Words. A force of creation or destruction. Who decides which words matter? How we talk about things influences how we think about them, which has tangible real-world consequences. Using our word in service of our ideals can be a double-edged sword. Ultimately, words are inert. In and of themselves, they have no meaning other than that assigned to them through mutual consensus.
The issue of being misunderstood or misconstrued remains a factor in every interaction, particularly because of the connotations attached to our choices to use a specific word instead of another. So what then of the words we don’t understand, the words we utter in disbelief, the words we mutter under our breaths?
Do words hold the power to liberate us from the tyranny that is post-modern culture, or are we doomed to exist in a vacuum of meaninglessness, devoid of substance? Our words have been overused and misappropriated to become some approximation of the definitive. Even as we say them, we know we are simply going through the motions, fulfilling the glut of content creation to feed the algorithm we neither understand nor care to. Mining data, for what, for whom? Our brains — the new frontier; our thoughts and emotions — collateral damage.
We see an abundance of literature using neuro-linguistic programming to seduce the reader into feeling seen, heard, valued, and believing they are part of something greater than themselves. Don’t forget to drop your dollars on the way out. We are deceiving ourselves into staying on the path to disillusionment, tropes rolling off our tongues. So glibly we repeat empty words and broken promises, pointing at something yet amounting to nothing as we drown in thoughts and deeds that serve the machine and rob us of our humanity.
Perhaps, once we have run out of words and squarely faced the shattering of the illusions we hold so dear, we will come to recognise the beating of our hearts, the medicine drum, the song that sings a new world into existence.