Abstraction is one of the greatest achievements of our evolved mind. Coupling attributions (letters that are otherwise just words/numbers — also words) to objects, helps us handle them in meaningful ways, and predict related future behavior. We can predict the motion of an object of known mass, we can also build an tool to carry it — or else decide that we don’t need one.

Words are cages we put meanings in, outside of which they would have been less defined but -necessarily- more themselves — the unworded meanings. We compress infinite information (meanings) into discrete, countable letters (words), and that could not happen without some information loss.

When it comes to humans, we are inclined to perform the same practice and label ourselves to know who we are. We are smart/stupid/confident/reliable…etc. Problem is: Our labels are believed to reflect our capabilities, but they rather reflect only our experiences. In fact, at worse times, labels suggest the exact opposite of our capabilities: labelling yourself as a failure -for example- suggests you have less odds than others at doing something, when actually you could only have better odds, given your experience.

As much as labelling things makes our lives easier, it is confining. It prevents us from having overlapped states by weighing us down with the crashing burden of logic, truth, and necessity: if we are something, we are necessarily not something else. Despite being the same person, labelling yourself as smart would only have you labelling yourself as stupid, when times get tougher.

It’s wrong to label ourselves because it is confining, and at best: helps us replay the safest of our past experiences and makes us miserable; because we live slightly varying repetitions of what our lives were.

Although our experiences made us who we are; we are not our own experiences… we are who we choose to be everyday, the continuous flux of actions and attempts.

Abstraction is our mind’s best attempt at facing everyday’s uncertainty, but you know what’s even better? Actually getting out there and finding out for yourself.