I’m not too fond of labels.
Yet, the world is full of them. I try to ignore them as much as possible.
Lately, we have tried to label everybody. It’s horrible.
The attribution of labels to your identity makes your personality hollow. Each to their own of course, I just don’t like basing your whole life on a few things in your life that you can’t do anything about.
Like being autistic, that doesn’t control my life.
But.
On the other hand, you shouldn’t eliminate the parts of you that matter. Just don’t let them take over your whole life — it’s possible to become someone else. Someone that you want to be.
Let’s try to explain.
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I didn’t isolate myself
I never labeled myself.
I knew I was diagnosed to be autistic, but it wouldn’t control my life. Nothing changed — I was still myself.
Other people were shocked and upset about the fact that they were autistic, even though it didn’t change a thing because you were always the same.
Once you’re putting yourself into a certain group of people with the same labels, you’re isolating yourself. You are creating a bubble that will always validate your ideas.
No criticism allowed.
I get it, it’s nice to surround yourself with people who understand you. But you won’t grow by doing this.
Culture is shifting
Labels have always existed, although I feel that more and more are being added. Logical of course, but it also deters people from developing outside their comfort zone.
I was raised with the idea that everyone is different. That was beautiful. Now I feel like everybody has to be the same and you can be different with your little circle of same-label communities.
It’s a cultural thing.
Movies, books, music, and social media contribute to these developments. It’s kinda pushy.
Very annoying.
Honestly, I don’t care what labels you carry. Just be nice and be valuable to me.
What if we quit labels?
Cultural changes are complex.
If we take a look at society from 50 years ago, we’d be shocked.
We don’t know what will happen 10 or 20 years from now. Abandoning labels could free our society.
But it could also create a lot of noise.
Humans simply aren’t all the same. Distinguishing between people is necessary to recognize personal qualities.
Without some kind of label, that’s impossible.
The downside about that is that people in your surroundings probably can’t quit label-thinking immediately.
It will bother you.
Try to talk to other people without using labels. Maybe they’ll learn something from it.
After all, we can’t blame people for something they’ve been doing for their whole lives.
Or can we?
We might be conditioned by label thinking. Humans are also very adaptive and can change their behavior if they want to.
Figuring out who you are
Being an author is a label. That’s not who you are, it tells something about the things you do.
Your name is just a label as well. Is that you? Your parents gave you that name so you don’t really have anything to say about it.
Quitting names will be difficult though.
We’d have to describe each other in order to know who we are talking to. But even that isn’t who you are.
As you see, it’s a quite complex philosophical topic that has been debated for centuries. I’m not sure we’re going to figure that one out if we keep rolling around in our labels.
You have much more to gain from transcending label thinking.
And I’m not talking about thinking about who you want to be, but who you really are. At the core of your soul. So this is much more spiritual than we often think.
So one cannot really give advice on this either. It is really personal.
Final thoughts
Transcending label thinking can really change your life.
We do it a lot. Even when we don’t want to. It’s almost unconscious.
It’s so easy to assign somebody a label. It would be much better to get to know this person and judge somebody based on their qualities instead of their characteristics.
Also, you’d feel much freer once you start doing it.