Not that it’s necessarily a recent epiphany but here’s my uplifting conclusion for the day: Everyone is incompetent and everyone is full of shit. Earlier this week I dealt with an insurance company and a government agency and everything went just swimmingly. That’s sarcasm. Heavy sarcasm. Around the same time I was exposed to a barrage of image polishing re-branding campaigns from four of the world’s biggest, and of late biggest scandal-ridden, companies – Facebook, Uber, Wells Fargo and Starbucks – all promising roughly the same thing: real change. Should we have any confidence in the legitimacy of these efforts? Why, no. And not just due to the self-righteousness and disingenuous virtue signaling their trite P.R. attempts share. But because having spent time in corporate America many of us are familiar with the process by which these messages would have been created. Not with sincerity, altruism or any genuine purpose but simply this: what they thought would play best. Like politicians. Which brings us to…No, no, let’s just not. Small wonder then that hearing the great Chris Stapleton identify the utter simplicity of “trying to untangle my mind” would resonate on this day. Preach.
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