Weltist

'Umwelt,' is the German name for the 'life-world,' the world as experienced by a living organism. Then there's the bare term 'welt' which is a delicious double entendre, standing for world in German and a painful injury in English, which is a terrific way of expressing the Buddhist (and more generally Indian) intuition that all of Samsara is suffering.

So a 'Weltist' is simultaneously a world-maker, someone who understands the essence of worlds and someone who tries to do so while minimizing suffering.

I'd first used the word a year before, half in jest.

If you tell someone you are interested in the world, they are likely to look at you funny but if you tell them you’re a weltist, and suddenly you are halfway important. I make worlds for a living, what about you?

Here's why I keep coming back to worlds.

We understand the universe very well. We can peek into its origins nanoseconds after it burst into existence. We can predict the motions of planets and control photons so they bend around walls. In contrast, we barely understand the world.

The world is what we can take for granted.