleven subject lines. And so it goes until, your brain stem is frozen like a wart and cracks right off.
   
   
   
   Winter: "These savings will warm your heart."
   January: "New year, new deals."
   February: "I ❤️ these deals."
   March: "Spring into savings."
   May: "The savings are blooming."
   June: "Our deals are hot hot hot."
   July: "The deals are bursting in air!"
   August: "Like Summer, our savings are ending soon."
   September: "Back to School savings."
   October: "Savings so good they're spooky."
   November: "You'll be thankful for these savings."
   December: "'Tis the season for savings."
   
   
2. Part two is even more pernicious. And way more cowardly.
   
   I saw a creative lead on the IBM account at Ogilvy do it once. And he did it with such dumb pomposity that I almost snapped my fountain pen in half in anger.
   
   About fifteen creatives, strategists and account people had been working for days putting together a presentation for the client. The deck probably had twenty commercials, as many print and banner ads and all the accoutrements in the back of the deck that take twice as long to create as commercials and ads that are never bought but you have to show, lest you're accused of just doing print, banners and TV.
   
   The creative puff started the meeting--he had a page that said, "We are on a journey." 
   
   As another ex-Ogilvy friend once said, "fuck me with an iron rod." At a decent agency, they would have shot him like a broken horse.
   
   Calling hundreds of thousands of dollars or work and thousands of hours of labor a journey is merely a circumlocution. A way of saying to the client, "you don't have to buy anything. This is a work in progress."
   
   That sentiment is about as heinous as bullshit gets.
   
   As I type this I'm an hour away from a client meeting where I'm presenting a Nifty Fifty. 
   
   Those 50 ads ain't a journey. They're work. They're carved. They're what the client has paid for and what they have to buy if they want to progress.
   
   When a plumber comes to my house to install a sump pump, I'd show him the door in about in about 2.9 seconds if he told me we were embarking on a "dry-basement journey," or a "black mold-abeyance odyssey."

I don't care about all the New Age bushwa that tinkles around and says the journey is as important as the destination. I am not Lawrence of Arabia or even Lawrence of Oregano. I'm fine with Mao's Long March beginning with a single-step. I get long-haul-isms.

But when we need food in the house, or I need a $69 cable for some peripheral that barely cost $69 in the first place, I don't want a journey, I want the job done. I'm sure my clients feel the same way. 

In fact, below is the second page of the client presentation I'm about to give. I called it an Agender not an Agenda because I'm from Yonkers and that's how I speak. And I've allocated the time as below.

The client doesn't want a journey. Or blah blah blah.

He wants some ads.