We think in language. The quality of our thoughts and ideas can only be as good as the quality of our language
George Carlin
Some words gradually started to represent more than a word is biologically capable of representing. The brain is an association machine but associations have to be created in a smart way. Having an object with very few association links would not give a deep understanding of it. But even worse would be to have an object associated with everything. This would not only make those millions of associations pointless but it would totally overload the object.
When many concepts are jumbled into the same word, they make it useless since it doesn’t bring clarification and understanding.
The brain is this ever-improving, constantly firing mesh of neurons, that has the purpose of delivering the most useful output while not experiencing major failure as a system. Every brain structure is connected to other structures. The “existential risk prevention” system of the brain does not allow too many associations, because it would trigger so many connections to be lighted simultaneously that we risk a system overload. So our theory is that the brain artificially suppresses activity in these word-centers.
Your thought process dies and is restarted. When restarted, you get the brain autopilot finishing the thought with whatever shallow content it can. It turns out these generic words are not just useless. They are harmful to our thought process in an invisible way. They disrupt it, leaving behind no evidence of their failure.
When humans first evolved language, the world was a very different place. Life was simpler. So language evolved the simple structure needed for then and there. Mostly one concept = one word. And this structure worked wonders.
Eventually we got concepts that didn’t fit into one word. Or even a sentence. Stuff that needed a paragraph to explain and would just confuse you if you didn’t understand other concepts. And then life got more complex, dynamic and interconnected and those complicated concepts got more and more interrelated.
We slapped a single word on all of those. Due to their importance they slowly became cornerstone words in our language, categories of their own. Education. Work. Career. Business. Money. Relationship. Religion.
But a cornerstone can only be one if it brings clarity and simplicity. If it is understood at a level deep enough so that all the references to it from related nodes return a definition simple enough that it clarifies the connections, not buries them in one big confused mess.
So when your thoughts touch these “centers of confusion” the brain just silently… blocks to protect itself. Leading to responses from our autopilot.
The brain is a structure you need long term and it has the main goal of protecting itself from confusion so you don’t go crazy. It doesn’t want to go through the risk of analyzing overcomplicated concepts in depth.
And since this mental block happens every time we encounter the “trap word“, we cannot develop an intuition about it. And failing to understand these cornerstone topics may cause anxiety and inadequacy feelings.
Then we copy the understanding of these all important concepts from people around us (and popular culture) with the hope that they know better.
However, other people have the exact same problem. They are just as confused and the same words make them block too. We can call this overlaying confusion about many cornerstone topics “The fog“. The problem is The fog is invisible to those in it.
There are four types of influence that either make The fog denser (-) or help you see through (+)
- + Mostly good people who see via The Fog and want to clarify and explain. Unfortunately a small minority.
- – Mostly evil people who see via The Fog and want to take advantage of your delusions. All populist politicians belong here. Luckily also a small minority but as they are often in a position of power, they cause great harm.
- – Systems that emerged to take advantage of The Fog. For example many universities because the students don’t understand the concepts of Education and Career well. And capitalism is always there to take their money.
- + Chance makes sure to expose you to these “eureka” moments that suddenly bring clarity.
The black hole of every trap word has its separate strong resistance. A lot of brain rewiring is needed. But once you’re there there is no going back. The truth cannot be unseen.
There is only one fundamental way forward. We just need much better cornerstone words. Then we’ll be able to deconstruct all “trap words” using our new fundamental structure and actually understand the concepts behind them. Wrong and confusing relations will vanish and new ones will be born. Ones we can intuitively feel!
This is what defines I Grow Younger. We use a combination of psychology, evolutionary biology, philosophy and the vast personal experience of our founders to reframe parts of language itself. We use the same words like you – chaos, structure, hunter, sheep, inertia – you all know intuitively what those mean. And they have just one clear meaning. But we don’t use trap words if we can avoid them. Because they have already done you enough harm. When having to talk about a trap word like money, we have an entire article deconstructing the mess.
We construct and deconstruct until we have a working model of the mess that is the world. One that our ancient intuition can handle, unlike the current one, broken by the trap words.
We use this model to reframe everything and make you immune to The fog.
We use basic concepts like Structure, Space, Time, Love, Fear, Truth and Freedom. They are our building blocks. They should hopefully mean the same to almost all people but we do some defining, just in case. And then we construct.
