The collapse of communication

On the words that stopped landing, the body that still knows, and the language that has yet to be named

The world as we knew it is becoming quiet in a way that feels unfamiliar. We speak more than ever - messages, meetings, arguments, endless streams of text - but the words don’t quite make it through. They bounce back, fall sideways, turn into misunderstandings. We say the same things but mean different things. And in that silence - where the words remain but contact is gone - something essential fades.

An ecosystem survives through communication. The bird knows it, sending one call or wingbeat through the flock and within seconds hundreds of bodies turn as if they were one. The tree knows it, sending chemical signals through its roots when danger approaches so the neighbours can prepare their defences before the attack arrives. The whale knows it, singing across an ocean so its family can stay together.

And humans? We’re no different - only more complex. Our language was born to bind us together, to keep us alive. At first it was a rhythm between mouths and bodies reading danger before thought had time to form. A tone that soothed an infant, a touch that softened the pulse, scents that signalled safety or threat. The first words were likely sounds carrying emotion - warnings, invitations, calls to return. A way of being together. Synchronising heartbeats. Finding one another in the dark. Creating the shared space where a “we” could form.

Researchers still disagree on when words arrived, but they mostly agree on why. Not to transmit information, but to hold us together. When our groups grew too large for constant physical closeness, we needed something else. A way to synchronise hunting, decisions, rituals. A way to speak about why we were here, together, and what it meant. Words became a new form of touch. A way to stay connected without sharing the same place.

Later, we learned to point to what wasn’t there - what was absent, what might come. The future. Death. Spirits. Law. The nation. We created shared fictions that held us across time and distance. We could speak not only of what had happened, but of what ought to happen. That was the magic of language.

When words became tools

As modernity took shape, the function of language shifted. We began to divide. Body from soul. Reason from feeling. Masculine from feminine. Right from wrong. Civilised from wild. Descartes formulated what became the foundation of the modern world: Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. But what happened to the body in that sentence? What happened to the heart, the breath, the pulse?

The body became something one had, not something one was. And language followed. It turned into a tool - but for what? We learned to separate professional words from private ones, rational words from emotional ones, legitimate words from the ones that felt too charged. In that split, something was lost: our ability to speak with our whole selves, with everything that actually moves us. The feelings remain, of course, shaping us constantly - but under the surface, out of reach, impossible to hold together with others.

I think about how this shows up at work. How we learn to say “challenging” when we mean “impossible”, “an exciting opportunity” when we mean “a crisis”, “feedback” when we mean criticism that hurts. As if the real words were too dangerous to use. As if contact between them might break something we’re trying to keep intact.

We built fields of knowledge. Medicine. Law. Economics. Engineering. Each field developed its own language - its own terms, symbols, codes. That gave us precision and a sense of belonging, but it also built walls. If you don’t speak the right language, you’re shut out.

Much of modern business language comes from the military and carries a worldview of hierarchy, command, territory, enemies. We crush competitors. We fight for market share. We attack new segments. We mobilise teams. Someone wins. Someone loses. Someone is sacrificed. But what happens to relationships when every conversation carries an undertone of battle, conquest, and victory? When the words don’t stay in the PowerPoint - they seep into the bloodstream, enter our dreams, whisper to our children what counts and what doesn’t.

What has no name

I’ve been collecting words from cultures other than my own for a long time without understanding why. Words that describe something deeply rooted in the place where the language emerged. Swedish has lagom - that gentle, almost instinctive sense of balance, not too much and not too little, but something that feels right in the moment. It only exists in relation to others, in a shared understanding of pace and proportion. A word shaped by a culture that has long trusted moderation as a way of living together.

Portuguese has saudade - a longing that is soft and deep at the same time, for someone or something that is absent, or perhaps never fully existed outside the heart. It holds grief and love in the same breath, like an echo that keeps resonating long after the source has faded.

Finnish has sisu - the steady force that moves a person forward when the world grows heavy. Strength, persistence, a quiet kind of courage that doesn’t announce itself, but shows itself in the way someone keeps going through winter after winter.

German has Fernweh - the ache for a place you have never seen, the pull toward an unknown horizon. A longing that feels both adventurous and tender, as if part of you remembers a landscape your body has yet to touch.

Zulu has ubuntu - the understanding that a person becomes a person through others. That care, responsibility, and belonging are threads of the same fabric. A way of seeing the world where generosity is not an act, but a way of being, and where reconciliation is woven into the everyday work of relationship.

All these words pull me in. Like poetry, they grip something deep inside. And it makes me wonder: what happens to a feeling that has no word? It doesn’t disappear, but it becomes invisible. And when it can’t be expressed, it opens a distance between me and everything around me.

We’ve lost vocabulary for the complex, the not-yet-formed, the things that aren’t yes or no. The things that are both grief and relief. Love and frustration. Our modern language rewards clarity, speed, unambiguity. But life is rarely binary. It’s contradictory, uneven, full of in-betweens. The things that matter most are hard to say - and even harder to measure.

There’s little room for doubt, for process, for what doesn’t yet know what it wants to become. And in losing the hesitant words, we lose something else: our ability to see ourselves and mirror one another. Because how can I understand what I feel if I don’t have words for it? And how, then, could I ever hope to be understood?

Exformation

We tend to imagine language as words, sentences, signs lined up in order. But when you listen - really listen, with the kind of attention you give to music or a flock of birds - you notice something else. Language is much larger than the words themselves. The real language lives in what isn’t said. In what gets filtered out. In everything resting between the lines.

Tor Nørretranders calls this exformation - the hidden background of experience, associations, memories, culture, and bodily knowledge that makes meaning possible in the first place.

When we speak or write, we do it with our entire inner landscape - feelings, thoughts, memories - and then we strip away almost all of it. What remains, the small distilled drop, is what we dress in words. But the words are only the surface. The depth lies in what we didn’t say. “Horse” isn’t just a noun. It’s childhood, fear, a film you once saw, the smell of warm fur, a memory of a meeting, something indescribable that unfolds in the listener.

That’s how powerful art works. A single well-placed word, a tone, a stroke of paint can carry whole worlds. They transmit ideas, feelings, states of being the creator once held - and awaken them in someone else.

Language works when two people’s associations overlap enough. When their worlds drift too far apart, it falters. We hear the same words, but they spark different images. The conversation comes undone. We think we’re communicating with words, but we’re really communicating our entire worlds.

When a society loses its shared stories, it also loses its shared exformation. Politics gridlocks. Families fracture. Public conversation becomes aggressive or hollow. The words no longer rest on the same ground.

What the body knows

But language hasn’t disappeared. The body still speaks. It knows things long before the mind can catch up. The stomach tightening when someone comes too close with an offer you don’t want. The neck tensing when your manager says “we need to talk”, even though the words sound neutral. The coldness in your hands in the middle of a presentation that is going well. The body reads rooms, reads people, reads danger and safety faster than consciousness can. Scents. Shifts in the air. A warmth or a chill you feel before anyone has said a word. How someone’s presence can make you open - or close. How a meeting can feel heavy even when everyone is saying the right things. How something can feel wrong without any clear explanation.

We sometimes call it intuition, but it’s really the sum of inherited and lived experience telling you what matters right now.

What does the body say that words cannot? The unspoken history families carry. The foundations an organisation rests on - old, unacknowledged rules, invisible power lines, unspoken agreements.

So how do we begin to speak again - truly speak? I think about the conversations that have changed me. They were never the most polished or prepared. They weren’t perfect. They simply happened, and they were true. Someone dared to say something that cost them. Someone held space for what was difficult. Someone stayed when it grew uncomfortable. Maybe that’s where we start. By letting go of performance. By speaking not to sound clever, or to be right, or to prove something. By daring to say: I don’t know. I don’t understand. I don’t feel at home here anymore.

Simple words, but hard to say. Because a living language demands what our modern language has trained out of us: vulnerability, presence, time. You can’t streamline connection. It asks us to stay. To listen. To listen intensely, so we can hear the nuance in others too.

The words we choose now

Single words build larger stories. Not too long ago, we shared a sense of the future. Progress meant something we all recognised. Technology would free us. Prosperity would grow. Each generation would live better than the one before. These were the promises that held societies together.

But the climate is collapsing. Ecosystems are dying. Inequality is rising. The future no longer feels shared, and we have few new stories about what we’re moving toward. We know far more about what we shouldn’t do than about what we must.

So which words do we choose now? Maybe we don’t need to return to what we’ve lost - maybe language itself is changing into something that doesn’t yet know what it wants to be. Because today’s world demands it. Feelings between people that don’t yet have names but still make us braver. Maybe we listen for the language that is forming. So we can rediscover, create, or reconnect with something new. Words that turn us into something other than what we are now. Not winners, but participants. Not words that create distance, but words that create closeness. Not words that shut things down because we’re in a hurry, but words that open. We need words for the in-between spaces. For the process. For what isn’t finished yet. For the complex things we can still feel. For what takes time. For what simply is.

We need a language for the regenerative - for what becomes true only in relationship. A language that creates presence.

We need a language for the living. Yes, we need the big narratives and manifestos, but that’s not where it begins. It begins in simple conversations. In the moments where we let go of who we think we need to be and choose to be present instead. Where we stop speaking about the world and start speaking with it - where we release our need to control and let language become what it was always meant to be: a way of being together. Weaving the world back together. Word by word.

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About this essay
We’re facing challenges that cannot be solved with the same logic that created them. In exploring our vast “knowing–doing gap,” I’m writing a book called “The Starting Point” to help us see our inner and outer systems – and the friction between them. Like a compass, it offers a set of lenses or directions that can be explored individually or together.

“Words” is the forth of these lenses. Here you can find the first three - Rythm, Position and Relation.

If you want to support my work you can pre order the book here or you can explore it more deeply through your own life and context by joining 100 Days.

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