October 14th. A Tuesday. I was sitting at my kitchen table doing something I’d been doing for months without realizing how strange it had become. I was renaming a walk.
Not the walk itself—I wasn’t out there with a Sharpie labeling sidewalks. I was renaming the practice of walking. The thing I did most afternoons when the light got soft and my screen-heavy eyes started aching. For the better part of a year, I had been calling it my “Golden Hour Loop,” a name I’d chosen because it sounded intentional. Because it sounded like something a person with a wellness blog might do on purpose. Before that, it was my “Decompression Walk.” Before that, “the 4:30 practice.” And before that—I’m almost embarrassed to admit this—I called it my “Moving Meditation.” A phrase that made me feel like I was doing something more significant than just walking around my neighborhood because my legs were stiff.
On that Tuesday in October, I opened the notes app on my phone and typed out a fifth name. Something cleaner. Something that better captured the spirit of what I was trying to cultivate. I stared at it for a long moment. And then I felt it—the small, familiar click of satisfaction that comes from organizing something. The same click I used to get from color-coding my calendar. From finding the perfect app. From crossing the last item off a list I’d made that morning specifically to have something to cross off.
That click, I’ve come to understand, is the sound of control. And I was done with it.
The Naming Habit
I don’t know exactly when I started naming everything. I think it crept in alongside my productivity obsession, somewhere around 2019, when I was still building systems for other people and needed my own life to feel equally managed. Morning routines became “Morning Anchors.” Evening wind-downs became “Twilight Rituals.” Sunday cooking became “Meal Prep Practice.” A walk after lunch became “The Midday Reset.” I didn’t just do things. I practiced them. I anchored them. I gave them names that made them sound like offerings at a retreat.
The language felt good. It felt like intention. But underneath the language was something else—a need to make every ordinary act legible. Defensible. Justifiable. If I could name it, it counted. If I could name it, it was real. If I could name it, I could point to it and say, “See? I’m doing something with my life.”
What I was actually doing, I think, was turning my life into a portfolio. A collection of labeled experiences, each one branded for presentation. The naming wasn’t just descriptive. It was performative. And it was, in its own quiet way, exhausting.
Linguistic framing—the idea that the words we use shape how we think and feel—has been studied for decades. Daniel Kahneman’s work on cognitive framing showed that people respond differently to the same situation depending on how it’s labeled. “Survival rate” and “mortality rate” describe identical data, but one makes us feel hopeful and the other makes us feel doomed. The frame changes the experience.
So when I called my afternoon walk a “practice,” I wasn’t just describing it. I was framing it as something with a goal. Something that could be evaluated. Something that could be done well or poorly. I was turning a walk into an assignment. And I was doing this to nearly everything in my life that might otherwise have been simple.
Branding Your Own Existence
The self-improvement industry has always been deeply invested in naming. Stephen Covey gave us the “Seven Habits.” James Clear gave us “Atomic Habits.” Mel Robbins gave us “The Five Second Rule.” Each system comes with its own branded vocabulary, a set of proprietary terms that make the author’s approach feel distinct and purchasable. This isn’t accidental. Naming creates ownership. Naming creates a product.
What I didn’t realize, for years, was that I’d internalized this logic so deeply I was applying it to my own life for free. Branding my own existence without anyone paying me to do it. I was a one-person marketing department for experiences that didn’t need marketing.
The afternoon I caught myself renaming my walk for the fifth time, I started scrolling back through my notes app, looking at all the names I’d given to things. “The Sunday Sabbath.” “The Tuesday Reset.” “The Friday Unwind.” “The Morning Protocol.” “The Evening Integration.” I had named my days of the week like a wellness retreat names its workshops. And the effect was the same every time: the moment something had a name, it had expectations. A “Reset” needed to feel restorative. An “Integration” needed to feel cohesive. A “Practice” needed to feel like I was getting better at something. When the experience didn’t match the name—which was often—I felt a faint, nagging sense of failure. I had failed to live up to my own branding.
I closed the notes app. I deleted the fifth name. And then I went for a walk.
What Happens When You Stop Naming
The first thing I noticed when I stopped naming my routines was a strange, brief disorientation. Without a label, my morning coffee felt untethered. Was I doing “The Morning Anchor”? Was I doing “The Slow Start”? Or was I just drinking coffee? For a few days, I felt a pull to name the experience anyway. To give it a frame so I could evaluate it. I’d reach for the name the way you reach for your phone in an empty moment—reflexively, without thinking.
But by the end of the first week, something else started happening. Without a name, the experience had no expectations attached to it. My morning coffee wasn’t “The Morning Anchor” anymore. It was just warm. It was just dark and slightly bitter. It was just the sound of the kettle clicking off and the cat sitting on the windowsill. I was drinking coffee, and that was all it was, and that was somehow enough.
I started applying this to other things. “The Sunday Sabbath” went back to being Sunday. “The Tuesday Reset” went back to being Tuesday. “The Evening Integration” went back to being the time after dinner when I sat on the couch. The practices didn’t disappear. They just lost their titles. And without their titles, they became lighter. Less weighted. Less like assignments I was giving myself and more like things that were just happening—which is what they’d been all along.
The second thing I noticed was that I stopped talking about them. When my routines had names, I would mention them in conversation. “I’ve been doing this Morning Anchor thing,” I’d say, and the other person would nod politely, and I’d feel a small glow of identity. I was someone with a named practice. I was someone with a system. Without the names, I had nothing to say. I wasn’t doing a “practice.” I was just drinking coffee. There was nothing to report. And in that absence of anything to report, I found something I hadn’t expected: relief.
I wasn’t performing my life for an audience anymore. Not even for myself.
Where Naming Actually Belongs
There’s one context where I’ve found naming to be genuinely generative rather than controlling, and that’s fiction. In fiction, a name opens possibility instead of narrowing it. When you name a character, you’re not branding an experience—you’re creating a door. A character named Clara is different from a character named Marigold, and neither one constrains you. They invite you in. They make you curious. They pull you forward into the story rather than pinning it down.
That’s a fundamentally different relationship with naming than the one I’d been applying to my own life. In my life, naming was about control—making an experience legible, marketable, fixed. In fiction, naming is about discovery. It’s about what a name might open up, what world it might open, what person might emerge on the other side of it.
I’ve spent time thinking about why this distinction matters, and I think it comes down to what naming is for in each context. When I named my walk “The Golden Hour Loop,” I was naming it to evaluate it. Was I doing it right? Was it living up to its name? Should I rename it to better reflect its purpose? The name was a standard. When a writer names a character, they’re not evaluating. They’re exploring. The name is a beginning, not a benchmark. The creative writing community has long understood this distinction, which is why tools designed to generate character names for fiction are framed as starting points for imagination, not final labels. You choose a name because it sparks something, because it feels right, because it opens a door—not because it defines a metric you’ll later measure yourself against.
The Authors Guild, in their guidance on writing practices, emphasizes that what matters is preserving the writer’s original voice, thinking, and creativity—the human intention behind the work, not the tools that might assist it. Their AI Best Practices for Authors document speaks to this tension directly: when does a tool support creative agency, and when does it substitute for it? The question applies just as well to naming. A name that supports your experience is different from a name that replaces it. A name that opens is different from a name that closes.
Reedsy’s character name generator page makes this explicit, describing how many writers use naming tools early in their drafting process, when a character is still taking shape, and then adapt the name as the story develops. The naming is iterative. Exploratory. Open-ended. The opposite of the fixed, branded naming I’d been applying to my own routines. In fiction, a name is a hypothesis. In my life, I’d been using names as verdicts.
The Experiment
So here’s what I want to offer, and I want to be clear that this is not a system. It’s not a practice. It doesn’t have a name, and I don’t want to give it one. It’s just something I tried, and something that helped.
Pick one thing you do regularly that currently has a name. It might be a formal name, like “Morning Routine” or “Sunday Reset.” Or it might be an informal name, the kind of label you use in your head without saying it out loud—the way you think of your evening tea as “winding down” or your Saturday walk as “getting steps in.” Whatever it is, just drop the name. Don’t replace it with a better name. Don’t replace it with a different frame. Let the thing be the thing. Coffee is coffee. A walk is a walk. Sunday is Sunday.
Do this for a month. Not as a challenge. Not as a commitment. Not as a practice you’re doing to see results. Just as a quiet experiment in letting something exist without a title.
I’ve found that what happens, at least for me, is that the experience becomes lighter. It loses its performance quality. It stops feeling like something I’m doing on purpose and starts feeling like something that’s just part of my life. And that shift—from doing something on purpose to something just being part of my life—is one of the most relieving shifts I’ve felt in years of unlearning the need to optimize.
I also noticed that without names, I stopped evaluating my experiences so harshly. A walk that was just a walk couldn’t be a bad walk. It could be a short walk, or a cold walk, or a walk where I felt restless, but it couldn’t fail to live up to its name because it didn’t have one. Coffee that was just coffee couldn’t be a failed Morning Anchor. Sunday that was just Sunday couldn’t be a wasted Sabbath. The experiences were allowed to be ordinary, and ordinary was allowed to be enough.
The Discomfort of the Unnamed
I don’t want to pretend this was entirely comfortable. It wasn’t. There were days when I missed the names, when I felt a pull toward the old frames. The names had given my days a shape, a sense of structure that I’d mistaken for meaning. Without them, my days felt formless. A little loose. A little too much like they were just happening, without intention, without purpose.
But I sat with that discomfort, and I noticed something: the discomfort wasn’t about the days themselves. The days were fine. The discomfort was about the loss of control. I’d been using names to manage my life, and now I was letting my life happen without management, and the part of me that had been trained to manage everything was panicking.
That part of me—the manager, the namer, the optimizer—isn’t gone. It still speaks up. It still reaches for the notes app. But it’s quieter now, and I’ve learned to hear it without obeying it. I can notice the impulse to name something and let it pass, the way you notice a wave of wanting to check your phone and let it pass. The impulse doesn’t need to be acted on. The name doesn’t need to be given.
Living Without a Title
It’s been about five months since I deleted that fifth name from my notes app. I still walk most afternoons. I still drink coffee in the morning. I still sit on the couch after dinner. None of these things have names anymore. They’re just things I do, and they take up the same space in my life that they always did, but without the weight of a label.
I think about the history of branding sometimes—the way companies learned, over the course of the twentieth century, that naming a product could create loyalty, identity, emotional attachment. We learned to call our running shoes by their brand name, our coffee by its roast, our identity by our job title. And somewhere along the way, we started doing it to ourselves. Naming our routines. Branding our habits. Giving our days titles like episodes in a series we were producing about our own lives.
I don’t think the naming is always harmful. Sometimes a name helps. Sometimes it gives shape to something that needs shaping. But I think most of us have overcorrected. We’ve named too much. We’ve branded too much of our own experience. And in doing so, we’ve turned our lives into a series of labeled products—each one evaluated, each one rated, each one needing to justify its own existence.
What I’ve found, in the absence of all those names, is something I didn’t expect: my life doesn’t need a title to be real. It doesn’t need a frame to be meaningful. It doesn’t need a name to count. It just needs to be lived. And living it—actually living it, without narrating it, without branding it, without naming it—turns out to be the most relieving thing I’ve done in years.
The walk I took this afternoon was just a walk. It was October, and the light was soft, and my legs were stiff, and I went outside and walked around my neighborhood for about thirty minutes. I didn’t call it anything. I didn’t evaluate it. I didn’t report it. I just did it, and it was enough, and then I came home.
That’s all. That was the whole thing.
