Words: The Architects of Your Reality

If you think words are simply labels for things that already exist, you're wrong. They are conjurers. They bring worlds to life or snuff them out. Language molds us, sharpens us, dulls us. It builds monuments inside our minds, then smashes them into fragments. Words aren't just sounds; they're the architects of your reality, an invisible hand, shaping.

Language as a Cage, Language as a Key

Keith Chen, a behavioral economist, suggests an uncomfortable thought: could the structure of our language shackle us? He asks if our verbs and tenses might determine how easily we slip into habits, into futures shaped by the present. A language with too much future is a language that slips, disconnected. "It will rain," you say, and suddenly tomorrow is less real than today, harder to reach, harder to save for.

English is a "futured" language, according to Chen. It cleaves your timeline into today, tomorrow, and forever. Other languages are slipperier, less rigid, more now. Chen says that those who use languages without this fixation on the future save more money.

But that isn't just about coins-it's about mindset, about where you are right now and whether tomorrow even matters to you.

The Danger of An Unexamined Vocabulary

Steven Hayes, a clinical psychologist, tells us something terrifying about language: words are the only reason we die before our bodies do. We write stories in our minds, stories so dark that the blank page feels better. No other animal, he says, can do this. And yet, it's our fiction, our performance.

My mother had a body so strong I was certain she would live to be one hundred. Shortly after turning 95, she became incredibly lonely. Her ever-optimistic nature dimmed and she simply did not want to do earth anymore. She passed away two months shy of her 96th birthday.

Replace, Reframe, Rewrite

A few years ago, I realized I'd been suffocating in the word, "should." It chained me to duties that weren't mine, a narrative I didn't own. Someone happened to say, "Don't should yourself!" A light switched on and I replaced "should" with "could." Walls shifted. Stage lights softened. Suddenly, the script was mine to rewrite.

"Could" is a portal-a path away from fixed destinies. "Could" is a doorway. "Should" is a shackle.

Language and the Power to Edit Reality

Your repeated phrases-your incantations-are they comforting you or binding you? If you find yourself caught, listen to your language. The repeated words, the loops that tangle you, recognize them, then break them.

Write the words down, then burn them. Replace them with a different kind of fire, a language that does not doom you.

We say, "Words have power," but we mean they have electricity, an invisible voltage. Language can illuminate. It can electrocute. It's an energy we carry, one that we ignore at our peril.

Chen's data and Hayes' words all point to the same thing. You are a creature made of syntax and syllables, moving through a landscape that language constructs beneath your feet. If you feel trapped, perhaps it is time to switch languages. Not from English to Spanish, but from "should" to "could," from "never" to "maybe."

Language is not a prison nor a paradise. It is a raw material. Melt it down. Reforge it.