Let’s explore how we tell stories about ourselves and others back to us by using words and symbols as the key to understanding who we are and the world around us.

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To communicate effectively and efficiently with another human. We cleverly employed a myriad of words and symbols to represent the “Stuff” we are pointing at. I think it does feel like magic to be able and speak our minds so effortlessly without needing the real thing to showcase every time.

Imagine how easy it’s to utter the noise “stone” without carrying a real physical stone around to indicate to others what you are trying to communicate across. Simply, uttering the noise of a word is enough to give others a sense of what is being talked about along with its linked possibilities and properties.

When comparing our species, the Home Sapiens (In Latin, Wise Man. Are we? 🤔) with other animals on earth. We’ve gained an outsized cognitive ability to employ both words and symbols effectively and efficiently as a means to navigate our environments.

The capability to think and communicate with others, thanks to our big brains, is a very powerful tool in our evolution. However, this is a double-edged sword. Civilization is enjoying immense growth within the last century but it comes with a heavy cost to our ecologies and natural systems on planet earth.

Everybody Loves A Good Story

Everyone creates their own narrative about who they are, how the world works, and why certain things happen in a certain way. Just like we have been passing down stories since ancient times as entertainment and also to teach people how to behave in certain situations.

We don’t just create them but also collect, modify and share them. Sometimes, we adapt it into our own internal narrative if it fits within our values and principles about life while other times discarding those that do not fit as nicely.

Do take a look at the western entertainment industry or any others. There’re plenty of popular titles of our times like Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Simpsons, and all the Marvel and DC Comics superheroes movies that are making money hand over fist with a massive fan base.

The money earned from the release of the movie to the sizeable fan base is a good indicator to tell there’s demand for more. Who doesn’t like a good story shown on the big screen?

What Narrative Do You Tell About Yourself?

Sometimes, they are short summaries with a few words then at times huge volumes of essays all in our heads.

• I’m a good employee and a caring colleague. I’m better than XYZ.
• I’m a great software engineer that is able to solve all the problems given to me and able to finish all the given stories within a sprint.
• I’ll be a good person and do good only.
• Someone did me wrong (in the past), but I’m not like that now as I’ve grown up to become more mature at handling the situation.
• I’m a responsible and loyal husband to my family.
• I’m an activist, democrat, republican, Buddhist, Christian, Engineer, etc.

We are all good storytellers to some degree as it’s part of who we are and what we do for most of our waking moments with our thoughts.

It’s important to know and understand this process is constantly running in the background when we are awake. This endless train of thoughts in telling a coherent story.

Of Memories and Hopes

Most of the time we tend to live in our heads a little too much, especially with the rise of digital technology usage like email and social media nowadays. Before this, we always have some kind of internal monologue (Eg: I like this and hate that) running in the background as we interact with others and the world.

You see, thinking is a form of silently speaking in our head without verbalization through using words and symbols to help us understand the experiences, sensory inputs, thoughts, memories, and information we chance upon.

Our thoughts do these zigzag jumps into the past or into the future when it feels like it or when something connects the link between 2 things through words and symbols.

The Past and Toward The Future

We can be remembering something from the past by reliving our memories in the hope to alter, review, edit, or modify to fit our own narrative of the situation. Sometimes, we learn new insights into an event or experience. While other times, we’re stuck in an unhealthy loop that we can’t get out of.

When we are not stuck in the past, the mind flies into the future in the hope to fulfills its endless desire. It’s known by many different labels like expectation, dreams, plans, and hope. If things didn’t go our way, we get immensely upset because it does not fit into our expectations.

But the funny thing is, nothing is set in stone. The future is not determined in a script and yet we build up grand expectations and plans to follow through. I’m not saying have no plans or expectations but to make a point that things will change and you should be flexible because life is essentially in flux all the time.

The Present Moment

Often enough, we are not living in the immediate present. Instead, our thoughts bring us into far-off corners in our minds endlessly looping and branching into different thoughts or memories. When one ends, another loop starts. This is how we live our lives most of the time but do not notice this cycle.

Perpetually holding tightly onto whatever piques its interest in the world of words, concepts, symbols, ideas, concepts, ideals, or memories. Never able to fully let things go or be in the moment until the body hosting the brain which allows the mind to exist becomes too tired to continue this maniacal dance anymore.

The Symbolic World We Live In

Commonly shared and agreed upon symbols are an effective way we communicate with each other within a social group. We all belong to some groups and know some of these shared symbols to an extent among families, workplaces, friends, social class, etc.

These can range from inside jokes, jargon (Responsive layout, if you work in UI/UX), clothes (religious or traditional), and physical symbols (cross necklace, sports car) to indicate we are part of a group.

Some of the listed symbols below don’t change much across different languages, cultures, and countries as we can easily identify them.

1. Owns an expensive car (indicates wealth).
2. Wears branded clothes (signal fashion sensibility).
3. Lives in a luxury house (indicate prosperity).
4. Marries a beautiful wife (signal you are family-oriented).
5. Works in a high office of an organization (signal power and profession).
6. Generates a high paycheque monthly (signal capability).
7. Traveling to exotic places for vacation (signal having means to do so).

People use these symbols to judge others and themselves against the social hierarchy to see where they are progressing in the agreed path. The expression “keeping up with the Joneses” is the name of the game that many mindlessly participate in, including me.

I’m not against people playing this game or wanting better lives for themselves. Heck, I’ve been playing this to a certain degree as well. It’s the first game everyone learns to play as we join the working population.

I’m just saying we can become so obsessed with chasing these symbols of success. The hedonic treadmills we put ourselves in are making people quite miserable and often worn out. It’s not doing ourselves nor the planet much good to serve our bottomless desires.

Rather than accepting the game and its rules blindly. Perhaps, it would be a better move to have a moment and ask ourselves this question every now and then. I think finding out whether the game is still worth playing is important.

Is the game still worth the toll it exacts on my mental and physical?

Most of the time, your heart already knows the answer

The object of desire changes but the motivation behind haven’t changed much at all. What symbols do you find yourself carrying now?

Money, A Powerful Underlying Symbol

Money is a very unyielding symbol that makes everyone go mad and act irrationally. It has the power to influence a person’s behaviors from chasing a coveted position in a Top 500 company to agreeing to hurt others in the hope to gain more.

The usefulness of money enables us to cover the basics like food, electricity, clothes, and shelter that we need to survive and a bridge to any imaginable luxuries or services a person possibly wants. And so, we have structured our whole society around it.

Lacking it means limited access to the basic necessities to even survive, especially to folks living in the city. We’re heavily dependent on the groceries store and supermarkets to buy our food for instance. Lacking money means a hungry stomach.

It’s a very useful invention to store and trade value with each other but we’re becoming obnoxiously excessive about it to our own detriment. It’s supposed to be a means to an end by itself but it ended up being the end itself.

Mistaken The Menu For The Meal

Money, by itself, does not exist in nature as there is no comparison like how we use money. Try holding up a stack of 100 USD dollar bills in front of a chimp then another with a bunch of bananas. The chimp will opt for the banana as they have no conception of money in their social group.

Oftentimes, we mistake “money for wealth” or “eating the menu and not the meal” as explained by Alan Watts. What Alan is trying to say is, money is a pointer to something we really need like food, clothing, shelter, and the Internet (a modern need 🤣). Those are real wealth.

So, don’t mistake a concept with what is real.

Words Become Crucial to Our Understanding

The languages we use in our daily life is the foundation of how we relate ourselves to our environment (people, space, nature, etc).

We navigate the world through the words our language gives us, like being able to tell exact time down to the precise nanoseconds or use an agreed-upon convention of cut-off length to describe it by indicating it’s in the past, present, and future events.

Remember my “stone” example I gave in the opening above?

The word Tree is not the Tree.

It’s a reference to what is real in the world. We uses abstraction all the time to represent something real in the world around us.

All words are nicely categorized and boxed up labels of reality born out of our curiosity to understand our environment. It’s simply an abstraction layer we use to communicate and differentiate “stuffs”. It’s not reality. This is important to be understood. They are akin to signposts indicating the direction forward.

Often enough, we give tremendous attention to a particular word, idea, story, concept, symbol, or any product of the mind. You see, the mind love to grab hold of something to feel secure because it innately knows that the world is constantly and violently changing at all times but chooses to ignore the reality of it.

(Who does not like to play pretend when we can find safety in our fantasy? I do, but I am increasingly becoming more aware of the tricks I play on myself)

So, the mind finds something it can secure itself in. What better than an abstract idea that never dies? So, it grabs hold onto it thinking it would feel secure enough to continue its existence. This is also the reason why we always feel unsecured which causes anxiety and immense sorrow.

A Little Experiment

Try this, see what emotion, memories, or images fills your head when you process the word given below.

Fear

Let’s try the world “fear”.

• do you see bad memories?
• Spider phobia?
• Sudden death from aneurysm?
• Frightful past experiences?

I don’t know what you’ll see because everyone have different images of this word.

Success

How about “success”? What does it evoke? or in the process of forming?

• earning lots of money?
• Wearing a business suit and shaking hands?
• Owning an expensive car?
• Living the high life?
• Being famous?
• Owning a successful restaurant?
• Acing that upcoming test?

Do you see how we attach the meaning to what we think it meant to us? Everyone will define it differently through their own experiences.

Summary

We’re living in an increasingly confusing world of our own making as we become more mesmerize in the world of words and symbols rather than what is in front of us.

This could leads to fuzzy and cloudy thoughts in finding the truth of any matter nowadays.

I hope I’m clear enough with my explanation above to have you understand that words and symbols are the representation of reality but not reality itself. Be aware of this process that is happening in the background of yourself.