Recently I was in the middle of a conversation that bounced from topic to topic like ping pong, when someone casually mentioned, “Have you considered…”

There is nothing out of the ordinary about this exchange. I hear this phrase dozens of times a week. So it was a few hours later that I stopped to think, what he really meant was that he disagreed with the consensus, and here is a possible, not definite, reason as to why.

It took me a moment to realize that in my few years in San Francisco, the lexical norm had well ingrained itself in my subconscious. In the cheesiest and sincerest of ways, I believe in the power of words to shape the ways in which we think about problems, establish social dynamics, and plan actions. Not everyone talks like this. Not everyone thinks in the way that causes people to talk like this.

The way we communicate in silicon valley tech culture feels like a delicate balance of universally aspiring to be the ubermensch and carefully protecting the ego. We exalt the search for the inviolate truth. In this quest, say anything, say what you truly believe. There is no room for egos, pretense, or argument ad hominem. At the same time, ours is an era of renewed emphasis on workplace dynamics. We are told that people who trust each other work best together, to empathize with one another, to enforce a “no assholes” rule as part of creating a winning culture.

In combination, we are trying to be more than human – more rational, smarter, more detached from our messy emotions; at the same time, more in tune with our peers, kinder, more considerate. For the most part this effort is long overdue. But at the end of the day, we are human in our messy glory. And meaning gets lost in sensitivity, or humanity gets lost in factuality.

“So, have you considered…?”