Words are a technology we use all day err day, and yet, we take them completely for granted.
Perhaps because they’re old.
There’s not as much novelty to saying “hello” as there is to seeing an AI agent spend a few seconds doing the work that used to take you hours.
Or perhaps because we were only given a surface impression of how words work and what they do.
It’s a topic I’ve spent way more time pondering than might be good for me. And I keep discovering new surprising things about the technology. Who knows, perhaps one day, I’ll fill a book with what I learned about it.
Hey, speaking of books, they’re the perfect way to introduce today’s topic.
Books are insane. I can’t get over it.
If the existence of books isn’t one of the most mind-blowing things in the world to you, hear me out:
We were a bunch of big apes making sounds at each other.
At some point we self-organized and agreed that a certain sound always means “fire” and another one means “mommy”.
Pretty hard to achieve without pre-existing language to communicate about it. How we pulled that off is beyond me.
But here’s where it gets weird:
As if using words to refer to things we can see isn’t wild enough, we started making words to describe things that aren’t here: “yesterday”, “I have a plan”, “Epstein client list”, these are all words that point to something that isn’t happening.
You can’t point at yesterday, it’s not here. And yet, we made words that allowed us to communicate about it!
We even made words for pure abstractions (“worth”, “good”, “intention”) which we toss around like it’s nothing.
These are things that don’t even physically exist, and never have in the past either. How did we agree on their meanings? It’s crazy!
Now, have you ever considered how crazy alphabets are?
We agreed that certain symbols represent sounds. But those sounds can change depending on the symbols around them. The “o” in “oar” sounds different than the “o” in “ouch” even though they’re the same symbol.
Oh, and when we see these symbols (they’re called “letters” btw, if you’re new to them), many of us hear an imaginary voice say the word. We literally stare at a shape and it makes us hallucinate a voice.
But no, that’s mundane. Move along folks, nothing to see here.
Hallucinating a voice isn’t the end of their magic though. And that’s exactly why I am so baffled by the existence of books.
When you read a novel, you don’t just hallucinate voices in your head.
You stare at symbols and hallucinate an entire world, full of characters born in the author’s imagination. You even develop relationships with them.
You can literally read Lord of the Rings and go live in that world every evening. You have characters you feel friendly towards and characters you find annoying.
Then you can meet someone who hallucinated the same people…and discuss those relationship together.
What?! How is this real?
It isn’t.
You just entered the same illusory world that was created by the technology of words. And we’re so used to this that we do it like it ain’t no thing.
But you don’t need to read a book to have this happen.
We are transported into foreign, illusory worlds every day as a result of the words we use.
We are teleported into them so rapidly that we barely notice, and the illusory realms we enter can feel just as real as this one.
I’m not talking about anything woo or esoteric even, I’m talking about the basic functioning of language we use every day.
Allow me to explain:
This is a language tree.
Language trees fascinate me because the further down to the roots we go, the less we know. Our understanding of proto-languages (like Proto-indo-European) is largely informed guesswork.
But what we can tell for sure which words are connected. And because of that, linguists have been able to identify which words are the oldest, and the most similar across languages.
Words like “I”, “you”, “we”, “mother”, “fire”, “ashes”, “dark”, “give”, “hand”, etc. Were among the first ones we devised, because they were directly crucial to our survival.
As we’ve seen, we then made words that could point at things even when they were not present. Allowing us to communicate messages such as:
“It’s going to be dark soon, we must make a fire.”
Which is a phrase you can not say without words. Because you can not point at a “soon”, a “must”, a “make”, or a fire that is not here. The best you could do is point at the darkening sky and hope they get the rest of the message.
This sounds small but it’s actually a huge innovation. It’s a shift from language pointing at things and describing them, to language calling things into being by describing them:
You want fire, you communicate about it, and you create it.
Instead of just pointing at the presence of things, we could now point at their absence, at timelines, and our intentions for them.
But it didn’t stop there. As language evolved, it also developed the ability to bring things into existence by pointing at itself. Through categories, identities and concepts.
For example, the word “rude”.
What’s “rude” in one culture (or to one person) isn’t rude in another.
Rudeness gets created by the word’s own existence, and people discussing it. You can not experience rudeness unless the word is part of your vocabulary. The closest you can get is “you did this thing, and personally, I don’t like that”.
The reason the word rudeness was created (I imagine), is so that groups of people could reach agreement about what they liked and didn’t. Rudeness allows you to say “as a culture, we don’t like that”, which can then get invoked as a rule and protect the speaker to some degree.
Instead of having to take ownership of your dislike, you can now point at subjective rudeness (as agreed upon by the culture) and the other person can apologize without you, specifically, having taken a stand against the behavior you disliked.
Once again, no real objective rudeness ever happened. The rudeness was created by the word itself. And yet, I’m sure you have experienced rudeness, haven’t you? You have been in moments where you lived in a world where rudeness did happen.
This is the same mechanism as reading a book. There was an objective behavior, and an illusory experience of “rudeness” on top. But in the world you lived in, that rudeness, was of course, real.
But that is just the tip of the iceberg. There are hundreds of words we use on the daily which have absolutely no basis in reality:
Deserving, duty, rights, guarantees, obligations, … None of these things point at anything that exist in reality.
Unlike “fire isn’t here, we need it”, it’s impossible to point to the presence or absence of a “duty” or “deserving” as a phenomenon:
You experience duty because you use the word. But nothing else makes it so.
No amount of “deserving” can give you what you think you deserve, or give other people what you think they deserve.
It’s just a word pointing itself.
No amount of rights or guarantees can guarantee anything. The reality is “this is what we verbally agreed upon”. But not “this is what will happen”.
What this means is that we can live in realities where we believe we are guaranteed a paycheck, for example. But that’s not true. If our employer goes out of business before the end of the month, they can’t guarantee it.
We can believe we have human rights, but anyone living in a country that doesn’t care for them can tell you those rights are a realm of collective illusion.
We can believe we deserve to be treated with more respect, for example. But that can not make someone respect us. And one of the many reasons for that is that respect itself doesn’t exist in reality either. It’s another word you can’t objectively point at.
Like books, these words transport us to illusory worlds and make us feel like we’re in them.
There’s an argument to be made that this is true of all words (”bird” as a word isn’t always the reality of a bird). But what’s special about this class of words is that there doesn’t exist a reality in which they are objectively true. Their only function is to create it.
This is immensely powerful. We can invent a word like “fairness”, and by inventing it, we can suddenly start treating each other more fairly. Because we collectively hallucinate a reality in which fairness is a thing. The word creates its own concept, points at it, and brings it into being.
But the drawback of this is that we can get trapped in their worlds too. We can start exclaiming “life’s not fair”, or “my payment is not fair” or insist others should treat us more fairly. And this does nothing but torture us because fairness is an illusory reality.
It doesn’t change things. We are stuck in it.
The real reality underneath is what’s happening and our feelings about it.
To do this, to retreat back to a world that isn’t create by words, is a process I call “truth therapy” and has been working wonders for me whenever I do it.
Simply refuse to inhabit any illusory worlds and retreat to the one you can point at. See how that makes you feel different.
For example, I can lament that I didn’t get what I deserve, but that won’t change things. Because no deserving ever really happened. If I retreat to the reality “I hoped to receive this, I didn’t get it, and now I feel ___”, I can once again collaborate with it.
It’s also useful interpersonally. Many conflicts, for example, are fought at the level of frame control (“which of our illusiory worlds, our interpretation of the facts, is the correct one? the one where you’re to blame or I am?”), but when you return to truth together, what’s left is this:
“Here’s what happened. Here’s what you did (or didn’t) do or say, objectively. Here’s what I did (or didn’t) do or say. Here’s how I feel about that. Here’s how you feel about that. What do we both do with all this?”
By changing the words you use, you can change the worlds you inhabit, and move in.
So if you don’t like the world you’re in, a good place to check is which illusions are part of it.
The same is true at scale: By changing a culture’s discourse, the words they use, you can change the reality that culture lives in.
And the same is true in relationship:
The reality you create for yourself (within & without) is the reality that emanates from you.
It’s spread through the words you speak, the way you move & breathe, and the world that is perceived when looking in your eyes.
A gift of love to yourself, becomes a gift to all of us, through the language you express.