Life Is a Verb: Why You're a Process, Not a Project

"Life is a verb" means that a life, and the self living it, is an ongoing activity rather than a finished object. You're not a noun, a thing with fixed properties that needs maintaining, upgrading or fixing. You're more like a verb: something happening, continuously, right now. Breathing, thinking, noticing, changing. There's no completed "you" sitting somewhere behind the activity. The activity is the whole thing.

This matters more than it sounds like it should. Nouns have to be improved. Verbs just have to be done.

What "life is a verb" means

Look at the words you use for yourself. "I am anxious." "I am a morning person." "I am bad at math." Each one treats you as a thing with a permanent feature, like a car with a dent.

Now try the verb version. Anxiety is happening. Waking early is happening. Struggling with this math problem is happening. Same facts, different grammar, and suddenly nothing is permanent. Verbs come and go. They depend on conditions. They stop.

That's the core of the idea: what you call "me" is better described as a pattern of activity than a solid object, and seeing it that way loosens a lot of knots. A noun has to defend its identity. A verb doesn't have one to defend.

Who said it?

The phrase has a lot of parents, which seems fitting for an idea about not being fixed.

• Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher (around 500 BCE), is the ancient patron saint. He's best known, via Plato's later report, for the claim that you can't step into the same river twice. (His own surviving fragment is subtler: the river stays the river while different waters flow through it, which is an even better description of a person.)
• Alfred North Whitehead built a whole philosophy on it. In Process and Reality (1929) he argued that reality is made of events and processes rather than lasting substances. He called it the "philosophy of organism"; today it's the best-known example of what's called process philosophy.
• Buckminster Fuller, the inventor and designer, put it most memorably: his 1970 book, made with Jerome Agel and Quentin Fiore, is titled I Seem to Be a Verb.
• Patti Digh wrote a popular 2008 book called Life Is a Verb, about living intentionally.
• Paul Hedderman, the contemporary teacher whose talks on no-self are blunt and very funny, uses the line in the most radical way. We quote him on our own design: "Life is a verb. It's just happening. Not to anyone."

That last part, "not to anyone," is where it stops being a productivity slogan and becomes non-duality.

Two ways to be a verb

There's a gentle version and a radical version of this idea.

The gentle version is about self-improvement without the pressure. If you're a process, you're already changing, so you don't have to force it. You can't be "behind" on becoming yourself; you're doing it right now, by default.

The radical version is Hedderman's. It's not that you are a verb. It's that there's a verb, and no separate "you" doing it. Seeing happens. Thinking happens. Walking to the fridge for no reason happens. The "I" that claims to be doing it all is added afterward, a noun the verb makes of itself. This is the same discovery as anatta and the headless way, said in grammar instead of Pali.

The idea also has a close cousin in Buddhism's emphasis on impermanence (anicca): everything that arises is changing, including whatever you'd point to as yourself. Heraclitus, Whitehead and the Buddhist teachers came at it from very different places, but they share a suspicion of permanent things. Look closely at anything that seems solid, a mountain, a reputation, a personality, and you find a slow process wearing a fixed name.

The Department of Non-Existence has reclassified you from Noun to Verb. Your file has been updated. There is no file.

Try the verb test

Here's a small experiment. Write down three sentences you'd use to describe yourself, the "I am" kind. "I am impatient." "I am not creative." "I am a worrier."

Now rewrite each as a verb, describing what happens rather than what you are. "Impatience shows up when I'm hungry and the line is long." "Making things hasn't been happening much lately." "Worrying happens a lot in the evening."

Notice what changes. The noun versions sound like permanent facts about a fixed object. The verb versions sound like events, with causes and conditions and an end. They also sound more accurate. Nobody is impatient all the time, uncreative all the time or worried all the time. Things happen, then stop happening.

The point isn't positive thinking. Some of the verb sentences are still unpleasant. It's just that a verb leaves room for the next verb, and a noun doesn't.

Why this is a relief

A noun can fail. It can be broken, behind, the wrong shape. A verb can't fail at being a verb. Walking is walking, even if it's slow and in the wrong direction.

Seeing yourself as a process also takes the drama out of change. You don't need a grand plan to become someone new. You're already becoming something, constantly, whether you plan it or not. You might as well enjoy the conjugation.

Wearing the verb

Our design You're a Verb carries Hedderman's line on its page and the idea on the shirt. It's the friendliest of our four designs, the one most likely to be read as encouragement, and it is. It just also happens to mean that there's nobody to encourage, which we consider a bonus feature.

If the radical version caught your interest, is the self an illusion lays out the arguments.

Sources

• Cover art: Cosmo Alexander, Alexander Grant (1770), Art Institute of Chicago, CC0
• I Seem to Be a Verb (Buckminster Fuller Institute)
• Process philosophy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
• Heraclitus (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)