Labeling the world is the process by which human language — particularly nouns — sorts the boundless variety of reality into a finite set of categories. In 📝The Ascent of Humanity, 📝Charles Eisenstein treats it as one of the earliest and deepest roots of 📝separation.
A word is a representation, and representation has a cost. To call both this tree and that tree "a tree" is to gain the power to speak of trees in general — and to grow slightly blind to everything that makes each one singular. Labels compress an infinity of unique objects and moments into manageable types; they let us manipulate and control what they name, but at the price of immediacy. Conditioned to the label, we increasingly perceive the category rather than the thing itself.
Eisenstein notes that this is not inevitable. Some ancient and Indigenous languages were far less noun-bound — the shaman Martin Prechtel describes tongues that barely had a word for "is" — suggesting ways of relating to the world that hold it as process rather than inventory.