While swimming in my library, flipping pages without actually reading a full paragraph — just hunting for something that would catch my attention — I stumbled on Symbol.

I had used it intentionally in my learner’s project back in April 2026. But this time, I was reading about JavaScript Symbols from a different perspective. A quieter one. A stranger one.

Talking about Symbols in JavaScript, I feel like most of us need to understand how they work — and why, in some quiet way, we all have to be Symbol in real life.

Brendan Eich gave us the bones of JavaScript, but Symbol wasn’t his doing. That gift came later, in June 2015, when Ecma International officially launched Symbol as part of ECMAScript 2015 (ES6).

It had been a work in progress by the brilliant minds of TC39 — the committee that shapes the language’s soul. All thanks to these gurus. They gave me a new lens.

Symbols in JavaScript are all about uniqueness.

You can create multiple Symbols with the exact same description — and they are all different.

In your browser console, try this:

Symbol("id") === Symbol("id") // false

The output whispers something profound: Everything is different. Even when they look the same.

It feels like seeing twins who appear identical — but with a deeper gaze, the difference becomes obvious. One smiles a half-second slower. One tilts their head when listening. The universe never duplicates. It only echoes.

There are seven primitive data types in JavaScript. Symbol is one of them.

String, Number, BigInt, Boolean, Undefined, Null, and Symbol.

“Symbol is a built-in object whose constructor returns a Symbol primitive — also called a Symbol value or just a Symbol — that’s guaranteed to be unique.”
— MDN Docs

And here’s where I paused mid-page.

What if we are all Symbols in human form?

Not copies. Not templates. Not generic instances of a class called Person. But primordial, unrepeatable values — carrying the same label, maybe, but fundamentally, irreducibly other.

Nature never creates duplicates. It iterates, yes. It remixes. But it never clones without a difference.

Does that mean programming is a simulation of reality?

Or does it mean reality has always been the original code — and we’re just now learning to read the syntax?

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