You are a verb!

You: “Hi I am [proper noun], I am a [noun]”

We use nouns to label everything in our world. If we have a name for something we often feel like we understand that thing. You would do well to be a little more cautious.

Language can be a double-edged sword

Language is an incredibly powerful tool, perhaps our most important technology. As Yuval Harari notes in his recent bestseller Nexus:

“We Sapiens rule the world not because we are so wise but because we cooperate flexibly in large numbers” (Harari, 2024).

This is in large part due to our ability to use language and tell stories. These stories can help us to cooperate with each other – allowing us to conquer our environment, but they can also create pain, misunderstandings, and suffering.

Enter psychology.

I am oversimplifying it here, but much of psychology is built on the idea that our thoughts - how we think (made up of language and stories), affect our feelings and behaviours.

Judith Beck, daughter of the famous psychologist Aaron T. Beck, herself a psychologist, writes:

“When people learn to evaluate their thinking in a more realistic and adaptive way, they experience improvement in their emotional state and in their behavior” (Beck, 2011).

Back to you

You introduced yourself to me as a noun. We see everything in the world as nouns. But nouns are not the whole picture, are they?

Some benefits of nouns include:

• They simplify things. You are a chef – that one word says a lot!
• They make things more understandable and thus predictable. As a chef, I can make certain assumptions about what you can do and what you may want/need etc …

Some pitfalls of using nouns include:

• Nouns are static (in a world where the only constant is change).
• They are narrow (forcing you to use adjectives to further describe something, which are themselves static), i.e. “I am a good chef”, or “I am an amateur French chef”.
• They define who you are, but at the same time they preclude what you are not. If you are a bad chef, then you are not a good chef. If you are a French chef, then you are not a Mexican chef. What if you would like to experiment and learn new styles of cooking?

This is just how language works - why is this even a problem?

Do you recall high school biology? There you learnt some criteria of living things – i.e. living things can reproduce. We may understand quite a lot about life, and yet scientists are still not all on the same page in terms of how to define it.

"...life is like fire, not water—it is a process, not a pure substance”. (Cleland & Chyba, 2002)

The problem lies in our language. We tend to think in terms of nouns first, process (verbs) later.

I would like to propose to you today that you can benefit by thinking the other way round: verbs first!

You are a verb first! (Enter cybernetics)

Cybernetics is the study of goal-directed adaptive systems (DeYoung, 2014). It is a branch of science interested not so much in what things are (nouns), but rather what they do (verbs).

We can use some basic principles of cybernetics to help realise the benefits of seeing things as verbs rather than nouns.

Here are three basic ideas of cybernetics:

Everything can be viewed as a system of processes

Nothing in life stands still. You, your team, or your organisation is a living process — continuously taking in inputs, transforming them, and producing outputs. When we look at things as processes instead of objects, we see movement, feedback, and the potential for change.

Every system has goals (whether clear or hidden)

Instead of seeing yourself as a good chef, or a French chef, you could see yourself as a chef who wants to master French cooking. This goal then drives much of what you do. This is true for all systems – they behave as if to achieve something. When we identify those goals clearly, we can measure whether our actions are helping or hindering us.

Feedback drives learning

A system adapts by comparing what is with what should be. If things drift off course, feedback signals the need for correction. As a chef, each dish you make is an opportunity to compare yourself against your ideal and learn in the process.

Whereas seeing the world through the lens of nouns can sometimes limit us, seeing ourselves as verbs first allows us to be more flexible and adaptive to our environment.

Nouns are defined, separate things, hypnotising us in thinking that the world is made up of many discrete, unrelated things. From the point of view of verbs first, you quickly realise that everything is connected. One thing’s output is another’s input. Nothing exists in isolation, and everything is affected by everything else. This expanded context is important when you consider that you yourself are autonomous, but you are not self-sufficient. Each of us relies on others and our environment for our survival.

Applying this to you

Let’s make this practical. If you’re a verb, how do you work?

What drives you? The answer: many things – often in conflict with each other. Perhaps the most well-known model is from Abraham Maszlow, who characterised these drivers (goals in cybernetic terms) into his famous hierarchy of needs.

We don’t need to go into the details of his hierarchy for now, the only thing we need say is that as a verb you are constantly trying to find a balance in meeting your different needs. To this end you are constantly comparing data from your senses to your ideal state as dictated by your needs. Cyberneticists would say that you are trying to reach an equilibrium.

You do this by thinking. This is the start of your feedback loop. You compare what IS through your senses (all the ingredients in front of you), with what you want to achieve (freshly baked croissants).

This then results in your feelings:

• If you perceive a problem in reaching your goal of making croissants, you might feel frustrated, even angry.
• If you don’t think that you’re a good enough chef to even try, you might feel sad or even depressed.
• If you’re seeing this batch of croissants as an opportunity to learn, you might feel excited, perhaps engaged.

These feelings are what drives our actions toward reaching our goals. They are our constant gauge of whether we are moving toward achievement, or away from it. They also guide us in terms of all the other goals we need to achieve as an individual.

Conclusion

In reality, you are far more complex than can be captured by a few pictures. And yet by using simple ideas from cybernetics we can unify many ideas from psychology (as well as other fields) into a useful, unified picture of ourselves as verbs.

The universe cannot be captured nor described sufficiently by nouns, not even many nouns. It is a complex, dynamic, changing thing, that includes you, me, and everything else. Seeing things from the perspective of verbs first allows us to see ourselves, and how we fit into the world in a more empowering way.

P.S. If you want more context on the cybernetics of human behaviour, go to my Glossary of terms.

References:

Beck, J. (2011). Cognitive behaviour therapy, basics and beyond (2nd ed.). The Guilford Press.

Cleland, C. E., & Chyba, C. F. (2002). Defining ‘Life’. Discover Life, 32, 387–393.

DeYoung, C. G. (2014). Cybernetic big five theory. Journal of Research in Personality, 56, 33–58. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2014.07.004

Harari, Y. N. (2024). Nexus, A brief history of information networks from the Stone Age to AI. Penguin Random House.