Linguistic Relativity
I dedicate this issue solely to the creators out there.
Language is weird.
In this issue:
💬 Linguistic Relativity and the Walls You Can’t See
⏱️ Nobody Needs Your Countdown Timer
Slightly shorter format overall this issue. One less story, but two longer stories.
Let’s fuckin’ goooo!!!!
💬 Linguistic Relativity and the Walls You Can't See
The word hit me in a izakaya in Naha at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night. Not the alcohol. The word.
Komorebi.
The bartender said it while gesturing at the streetlight filtering through the banyan tree outside the window.
I’d been in Okinawa for almost three years by then, spoke passable Japanese (mostly forgotten now), could order food and argue with landlords and navigate a military bureaucracy in two languages. B
ut this word stopped me cold because I understood what it meant and I also understood, in the same instant, that I had never once been able to say it in English.
Komorebi. Sunlight filtering through leaves.
Not sunlight. Not leaves. Not “dappled” or “filtered” or any of the clumsy multi-word constructions English forces you to build like a man assembling furniture without the manual.
One word.
A single sound for a specific quality of light that I had seen ten thousand times in my life and never had a container for.
That was the night I started to suspect that English had been lying to me. Not through what it said. Through what it made impossible to say.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the academic name for a gut feeling most bilingual people figure out on their own: your language doesn’t just describe your reality. It builds the walls of the room you think inside.
The strong version says language determines thought entirely, which is probably too far, like most strong versions of anything. The weak version says language influences thought, shapes perception, nudges your consciousness toward certain grooves and away from others. The weak version is almost certainly true and the implications are the kind of thing that will keep you up at night if you sit with them long enough.
The Hopi language doesn’t slice time into past, present, and future the way European languages do.
Benjamin Lee Whorf studied this in the 1930s and got shouted down by linguists who thought he was overstating things, which he probably was, but the core observation survived the criticism.
Hopi speakers describe events in terms of duration and cyclical patterns rather than points on a timeline. Their verbs carry information about whether something is ongoing, expected, or habitual in ways that English verbs simply cannot.
Think about what that means. Not as an anthropological curiosity. As a structural feature of consciousness.
If your language doesn’t chop time into a line with a past behind you and a future ahead, you don’t experience time as a line. You experience it as something else.
Something English literally cannot describe because the description tools don’t exist in the toolkit.
I spent eight and a half years in Japan. The first year, I thought I was learning a language. By the third year, I realized I was learning a different way of perceiving reality. By the sixth year, I couldn’t always tell which perception was the real one.
Japanese has a word, mono no aware, that translates roughly to “the pathos of things,” but that translation is garbage.
It’s the bittersweet recognition that beauty and sadness are the same phenomenon, that a cherry blossom is beautiful because it’s dying, that impermanence isn’t a problem to solve but a texture to feel.
English can explain this concept in a paragraph.
Japanese can say it in four syllables.
The difference between explanation and expression is the difference between reading about swimming and being in the water.
Wabi-sabi. Not “beauty in imperfection,” which is how every lifestyle blog on the internet has butchered it.
It’s the aesthetic and spiritual recognition that incompleteness, asymmetry, and decay are where the real beauty lives. The cracked bowl is more beautiful than the perfect one, not because imperfection is charming, but because the crack is honest.
English can approximate this. Japanese can inhabit it.
Ma. Negative space.
The silence between notes that makes music possible. The emptiness in a room that gives the room its function. English treats emptiness as absence. Japanese treats it as presence.
That’s not a translation difference. That’s a perceptual difference so fundamental it changes how you arrange furniture, structure a conversation, and sit in silence with another human being.
I came back to the States after almost a decade and English felt thin.
Not wrong. Just different and a bit surreal. Like trying to describe a full-color painting using only six crayons. The colors were there. Most of them.
But the shades between the colors, the subtle gradients where the interesting perception happens, those were missing. And I hadn’t noticed they were missing until I’d spent years living inside a language that had names for them.
This is the prison.
Not a dramatic prison. Not a torture chamber. A comfortable, invisible, climate-controlled prison where the walls are made of the words you have and the things you can’t think are the things you don’t have words for.
Russian speakers have separate words for light blue and dark blue, goluboy and siniy, and studies show they can distinguish between shades of blue faster than English speakers can. The language didn’t teach them to see the difference. The language made the difference visible. Or rather, the absence of the language made it invisible to everyone else.
The Pirahã people of the Amazon don’t have words for specific numbers. They have terms that roughly translate to “few” and “many.” Researchers found they struggle with tasks requiring exact numerical matching. Not because they’re cognitively impaired. Because their language never built the container for precise quantity, and the container turns out to be load-bearing.
Every language is a set of decisions about what matters enough to name.
Those decisions were made centuries or millennia ago by people you’ll never meet, in contexts that no longer exist, for reasons that were probably practical at the time and have since calcified into invisible architecture.
You inherited that architecture. You live inside it. You think inside it. And most people go their entire lives without noticing the walls because the walls are made of the only material they have for noticing things.
I don’t have a solution to this if this bothers you.
I just find it curious.
If it does worry you, learning a second language helps, but it’s not a fix. It’s more like standing in the doorway between two rooms and seeing, for the first time, that both rooms have walls.
Some people take psychedelics and report similar perceptual shifts, the sudden awareness of structure where they’d previously seen only open space. I think that’s the same phenomenon approached from a different angle.
What I know is this: the day I heard komorebi in that bar in Naha, something cracked.
Not broke. Cracked.
Like a window that still holds but lets in a draft you can’t ignore.
I started noticing the gaps. The things I felt but couldn’t say. The emotions that existed in my body but not in my vocabulary, and therefore not quite in my consciousness, hovering at the edge like shapes in peripheral vision that disappear when you turn to look.
English is a beautiful language.
Flexible, vast, inventive, capable of precision and poetry and profanity in equal measure. I love it. I write in it for a living.
But I don’t trust it the way I used to.
And I think about that bartender in Naha sometimes. The word he said so casually, like it was nothing. Like naming the light was the most ordinary thing in the world.
For him, it was.
⏱️ Nobody Needs Your Countdown Timer
A woman in a used bookstore in East Nashville changed the way I think about selling things, and she did it without saying a word to me.
I was browsing.
She was restocking. Pulling books from a cart, checking spines, sliding them into their spots on the shelf with the efficiency of someone who’s done this ten thousand times and has stopped performing the task for anyone’s benefit.
No customer greeting. No ambient playlist designed to increase dwell time. No sandwich board outside promising “BOGO DEALS THIS WEEKEND.” Just a woman putting objects on a shelf in a quiet room and trusting that the right people would find them.
I wandered the store for twenty minutes. I bought three books.
Two of them I hadn’t come in looking for. One of them I didn’t know existed until I saw it sitting between two other spines and something about the title caught me, the way a face in a crowd catches you.
That’s the bookstore model. Stock the shelf. Keep the lights on. Let the catalog do the work.
The internet runs on the opposite model. The launch model.
The movie premiere.
Sixteen-email sequences.
Countdown timers. “Doors close at midnight.”
Artificial scarcity for digital products that, by definition, have infinite inventory.
A manufactured panic, a choreographed frenzy, a simulation of urgency designed to short-circuit the part of your brain that asks whether you actually need the thing.
I’ve watched creators burn themselves alive on this altar.
Three months of building hype for a product that took two weeks to create.
Social posts teasing.
Email sequences warming.
A launch week that consumes more energy than the actual work.
And then, if it sells, the hangover. The crash. The return to zero where you have to do the whole thing again for the next product because the launch model doesn’t compound.
It spikes and collapses. Every time.
The bookstore model compounds.
I wrote a guide called Thirty Bricks about this.
Not theory.
Field notes from building a catalog that now sits north of thirty products on Gumroad, priced between two and fifteen dollars, selling without my participation in the transaction. The title comes from the observation that each product is a brick, and bricks are boring individually but become structurally significant when you stack enough of them.
Here’s what the bookstore model looks like in practice.
You make a thing. You put it on the shelf. You make another thing. You put it on the shelf.
You don’t launch. You don’t build anticipation. You don’t create urgency because the urgency is fake and everyone can smell it. You just keep stocking.
Below about fifteen products, nothing interesting happens. Each product sits alone. Isolated. Someone finds it, maybe buys it, leaves. The catalog is a collection of individual items in the dark, unaware of each other, generating nothing beyond their individual sales.
Above fifteen, the math changes. A person finds one thing, buys it, sees other things in the sidebar, gets curious. They bookmark something. Come back Tuesday. Buy another. Share a link with a friend who has a completely different problem, and that friend finds a completely different product, and now you’ve got two customers from one entry point and neither of them was funneled anywhere.
That’s the density threshold. A pattern I watched happen in my own data after the fact, an inflection point.
My newsletter feeds the catalog and the catalog feeds the newsletter.
No automation. No drip sequence. No complicated tech stack.
Someone reads the free writing on Sunday morning, likes the voice, clicks through to the store, spends three dollars on something that caught them.
Someone else discovers a two-dollar PDF through Gumroad’s search, reads it, follows the link back to the newsletter. Now they’re a subscriber.
The two systems feed each other and neither one requires me to be awake for the transaction.
I don’t track conversion rates. I don’t A/B test subject lines. I don’t run the newsletter through some optimization algorithm that would sand off the edges that make people actually want to read the thing.
I write honestly. I link to products when the connection is natural. I don’t link when it isn’t. Some weeks I don’t mention any product at all. The newsletter just exists, being what it is, and the people who want more know where the shelf is.
This approach will infuriate anyone who wants predictable, scalable, measurable growth.
It is none of those things. It’s a wall that gets one brick heavier every time I finish something.
The launch model sells the fantasy that you can compress time. That the right sequence of emails and countdown clocks and “limited bonuses” will make six months of organic growth happen in a weekend.
Sometimes it works. For some people it works consistently.
But it requires you to be a carnival barker for your own work, and I have discovered through painful experience that I would rather earn less money than spend my creative energy convincing people to buy things by Tuesday or miss out forever on a PDF that will be available Wednesday at the same price.
The dishonesty of it bothers me more than the inefficiency.
The countdown timer is a lie. Everyone knows it’s a lie. The “doors close” email for an evergreen digital product is theater.
We’ve all agreed to pretend we don’t see it because the marketing industry built an entire pedagogy around artificial urgency and questioning it feels like questioning gravity.
I’m questioning it. It’s not gravity. It’s a choice.
And the alternative is simpler, quieter, and earns you the right to go to bed without wondering whether your audience trusts you less today than they did yesterday.
My best-selling product is something I consider mediocre.
Wrote it fast on a day the words came easy. Minimal editing. I almost didn’t publish it. It sells nearly every day for reasons I will die without understanding.
My favorite product, the one I think is genuinely excellent work, moves maybe two copies a month.
I stopped trying to predict which bricks the market wants and started focusing on having enough bricks that it doesn’t matter. The aggregate is the thing. The individual product is just a unit. The catalog is the organism.
The woman in that bookstore didn’t need a launch plan.
She didn’t need a countdown timer or a bonus stack or a webinar.
She needed inventory, patience, and the faith that people who want books will walk into a room full of books and find the one that was waiting for them.
That’s the model.
Stock the shelf.
Keep the lights on.
Go to bed.
Profit.
🛰️ GOOD READS:
If you made it here, that means you should…
That’s it for this week. And remember kids, don’t get into vans with strangers unless they offer drugs. Until next time…
~ J.D.
P.S. I’ve made about $21K in the last 6 months. Here’s how…
Please note some links may lead to affiliate offers and if you purchase from these links I may receive a small amount of compensation at no extra cost to you.
This reminds me of a couple of things:
1. A recent post I read here it was theirizrs that one key factor between successful and unsuccessful artists is the successful ones made more stuff.
2. A while back I was at a used bookstore and the Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark book had come out recently. The bookstore had it on display in a round window area, propped up on one of those foldout stands that books lean on. The cover and the lighting weres catchy enough to convince me to buy a book that turned out to be disappointing.
What struck me about this piece is that it describes something many bilingual or multilingual people recognize instinctively: language doesn’t just label reality. It quietly organizes it.
The example with komorebi is perfect. A single word for sunlight filtering through leaves. Not a poetic description, not a phrase you assemble with effort, but a ready-made container for a specific experience of light. When you encounter something like that in another language, it can feel unsettling. You suddenly realize that you have seen that exact thing thousands of times in your life, yet your native language never gave you a clean way to hold it.
That’s the core intuition behind linguistic relativity. The strong version—that language completely determines thought—is probably too extreme. But the weaker version, that language nudges perception and shapes how we categorize experience, is very difficult to dismiss once you’ve lived inside more than one language.
And living inside more than one language changes how you experience the world.
In my own case, I live in three languages I speak and write, and a couple more that I understand without any real fluency. I was born in Germany, so German is the language of childhood and instinct. I speak French in everyday life. And I write in English. Each of those languages has developed a different function in my mind.
German is direct and structural. It’s the language of early memory and internal logic.
French is social and conversational. It’s the language of daily interaction and the environment I live in.
English is where my writing lives. It’s the language in which ideas stretch out, where I build essays and stories.
The interesting thing is that the same thought doesn’t behave the same way in each language. Some ideas arrive more naturally in German, some conversations flow better in French, and many things I want to write simply appear in English. It’s not just vocabulary; it’s a slightly different mental posture in each language.
Once you experience that shift, the Sapir-Whorf discussion stops feeling like an abstract linguistic theory and starts feeling like a practical observation. Languages are not just interchangeable sets of words. They are slightly different cognitive toolkits.
You begin to notice the gaps. The things one language names elegantly while another circles around with explanations. The emotional tones that sit comfortably in one language but feel awkward in another.
English, for example, is extraordinarily flexible and expressive, especially for writing. But encountering words like komorebi, mono no aware, or ma reminds you that every language highlights certain aspects of experience while leaving others in the background.
That doesn’t make any language inferior. It just means every language is a set of historical decisions about what was worth naming.
When you live inside only one of those systems, the walls are invisible. When you move between several, you start noticing where the walls are.
And once you see them, you never quite trust them the same way again.