Someone on a support call told you to 'clear your cache,' and you said 'okay, let me try that' with total confidence, and then quietly typed it into a search bar the second the call ended, because you had absolutely no idea what a cache was, where it lived, or how you were supposed to clear it. You are not alone in this. Almost everyone has had that exact call.
Here's what nobody tells you in that moment: the word wasn't self-explanatory to anyone the first time they heard it either. Every person who now says 'clear your cache' with total ease once had their own version of that same silent, private moment of not having a clue. The difference isn't intelligence. It's just that somebody, at some point, actually explained it to them in plain language, and nobody's done that for you yet.
Jargon isn't a measure of how technical you are. It's a measure of who happened to explain something to you in plain language, and who didn't.
This matters more than it sounds like it should, because the shame around not knowing a word tends to generalize far past that one word. Miss the meaning of 'cache' in one call, and it's easy to walk away with a much bigger, much less accurate conclusion — that you're 'just not a tech person,' full stop, instead of the much smaller and much truer fact that one specific word was never explained to you.
What a cache actually is, since we're here
A cache is just a stash of leftovers. When a website loads, your device saves little pieces of it — an image, a bit of code — so the next time you visit, it loads faster instead of downloading everything all over again. Usually that's helpful. Occasionally the leftovers go stale — the site changed, but your device is still showing you the old saved version — and 'clearing your cache' just means telling your device to throw out the leftovers and get fresh ones. That's the whole concept. It fits in three sentences, and somehow it took most people years to hear it explained that plainly.
Picture the actual version of this: a client of mine, sharp, capable, has run her own business for years, once told me she'd avoided setting up two-factor authentication for eight months because a setup screen used the word 'authenticator' and she assumed it meant she needed to download some separate specialized program she didn't understand. It meant nothing of the sort — a text message with a code would have done the exact same job. One unexplained word cost her eight months of a security feature she'd have set up in ninety seconds with the plain version of that sentence.
Why the explanation almost never comes
Tech support scripts are written by people who've explained this a thousand times and forgot, a long time ago, that it isn't obvious. To them, 'clear your cache' is as basic as 'turn it off and on again.' To you, hearing it for the first time with no context, it's a phrase that sounds like it requires a computer science degree to safely execute. Nobody in that phone call is lying to you or trying to make you feel small for not knowing. They've just genuinely lost track of what it's like not to already know.
This happens constantly, and it's rarely malicious — it's just what happens to any specialized language over time. Doctors do it. Lawyers do it. Anyone who spends years inside a field stops noticing which words used to be foreign to them, and starts using them as if they were always common sense. The gap that creates isn't your failure to keep up. It's a completely predictable side effect of expertise forgetting where it started.
You weren't supposed to already know what a cache is. You were supposed to be told, plainly, by someone who remembered not knowing once too.
I see this constantly in this work — the block is almost never the actual task. Clicking a button, typing a code, checking a box: none of that is hard once someone gets there. The block is the single unfamiliar word standing in front of the task, doing the job of a locked door when it was never anything more than an unlabeled one.
A small habit that actually closes the gap
The next time you hear an unfamiliar tech word — cache, cookies, DNS, sync, whatever it is — write it down before you look it up. Just the word, in a running list. Then find the plainest possible explanation you can, ideally one sentence, and write that next to it in your own words, not the definition's. That list becomes yours in a way a search history never does, because you're not just looking the word up once and forgetting it — you're building a small, personal glossary you can actually return to.
Do this for a month and something shifts that has nothing to do with becoming technical. The next unfamiliar word stops feeling like proof something's wrong with you and starts feeling like the next entry in a list you're already used to adding to. That reframe alone removes most of the shame, because shame needs the feeling of being the only one who doesn't know to survive, and a running list of words you've calmly looked up and understood is evidence directly against that story.
This is also why a genuinely good explanation is worth more than a genuinely thorough one. You don't need to understand how a cache works at the level of the engineers who built it. You need the one sentence that lets you act on it correctly and move on with your day. Depth is available if you ever want it. Most of the time, plain and short is the whole assignment.
The real question
So here's the one worth sitting with: how many tech conversations have you quietly nodded through, agreeing to something you didn't fully understand, because asking felt riskier than pretending? That's not a confidence problem you were born with. It's a habit built by years of jargon nobody stopped to translate, and it can be unbuilt the same way it got built — one plainly explained word at a time.
You're allowed to ask what a word means in the middle of a call. You're allowed to say 'can you explain that like I've never heard it before' without it meaning anything about your intelligence. Most of the people who'd judge you for asking don't remember not knowing it either — they just got explained to first.
Want your setup explained in plain language, start to finish? Start here: Discover