SEARCHING WITH WORDS

November 24th, 2022

This is an experimental post. The idea is to find a new name for the meditation app. Currently the name is The Tinkered Mind, but this is too clunky on the tongue, too long, and it’s also past-tense, which doesn’t feel right for a meditation app that ultimately describes a continuous process through time.

The branding for the app is centered around an image of a mind with gears in it, and some of the gears are floating out. Meditation also has the connotation of maintenance, like a mechanic, and training, like lifting weights for the mind. 

The three major meditation apps out there are HeadSpace, Calm, and Waking Up. Headspace as a name is very solid in terms of how it sounds and rolls off the tongue. But it is a noun, as opposed to a verb which indicates more of a process, which is more desirable. Waking Up hits that note of being an active verb but it’s not nearly as smooth as Headspace. Calm is simple and sort of hits all the notes, but it does describe a state as opposed to a process.

A Lucilius Parable was written about an advanced meditation app that functions through a Brain-Machine-Interface and that parables was called Headway which was a cheeky poke at Headspace, and this is a possible candidate, but it feels like a rip-off of Headspace which isn’t nearly as a good.

The vibe that I’d like is perhaps captured by the image of a person doing maintenance on their motorcycle in a zen garden. It related to a slow, subtle shift in the nature of thought over a great deal of time.

Someone just gave be the idea of cognition as related to cogs on a gear. Cog is a word root is pretty ugly but in terms of etymology it has a very elegant double meaning. 

Another fan of Tinkered Thinking recommended Shift but of course such a name was scooped up long ago. 

Shifted Thought

Shifted Thinking

ThoughtShift

Perhaps something to do with paradigm? After all, meditation is a slow shift in paradigm.

Given the momentum score that is probably the most valuable innovation of the app, something like KeepTrack also feels like it’s in the right direction, though it sounds most like a calendar, habit tracking app…

Mindshift?

Well this was a worthwhile experiment, but not a particularly productive one. But that’s the thing with writing. They are attempts to discover something. Hence the fact that Essay is French for ‘try’.