Nasal Nourishment
Smelling Sauce
Everyone loves a good meal — especially a home-cooked one that nourishes the mind, body, and soul. For some of us, just the thought of a favorite cuisine can trigger a dopamine rush like a shot of adrenaline. As we imagine the smells and flavors, our tastebuds get so overloaded that we "inhale" the food when it's presented.
Unless you have an aversion to the texture of food. Then you literally inhale it.
In the Season 7 premiere of TLC's "My Strange Addiction," a 30-something Virginian woman identified only as Kathryn reveals that she snorts everything she eats because "it feels phenomenal." What started as a dare turned into a 5-year-long disgusting habit that has her puree everything from steak and eggs to spicy guacamole, then ingest it through her nose.
Somewhere, Maya Angelou's spirit is gently whispering, “Girl, that is not what I meant”
I've never snorted anything — other than a laugh — but I imagine passing tabasco sauce through my olfactory glands would be as pleasant as drinking shots of glass shards. Even former fans of Goldschläger wouldn't take that shot.
Kathryn claims her obnoxious obsession "has no drawbacks" because it helps her avoid overeating and choking, but snorting spicy salmon can trigger severe burning, inflammation, and bleeding in the nose and throat.
With those side effects she'd be better off taking Ozempic for weight loss.
It’s Showtime
In corporate America — and life in general — there are many "costumes of performance" available for us to don. Last week, the Russian Deadbeat Dad modeled the costume of performance as escape. He used identity as a shield against responsibility, leaning into the illusion that if you could just become someone else, your problems wouldn’t follow.
This week's costume is a bit different — performance as sophistication.
Instead of running away, Kathryn is really just showing off. What's really beneath the food snorting is the belief that if something looks extreme, complicated, or impressive enough, then it must be meaningful.
She’s not really chasing nourishment. She’s chasing the feeling of being exceptional.
And while most of us aren’t pureeing steak for nasal consumption, we’re all guilty of mistaking complexity for competence from time to time.
We build Rube Goldberg workflows that look brilliant but solve nothing.
We use bigger words instead of clearer thinking.
We mistake complexity for competence.
Somewhere along the way, we learned to believe: If I look impressive, I’ll feel impressive.
So we optimize for optics instead of outcomes. We perform sophistication instead of building mastery. We chase the appearance of evolution instead of the discipline of progress.
The problem is, sophistication is supposed to make work simpler.
If your process needs a flowchart, a glossary, and a 45-minute walkthrough just to explain it, you’re not building capability — you’re staging a production.
And like most productions, it only works as long as no one asks too many questions.
Real confidence is quieter than we expect. It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t need spectacle. It doesn’t need a costume.
The people who are actually strong at what they do don’t need elaborate systems to prove it. They build simple processes. Durable thinking. Repeatable habits.
They don’t need to snort steak to feel phenomenal. They just cook it well.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be impressive. But if your work needs a lot of explaining to look impressive, it probably isn’t.
Because real sophistication doesn’t make people say, “How did you do that?” It makes them say, “That just makes sense.”
And in a world full of performance, that kind of clarity is what actually stands out.
Question of the Week
What’s something in your work that looks impressive — but would work better if it were simpler?
