What's in a Name? the meaning behind "10000things"

10000things as a website and business isn’t what it started out to be (more on that in a bit), but as I’ve gotten a little older I’ve tried to embrace, with uneven success, the beauty of mislaid plans becoming something both other and odder.

The “ten thousand things” is an old idea, borrowed from Classical Chinese philosophy, that refers to everything in the world, all of the named  and nameable Things. To me it’s an idea about the infinite baffling complexity of the world, and the quiet simplicity all at once. The mirrors and lenses of perception, and how they can either lead us astray, or lead us to surprising insights and discoveries. It’s like the chaotic mess of an artist’s studio when working, and the joy of all the messiness resolving into a perfect image, or poem, or dance.

Why is it the business name though?

I started using the name a long time ago, back when I imagined the site as a kind of online arts collective. Over the years it became a catch-all for my own art and my web design business, which eventually got confusing for everyone involved. So I split things up. My art now lives at davidchastain.art, and 10000things stayed put as the home for the web work. The name has been around long enough now that it’s become relevant through a process of accretion, though mostly, honestly, it’s just stuck.

Where the phrase comes from

The “ten thousand things” is a translation of the Chinese term wànwù (萬物), a poetic way of saying “all beings” or “everything that can be named.” It shows up most famously in two foundational Taoist texts:

• The Tao Te Ching, attributed to Laozi, describes the nameless Tao as the origin of heaven and earth, and the act of naming as what gives rise to “the mother of the ten thousand things.”
• The Zhuangzi uses the term to point at the infinite, uncountable diversity of the phenomenal world.

The number itself is a cross-cultural shorthand for “more than you can count.” Ancient Greek had myrias (μυριάς), literally 10,000, but used to mean a “myriad,” an uncountable multitude. Sanskrit has ayuta (अयुत), used in the Hindu epics for vast armies and immense spans of time. In Japanese and Korean, man (萬) shows up in expressions like banzai and manse — “ten thousand years,” meaning roughly “forever.” And the American composer John Cage borrowed the phrase for a series of works in the 1950s, drawn to the way 10,000 stands in for the infinite and the magnificently diverse.

So while the specific metaphysical concept is uniquely Chinese, the impulse to use “ten thousand” as a stand-in for everything is something humans have done in a lot of languages, for a long time.

A note on spelling, “10000things, 10,000 Things, Ten Thousand Things”

If you’ve tried to look us up and gotten lost, you’re not alone. The name gets written half a dozen different ways:

• 10000things (the official spelling, and the domain: 10000things.net)
• 10,000 Things (with the comma, grammatically tidier)
• 10000 Things (no comma, with a space)
• Ten Thousand Things (spelled out)
• 10K Things (occasionally)

The smashed-together, comma-less “10000things” is what’s on the LLC paperwork and the domain name, mostly because that’s how URLs work.

What it all means to me

There’s a beautiful dichotomy in the notion that all of the swirling messy things of the world are at once illusion and distraction, and also the undiluted source and material of creative work of any kind. The simplest, truest things exist within and beside and because of the chaos of life.

That said, if I could go back in time and pick a company name that was easier to spell out over the phone, or that didn’t make people pause and squint at a business card, I might. But after this many years, the name has earned its place.

It’s a small, slightly stubborn reminder that the work, every website, every small business, every project, is one of an infinite multitude of things, and that from churning chaos emerges meaning, and all good creative work.