When every word is powerful, none of them are.
“What is the most overused and meaningless buzzword of our time?”
There was a time when words like authentic, innovative, and empowered carried real weight—when they were spoken by those who meant them, and heard by those who needed them. Today, these same words float in the ether like over-inflated balloons: shiny, colorful, and completely untethered from substance.
We are now living in the golden age of linguistic inflation. And if there’s one term that epitomizes this era, it’s “gaslighting.” Once a precise, haunting term for psychological manipulation so insidious it made people doubt their own reality, it’s now tossed like confetti onto every argument, disagreement, or disappointment. Didn’t like someone’s tone? They were gaslighting. Forgot to call you back? Gaslighting. Politely disagreed with your opinion? You guessed it—gaslighting.
The tragedy here isn’t just misuse—it’s dilution. Words like gaslighting, narcissist, trauma, and boundaries were once tools for healing. Now they’re hashtags. Meme captions. Punchlines in TikToks. In making them accessible, we also made them disposable.
But “gaslighting” is not alone. Other offenders line up like actors in a parody of a TED Talk. Empowerment is promised in every shampoo commercial. Resilience is printed on coffee mugs as we drown in burnout. Everything is curated, from Netflix lists to chicken nugget trays. And worst of all, AI-powered—as if artificial intelligence is now responsible for your fridge light or your vibrating toothbrush.
Each overused buzzword is a symptom of a deeper societal hunger: we want language to feel important again. But instead of seeking meaning, we’ve settled for performance. We perform sincerity with phrases like “my truth,” we perform empathy with “thoughts and prayers,” and we perform intellect with “disruptive innovation.”
The consequence? Real communication begins to erode. Authentic stories get buried under a mountain of branded buzz. The word “trauma” becomes a placeholder for inconvenience, and “boundaries” get weaponized to mean “do what I say, or I’ll say you violated my healing.”
So what can we do?
We reclaim language by using it precisely, not performatively. We say “I disagree” instead of “you’re gaslighting.” We say “I’m tired” instead of “burned out beyond repair.” We tell the truth without dressing it up in Instagrammable, pseudo-therapeutic soundbites.
Because here’s the quiet irony: the most powerful words are often the simplest.
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