words are not experience

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When I was younger, I very much wanted to be happier. So I started gratitude journaling, one of the best-known Strategies for Being Happier. I was diligent about it. I wrote down three statements of the form "I am grateful for x" per day.

I didn't get anywhere, though. The benefits from gratitude journaling come from feeling more gratitude, not from writing down the magic words. The gratitude-journaling people assume that intentionally writing things down will serve as a pointer to that feeling, and I think they're right, for most people.

But I didn't understand the difference, because I had somehow internalized that being grateful was the same as thinking the string of words "I am grateful." I assumed that the words were the experience.

Written down like this, the fact seems incredibly obvious. Of course thinking "I am grateful" is not the same as being grateful. But in practice, it's not so easy to see, especially if you have a strong internal monologue.

Suppose you live your entire life with a stream-of-consciousness that says the literal words "wow isn't that flower pretty? mm I feel hungry. yikes, my head hurts!" and so on and so forth. The words almost always coincide with the actual experiences of beauty and hunger and pain.

Given enough time, you might start conflate the two. And if you are a words person, like me, you might be tempted to pay attention to the words over all the other things that are happening. It's much easier to identify the string of words "I feel hungry" than experience the weird rumbly empty feeling that is hunger.

Eventually, you might forget that the words were supposed to describe the experience, not the other way around.

Being detached from experience is pretty bad.¹

You miss out on a bunch of small joys, like what the breeze feels like and the way good soup just hits. You lose track of the unnameable things that bring you joy, in favor of the ones that are clear-cut, easier to describe.

There are also bigger problems, like being unable to experience physical pain properly. At the height of my words/experience confusion, I had trouble internalizing that I was in pain at all. I would suffer for hours before I even considered taking painkillers because the words "I'm in pain" didn't occur to me.

You should practice describing your experience with words. (After all, that's what I'm doing right now!)

Being good at it is useful—you can explain things to other people, organize your thoughts, etc.

But you should also remember that your personal experience of the world doesn't have to be filtered through words. You don't need to think the words "I am grateful" in order to feel grateful. You can know that a sunset is beautiful without thinking "wow, that sunset is beautiful," you can know how to do something without having the words to describe exactly what you're doing.

If you do, you're missing out.

footnotes

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1. I think the Buddhists have figured this one out already. ↩