From Things to Flows

        How Changing Our Metaphors Changes the Worlds We Can Live In

Modern life is saturated with things.

We speak of the self, the economy, power, the system, nature, the market, society—as if each were a discrete object, bounded, nameable, and available for manipulation. This way of speaking feels natural, even inevitable. But it is neither neutral nor harmless.

It is metaphoric.

And the metaphors we rely on quietly determine not only how we describe the world, but what kinds of worlds can even appear to us as real, possible, or negotiable.

 The hidden cost of substantial metaphors

Substantial metaphors treat reality as composed of things with properties. They assume:

• clear boundaries
• stable identities
• linear cause and effect
• control through intervention

This way of seeing has been extraordinarily productive. It underwrites modern engineering, bureaucracy, law, and industrial economics. But it also carries a cost we are only beginning to feel.

When the world is composed primarily of objects:

• agency appears externalized
• responsibility becomes difficult to locate
• change feels imposed rather than participatory
• complexity collapses into blame

We begin to experience life as something that happens to us.

The irony is that this sense of powerlessness is not caused by the world itself, but by the metaphors through which we encounter it.

 What science has been quietly telling us

Across disciplines, the sciences have been drifting—sometimes reluctantly, sometimes decisively—away from object-centered descriptions.

Physics no longer describes reality as a collection of solid particles, but as interacting fields, probabilities, and relational structures. Biology increasingly understands organisms not as machines, but as self-organizing processes maintained through constant exchange with their environments. Neuroscience does not find “things” in the brain, but patterns, activations, and ongoing dynamics. Complexity theory shows that many properties do not pre-exist at all—they emerge from interaction.

In short: the deeper science looks, the less the world resembles a warehouse of objects.

And yet our everyday language, politics, and economics remain stubbornly substantial.

 Movement metaphors: when reality begins to loosen

Movement metaphors shift attention away from what something is and toward what it is doing.

Instead of:

• identity as a thing → identity as a trajectory
• power as possession → power as capacity to move or respond
• problems as objects → problems as stuck processes

Change becomes navigational rather than combative. Agency reappears not as domination, but as repositioning.

Movement metaphors make room for learning, adaptation, and timing. They allow us to speak about life as something we enter, move through, drift within, or reorient ourselves toward.

But movement metaphors still assume a mover.

To go further, we need field metaphors.

 Field metaphors: when relations come first

Field metaphors reverse a deeply ingrained assumption: that things come first and relationships second.

In a field-oriented view:

• relations are primary
• entities are temporary coherences
• influence is distributed
• meaning arises through resonance

Nothing exists in itself. Everything exists in relation.

This does not deny the usefulness of naming or categorizing. It places them back in their proper role—as tools, not truths.

From within a field metaphor, power is not something one holds. It is something that circulates, intensifies, dampens, or aligns. Responsibility is no longer a burden carried by isolated individuals, but a property of participation within a shared field.

This is not mysticism. It is increasingly how the world actually behaves.

 The political and economic destabilization this implies

Modern political and economic metaphors are almost entirely object-centered:

• the state as a machine
• the economy as a system to be managed
• nature as a resource
• society as a container
• individuals as units

These metaphors presuppose control, extraction, optimization, and growth. They make sense only if reality is made of things that can be owned, measured, and rearranged from the outside.

Movement and field metaphors destabilize this entire architecture.

If the economy is not a machine but a dynamic ecology, then growth without regard to coherence becomes pathological. If society is not a container but a relational field, then exclusion, polarization, and inequality are not side effects—they are structural distortions. If nature is not a resource but a living field of mutual dependence, then environmental collapse is not an external problem. It is a loss of relational integrity.

These are not moral claims. They are ontological ones.

 Affordance landscapes: how life feels different

Metaphors do not stay in language. They shape affordance landscapes — what situations seem to allow or demand.

In an object-centered world:

• problems must be fixed
• power must be seized
• responsibility feels heavy
• failure feels personal

In a movement- and field-centered world:

• situations invite entry rather than control
• agency appears as responsiveness
• responsibility feels shared
• failure becomes feedback

Nothing becomes easier in a superficial sense. But life becomes more workable.

People report greater calm not because the world is calmer, but because their metaphors no longer place them outside the flow of events.

 Toward a new cultural umwelt

A cultural umwelt is the background world that feels obvious before we think about it.

Modernity’s umwelt is object-centered. That is why so many people feel trapped, exhausted, or powerless even when materially secure. They are navigating relational realities with object-based maps.

A relational umwelt would not abolish things. It would decenter them.

It would normalize:

• identities as evolving
• knowledge as situated
• power as relational
• meaning as emergent

Such a shift does not require consensus or revolution. It begins where all cultural change begins: with attention.

With noticing what our metaphors make visible—and what they quietly erase.

 Control gives way to participation

The question is no longer whether movement and field metaphors are more accurate. Science has largely answered that.

The real question is whether we are willing to live in a world where control gives way to participation, where certainty gives way to coherence, and where power is no longer something we take from the world, but something we generate with it.

Changing our metaphors will not solve our problems.

But without changing them, we may not even be able to see what our problems actually are.