When I talk about the color of life, I’m not talking about happiness.
I’m talking about range.
The full spectrum of what it means to be human.
Language was not born in boardrooms or courtrooms.
It wasn’t engineered for safety, compliance, or deniability.
Language came from experience.
From fear before danger.
From love before attachment.
From pain before warning.
From loss before memory.
From joy before sharing.
We felt first.
Then we found words so others could recognize the same thing.
That’s why one emotion never had one word.
Fear became caution, dread, anxiety, alarm.
Love became care, devotion, loyalty, sacrifice.
Anger became protection, resolve, refusal, boundary.
Grief became sorrow, ache, longing, remembrance.
Those aren’t synonyms.
They are shades.
That variation — that nuance — is the color of life.
And it’s what’s being drained away.
Not by accident.
By systems that flatten language for control.
By cultures that prefer deniability over responsibility.
By environments that reduce human experience to “acceptable terms.”
When language loses its color, empathy goes with it.
When empathy goes, understanding collapses.
When understanding collapses, connection turns cold.
People feel this loss even if they can’t name it.
They feel conversations cooling.
They feel meaning thinning.
They feel life turning gray.
This isn’t nostalgia.
It’s erosion.
Clarity doesn’t come from stripping emotion out.
It comes from honoring it without letting it run wild.
Responsibility.
Accountability.
Respect.
Those aren’t constraints on humanity.
They are what allow the full spectrum to exist without destroying itself.
The color of life isn’t chaos.
It’s distinction.
And when we protect language — real language, rooted in feeling and experience — we protect something deeper than communication.
We protect our ability to be human with each other.
That’s what I’m talking about when I say the color has been taken away.
And that’s why it matters to bring it back.
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© 2025 Michael S. Faust Sr.MIAI: Moral Infrastructure for AI
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