Words and labels, on the powers of

Nobody has seasonal affective disorder describes that Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is one of those medical-ish conditions that cannot be tested for, has no specific or clear symptoms, nor treatment. It could be generously called an umbrella term:

The more I read about it, the more I get the sense that SAD isn’t really a thing, it’s just a label to describe the tendency for some people to get depressed and anxious in winter, regardless of the (perhaps untraceable) particular factors behind it. Seemingly, SAD is just what you call it when nothing particularly explains your winter funk.

With this in mind, calling it a “disorder” sounds disingenuous, misleading, perhaps even toxic, but I digress. Taking a phenomenon as unclear as this one and assigning it a name is controversial, in that it comes with advantages and disadvantages both:

If you have a name for a group of symptoms, some of the interventions that helped one person with those symptoms might be likely to help someone else.

The downside to naming this disorder, or naming anything really, is that it gives you a narrowed view of what it is and what should be done about it.

The way I would put this is that the human brains is constantly looking for ways to simplify its job in order to be able to conserve energy. Cognitive biases, fallacies, and stereotypes are well-understood results of this behaviour, and something that no human can ever detach or escape from. These all work by simplifying the world by applying simple heuristics. A few common examples:

• negativity bias: bad things seem more likely and feel worse than good things seem likely and feel good,
• association fallacy: inferring guilt or honor from association,
• taking high probability as a certainty¹, see also Heuristics that almost always work,
• the stereotype of a nerd: computer programmers are smart but have no social skills.

Some heuristics are better than others, and some are actually almost always correct, but what they all share is that they make the world a simpler place for the brain to deal with. If one glance at a person is enough to determine that he is heavily muscular, our heuristics can tell us that he is likely to be a dumb brute and bamm, judgement was rendered, case closed, we don’t need to spend valuable brainpower on actually thinking about anything.

Concepts and names follows the same pattern, but less extremely so. Our brains love labels because they promise clarity and simplicity: they are clutches to use in a world that is simply too big and too complex for us to ever be able to truly comprehend. Raptitude explains this rather well:

Concepts should be held loosely, because they’re nowhere near as complex as the reality they’re supposedly explaining. Not by many orders of magnitude. They have no truth value in themselves, they just point you to some possibilities, while simultaneously pointing you away from other possibilities.

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Concepts can be useful, but they mainly restrict our view of what’s happening. When you tag something as X in the mind, you stop considering things that don’t apply to X. I guess this is what Don Miguel Ruiz means when he says words are magic spells.

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After all, nothing really has a name. Names are crude, low-resolution add-ons that only exist on the level of human thought. Reality doesn’t care what you call it; it will remain its complex and ineffable self.

Students of humanities tend to hold opinions such as “there is no such thing as real, humans make their own reality with words” and “words and language define the world”, and this used to annoy and even frustrate me, as I tend to put the physical reality first. Over the years however, I’ve come to see the wisdom in this (mostly thanks to the sweetest girl I’ve ever met), and have grown to recognize the importance of that perspective as well.

The sad truth is that we exist in a universe that is too vast and complex for us to ever truly understand. That our brains manage to make any sense of it at all while taking up less space than a football and using far less energy than a computer is frankly kind of insane.

There does exist a physical reality that has true, immutable laws… but it’s a reality we can only ever interact with or think about through the highly imperfect lenses of our own bodies and minds. And so, via humans, mere words gain power almost rivaling that of the very laws of physics.