A blunt tool cannot carve a masterpiece. If I hand you a rusty sledgehammer and demand that you perform open-heart surgery, you will not save the patient; you will liquefy them.
We are the most expressive generation in human history.
Everyone has an opinion on everything. We text constantly, drop comments, scroll through infinite streams. All behind a screen.
It is profound yet it is a terrifying deception.
Expression requires something to express. And the thing that gets expressed, is shaped entirely by the precision of the language available to shape it.
And the language is shrinking.
Hyper-connectivity has optimized its communication for speed and reach rather than precision and depth.
We are talking more.
We are saying less.
We are louder than any generation before us.
Yet we are quieter.
George Orwell worried that a shrinking vocabulary would eventually produce a shrinking range of thought. He understood that if you want to lobotomize a population, you do not need to ban books. You simply need to shrink the vocabulary until the human mind loses the capacity to formulate a rebellious, complex, or sovereign thought.
The person who does not have the word "ennui" does not merely struggle to describe the feeling of listless, purposeless dissatisfaction. They struggle to identify it. To precisely locate it. To understand that they are experiencing a distinct thing with a distinct cause that is different from sadness, different from boredom, different from depression, different from exhaustion.
Without the word, the experience becomes a vague, undifferentiated discomfort.
And vague, undifferentiated discomfort cannot be seen, and thus cannot be steered through.
The fact I'm trying to point out is that the explosion of internet slang and hippie language is turning fully grown adults back into grunting Neanderthals.
Precision requires the reader to hold multiple things in mind simultaneously, to follow a chain of reasoning, to resist the comfort of the simple conclusion. Precision does not travel well. It does not produce the immediate, satisfying click of recognition that the platform needs from you to keep you engaged.
What the algorithm rewards is the blunt label.
What the algorithm rewards is the blunt label.
The word that sorts the situation into a known category without requiring further examination.
"Toxic." "Cringe." "Triggered."
Complex human scenarios, deep philosophical dilemmas, and multi-layered psychological states are compressed into binary buzzwords.
It is a cognitive shortcut that bypasses the specific, difficult, necessary work of actually looking at the situation clearly enough to understand what is happening in it.
And a mind that habitually takes cognitive shortcuts does not develop the stamina for the paths that have no shortcuts.
This is cognitive decay. If your vocabulary consists of merely fifty internet slogans and therapeutic clichés, you are structurally incapable of experiencing a nuanced life.
Epictetus taught that the very first step of wisdom is the calling of things by their right names.
If you lose the precise verbal distinctions between arrogance and confidence, between loneliness and solitude, or between compromise and cowardice, you allow matrix to take its hold on you. You become another bot.
When someone violates your boundary, and your only verbal recourse is to throw a tantrum or use a hollow catchphrase you heard on the internet.
The only possible solution to this is to read the old prose.
Read philosophy, history, and heavy literature. Force your brain to wrestle with long sentences and dense concepts until your cognitive stamina returns.
The sentences in texts written hundreds of years ago are constructed differently because the minds that wrote them were constructed differently. The grammatical complexity. The subordinate clauses that hold multiple ideas in careful relationship to each other. The precise vocabulary. The willingness to sit inside a long thought rather than rushing to the conclusion.
Engaging with that prose does not just teach you words.
It reshapes how thought moves inside you.
Every precise word you add to your vocabulary is a new tool for examining your own experience. A new capacity for making distinctions where you previously had none. A new ability to present your ideas with greater accuracy.
Every blunt label you adopt in place of a precise description is a tool lost. A distinction collapsed. Because the only thing humans control is their chain of thoughts, not even their own body. And it is a loss if you're not articulate enough to make people vividly imagine exactly what you're thinking.
— Marcus | Stern Stoic
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