Identity Labels Just Aren’t Working Anymore

There’s no need to get hung up on semantics

Photo by noodle kimm on Unsplash

Man, do we love a box? We love to belong, to have a tribe, a trend, a buzzword. We love to be able to instantly define someone.

Vegetarian. Vegan. Goth. Hippy. Single. Married. Nerd….it goes on and on.

There are reasons for labelling, and perfectly legitimate ones. In order to quickly get a handle on things, we tend to look at them in the simplest possible terms.

Fundamentally, is it dangerous or not dangerous? Then, is this something that should be on my radar or not?

Hey, we’re busy people, the faster we can dismiss something the more time we have to pay attention to what is relevant to us. Labels help us define ourselves and others, they make us feel like we fit somewhere and can easily identify others who share our labels.

I get it, labels are useful.

But the thing is, labels are only as useful as they are accurate. And as we’ve been discovering in recent years, there’s an awful lot of variation in society, within the individual, that has historically not been labelled.

In fact, it sort of seems like we’ve all been desperately clinging to a mindset that says, ‘if it doesn’t have a name, it cannot exist.’