By Ethan Maurice | June 29, 2020

Symbols matter more than you think.

In a column titled, The Story of a Thing, a New York Times Reporter asked a few dozens famous creatives, “what’s your most prized possession?” While the answers varied widely, from a factory table where women sewed flowers onto hats in the 1960s, to a picture of Harriet Tubman, to a fifteen-year-old tea bag, each object was not prized for its usefulness or economic value, but for its meaning. Everyone’s most prized possession was a symbol — an object highly charged with meaning.

Symbols are a curious, human thing. How is it that a fifteen-year-old tea bag could be someone’s most prized possession?

For an answer, let’s look to Nike. A company that spends billions of dollars each year on advertisements that, interestingly, don’t even mention their products. Instead, Nike spends a bulk of its advertising budget associating specific, powerful meanings and emotions with its symbol: the swoosh. For the biggest companies that are best at advertising, creating these associations to their symbol is what advertisements are all about.

Seriously. Check it out. Here are three commercials from Nike, Apple, and Mazda. Each makes no attempt to sell anything. Instead, each ad builds meanings and emotions that their customers will relate with, and associates them with their symbol:

Advertisers for the biggest companies spend fortunes on charging their symbols like this in the public-eye every year. Why? Because charging a company symbol with the same meanings that move their customers is the most effective way to move customers to their buy products.

Interesting, huh?

Symbols are also essential undercurrents to movies, powerfully lurking below the level of our awareness. We usually don’t notice them, but we always feel them.

While researching for this article, I stumbled upon an analysis of the symbols in the movie Parasite, which became the first foreign movie ever to win the Academy Award for Best Picture this year. I watched Parasite a few months ago, and I like to think I usually notice some of the symbols unconsciously at work on me. But I couldn’t recall a single one. Once pointed out, though, the symbols were so obviously there, effective, and deliberate. That stone and the smell of poverty appearing again and again throughout the movie, driving the narrative below our conscious awareness, were essential parts of a masterpiece able to unconsciously reach audiences cross-culturally:

The reason we are so affected by symbols, and yet, miss them so easily is that meaning (remember, symbols are just objects highly charged with meaning) works on the unconscious level of the mind.

While this may sound “woo-woo,” it is grounded in hard science. Language and logic correspond with a part of the human brain called the neocortex — the outer, high-functioning, newest evolutionary happening of the human brain that allows us to reason like no other animal. Fascinatingly, meaning and symbols correspond elsewhere in our brains with a deeper, more primitive part we call the limbic system. The limbic system is where our emotions, decision making, and behavior ultimately happen— a highly influential, decision driving place that language and logic alone cannot reach.

This division is why we find it so difficult to describe our feelings. This division is why we often find a way to justify “gut” decisions with logic after the fact. This division is why the best advertisers associate meaning with their symbol instead of doing the logical thing and telling us about the benefits of their products. This division is why symbols are essential to all great movies, why all great movements need a symbol, and why symbols are central to all major religions. 

Symbols charged with meaning reach deeper than reason, straight into the unconscious, primal, decision-driving area of our brains! Advertisers, screenwriters, and priests are not the only ones who can so powerfully wield symbols in life, though. Remember that table, teabag, and Harriet Tubman picture I mentioned at the beginning of this article? 

We can too.

Harnessing the Power of Symbols for Our Own Purposes

Now conscious of the unconscious power of symbols, what do we do with this understanding?

We could use symbols for external purposes? We could build a brand, take a screenplay to the next level, or unify our favorite social movement? However, like the famous creatives interviewed in The Story of a Thing, who probably do wield symbols in such ways, why not strike at the root of our experience and start with ourselves?

To do so is simple. We just have to find the symbols that matter most to us and ensure we encounter them throughout the day.

However, since meaning and reason are handled by different departments of our heads, we can’t just reason our way to the symbols that matter to us most. The search for our symbols is a personal process of seeking, finding, and discovery. We have to experience a symbol’s effect to know if it resonates with us. We know when it does.

Let me give a personal example.

Twelve years ago, I nearly died of a viral brain infection. The experience still echoes through my days with profound ripples in my values and perspectives. One day not so long ago, I happened upon the ancient concept of “memento mori,” (which translates to “remember death”) when I encountered a coin with the phrase printed upon it:

My heart leapt! I instantly recognized that coin was something special. It was the physical manifestation of all my near death experience meant to me. I had to have one. And I have carried it in my left pocket just about every day since. I hold that coin, run it through my fingers, and notice the press of its weight against my thigh many times a day. Each encounter is a cascade of gratitude, meaning, and perspective gleaned from getting so close to the edge of life. For me, it is the most powerful symbol I have ever encountered.

From my experience, I suspect the best place to search for our symbols is in the places that matter most to us. That sounds ridiculously simple, but it’s actually a difficult conclusion to arrive at (as I keep saying, meaning and reason happen at different places in our heads). 

A good question to ask is, “what matters most to me?” Then explore those areas for their symbols and feel for what resonates.

The treasure to be found is an endless fountain of meaning. A most prized possession. An object priceless in value, that will give to us in ways that matter more to us than any other object ever could.

This is a particularly worthwhile search today. Many pages have been written on the meaninglessness of modern society, a consequence of a world run on numbers, science, and tech — the mighty, but heartless gods of our days. Carl Jung, the most popular prophet of the unconscious mind, a man who devoted his life to rallying for its reintegration, put it this way:

Finding our symbols and integrating them into our daily lives is a means of bringing meaning back into our lives. It’s a means of rekindling the connection between our conscious and unconscious minds. Symbols nourish the human spirit—working as wells of meaning to drink from in the logic-heavy, meaning-deficient deserts of the modern day.

I encourage and wish you luck in the search for yours.

Lastly, a warning. We become more like anything included in our lives, but symbols are particularly powerful things. As the saying goes, “with great power, comes great responsiblility.” Choose carefully.

P.S. Want more examples of symbols of one’s own? I just posted a follow up article entitled, The Symbols I Consciously Include in My Life, and thought to tack the link here. Perhaps one will provide a jumping-off point in the search for your own symbols?