Labels

[MrRazot]

WARNING: I may end up being hypocritical

Why do we label ourselves?
Straight, Gay, Bi, Furry, Brony, Punk, PC Gamer, Redditor, Jock, Whatever
And whatever doesn't have a label will have one eventually and then people will fight over them and spark flame wars over which label is better to be labelled with.

Why can't we just be humans up until the point where we become trans-humans?

[Obey138 (Matthew "Fluffy")]

To be identifiable

[MrRazot]

Then why are we trying to be unique when that leads to conforming to a standard?

[Celestial_Dragon]

i believe coca-cola made a add for something like this...

[HollowOfHaze]

People crave variety. Variety inherently leads to diversity. Diversity can either lead to acceptance, or to classification and separation.

Everyone wants to be able to say that they are special in some way. They want to be unique from others around them. They want to be able to say that they made a difference. They want a way to say "I was here, and nobody like me was here before".

Labels and classification are required on both a systematic and psychological level. That is just how we work. It's part of our primal mechanisms to distinguish between people for any reason.

[MrRazot]

It just seems to constantly be creating social backlash in which no one wins.
It seems the more labels someone has, the better they are.

[Kazuene]

It just seems to constantly be creating social backlash in which no one wins.
It seems the more labels someone has, the better they are.

In that sense, it seems like each extra label appended to their list makes them feel a tiny bit more special which is rather silly.

[Cheza]

"You're unique. Just like everyone else." Way too many seem to forget about that.


*Yay, ramblings that might or might not have anything to do with the actual topic*


To me, labels have mostly been a convenient-ish way to try and describe myself in a shorter way (can't come up with a better way to put it), but other than that I don't really care much for them.
Like, I'm a Finland-swede, furry, metalhead and a filthy console peasant heathen.
That's shorter than saying "I'm a person living in Finland but my ancestors were Swedish, I'm fan of anthropomorphic animals, I love music of the metal genre and I enjoy playing video games on consoles", but the message should still come across just fine.


The main thing is, I'm still plain old boring me. None of those things makes me better or more special than anyone else. But it should give people a slight hint of what kind of person I am, my likes/interests and so on.


When done right, they might actually fill a role, but when they've gone to the point where every single tiny obscure detail of a persons life needs a label and a name or they're used as some sort of "I'm *this*, that automatically makes me far more superior because you're *that*", it's gone too far.

[Cecilia Peromi]

I'm not one for labels. I'm me and you're you. Plain and simple.

[Goblin Cat 😸]

Labels can help people identify themselves. They can also help identify safe spaces for those that identify differently from the norm. Labels aren't always harmful. I can say that there are a few I wish I had known of growing up so that I didn't feel so alone and broken. Also labels help dictate what sort of experiences a group may share so that these people can support one another.

[Nrein]

I think my biggest issue with labels comes from the people who feel the need to make them out like they're the most important thing, and that you *have* to have one, be it by yourself, or by their "deduction."

I don't much enjoy who many "tumblrientations" there are but, it's worse when people feel the need to analyze you and then force their opinion of your orientation/gender down your throat.

[CrazyCat]

It's an easier way to let people know about you than telling them your whole life story and philosophy. On the other hand, it's a lot less accurate. So, convenience or laziness. Call it what you will.

[Midnight Madness]

I like the way you put it. It does condense your story to have a label, of sorts, but it also can be followed by someone reacting based off of stereotypes. But frankly, that's gonna happen whether we apply our own labels or not... because people label others all the time, whether or not they wish to be.

[Cecilia Peromi]

Labels are a way of putting people into nice little categories. But the truth is: that  can't really be done. We all are much more than our labels. People use labels as an easier way to describe someone, but the only way to do that is to actually talk to them and get to know them.

[anoni]

The human mind is limited, we all like to think it's this infinitely expanding universe that can hold as much information as possible but in truth it can't.

You know research shows that the average human can only truly remember 300 people at any one time? Yet even with this limit we can still seemingly know anyone, thousands of people, even 300 people seems to be a lot. How do we do this? Labels.

Humans have properties, and when we associate only one property per human we get into trouble, the amount of space required to remember each property for each individual human is large, it's inefficient to have only one human for one property. Instead, we can extend the property to be more, we may have one property that a hundred humans share, when we do this we only have to remember what property a human belonged to, we don't need to rethink or remember the exact qualities of the human, we can just specify that the human is part of the set of humans that share this property, that is a label.

  The reason we have labels is it's generally more efficient to store information that way, and it allows us to seemingly remember hundreds of things about people, while only keeping a small amount of information. It creates bias though, and sometimes creates inaccuracies, but that's generally the reason.