You let someone name your world.

One of the weirdest things about being alive is how few people ever notice that literally every single object they interact with has a name — and none of those names were inevitable. Someone named everything in your world. You think “chair” is self-evident. No. Someone invented that sound. Some caveman grunted a syllable near some woven twigs and boom — now every IKEA showroom on earth is a cathedral of nested lies, and we never question it.

It’s bananas.

Naming is sorcery.
Naming is the original deepfake.
Naming is the Zoom background of reality.

The big trick

You think reality is things. But it’s not. Reality is labels applied to chaos. The entire world is a collection of Post-it notes stuck on the void. George Lakoff (Berkeley cognitive scientist, actual genius, not a TikTok wellness coach) said: “language is not neutral — language shapes perception.”

Translation: Whoever names a thing controls how you think about that thing.

Naming is propaganda.

Naming is ownership.

Naming is… power.

The map is not the territory — but people live by the map because the territory is terrifying.

Naming is how we domesticate mystery.

Example: “love”

“Love” is a sound. That’s it. It’s a sound we all pretend means roughly the same thing, but ask 100 humans for a definition.

You’ll get:

• loyalty

• sex

• attention

• validation

• safety

• obsession

• worship

• somebody doing your laundry 

and we’re still like:
“he said he loves me,”

ok, but what version?? You don’t know. The word is so powerful, you act like it’s a known quantity. Naming hijacks the nervous system.

Example: “success”

Success is literally the most free-floating empty variable of all time. Milton Friedman invented a version (maximize shareholder value) that basically ruined society until like… last Tuesday. Then, startup culture invented a new version (get term sheets). Self-help culture invented feelings-based success (wake up earlier and juice kale).

But they all use the same word, so we pretend it’s a stable thing, it isn’t.

Success is a Mad Lib. You fill in whatever makes you feel not like a failure.

Someone named everything around you

Look around the room you’re in right now:

the “wall”
the “window”
the “couch”
the “remote”
the “pillow”
the “blanket”
the “laptop”
the “phone”

None of those names is inherent to the objects.

We could’ve called “blankets” — “comfort skins.”

We could’ve called “couches” — “horizontal thinking platforms.”

We could’ve called “phones” — “god portals.”

We could’ve called “laptops” — “infinite anxiety machines.”

Words feel natural because we’ve been marinating in them since birth, but they are artificial; they’re scaffolding we inherited. Someone made them up, and we never got to vote.

Whoever names the thing owns your thoughts about the thing.

..and you have been living inside someone else’s naming conventions your entire life.

Your mind is IKEA. You didn’t build the inventory. Even your own identity was named for you.

Think about your legal name. You didn’t pick it. Your parents chose a sound to assign to your existence, and that sound then shaped everything that followed.

Your legal name triggers bias.

Your legal name triggers expectations.

Your legal name might’ve gotten you hired. Or not hired. Or profiled. Or accepted. or assumed.

As Dr. Bertrand & Mullainathan’s research has proven, identical resumes with different names receive different callback rates. Naming changes outcomes. Identity is a variable in a simulation, and you didn’t author your variable name.

The hidden psychic violence of naming

That’s dramatic. Good. Stay with me. Naming makes the chaotic feel containable. Naming gives an illusion of understanding when we’re actually drowning in unknowns.

Categorization is anesthesia, but here’s the punchline: categorization = oversimplification. By naming things to make them digestible, we also make them inaccurate; all the nuance gets surgically removed, like how the DSM keeps renaming mental conditions, as if they are updating firmware.

But it’s still a guess. The labels are guesses. Naming is always approximation, but we treat it like gospel.

Language is the biggest prank in human history

This is the prank: we invented labels → then believed the labels → then forgot we invented them → then built society on those labels, and now if you question the labels, people act like you’re the chaotic one.

No.

The chaotic thing is pretending a word is the same thing as the thing. Like George Carlin said: “It’s all bullshit, and it’s bad for ya.” This is that.

If someone else named your world, then someone else framed your world; you think you’re experiencing reality, but you’re experiencing someone else’s metadata. The names are not the world. The names are the operating system. You’re not thinking your own thoughts; you’re thinking inside their labels.

The most rebellious act in the world is to rename things. That is how culture actually changes. That is what revolutions are. Revolutions are not overthrowing governments.

Revolutions are overthrowing definitions.

You don’t have to accept the names you inherited.

You can rename anything at any time.

You can rename failure to “data.”
You can rename heartbreak to “chapter migration.”
You can rename aging to “evolving feature set.”

You can rename your ex to “pilot program.”

You get to update the labels.

You can literally hack your emotional experience using linguistics.

CBT is literally “rename your thoughts.”

ACT is literally “defuse from labels.”

The future is not to find the right names. The future is to realize names are arbitrary. Names are the costume, the world is the naked underneath, and no one knows what that naked thing really is. So, you may as well name it yourself, because someone else already did.

And you’ve been living in their story.