Language Shapes Reality: The Lenses We Live Through

We’ve all wondered whether children with glasses see better—or simply differently. That question points to a bigger truth: whatever “reality” is, we meet it through lenses we didn’t choose. Genetics, gender, culture, and the dynamics of our families hand us a starting pair. Those lenses help us navigate. But later we notice how often we lived not from our own nature, but from what those lenses allowed us to see.

We don’t act on “reality.” We act on how reality occurs to us.

Our inherited lenses shape what feels normal, possible, or off-limits. They filter what we notice and what we ignore. None of that makes us wrong; it just means we’re looking through a frame. And frames can shift. New places, hard feedback, unexpected success—moments of friction unsettle our taken-for-granted view. When the familiar blurs, we can step to one side, look again, and get curious about what might be rather than what must be.

Reality is a phenomenon that arises in language. There is no reality “per se,” no fixed reality—only interpretation all the way down. What we say with and about others, ourselves, and the world constitutes who we are.

If language brings our world into focus, then we’re not stuck with a fixed picture. We can move from reporting on life to making new possibilities. That shift expands what’s doable, not only in how we think about ourselves but in how we actually experience and express who we are. Practically, that looks simple: we spot a lens (“People like us don’t speak up”), rename the moment with words that open action (“This is a chance to make a clear ask”), and then take one step—send the message, make the call, ask the question—and notice how the world now occurs.

We can’t ditch our lenses, but we can choose them—and sometimes grind new ones. When we treat language as the medium of reality, we gain access to more of our nature and more of what’s possible together.