Labeling people is the root of all major issues in Western culture!
How does that make you feel? Does it sound unfair, do you feel triggered, or did it perhaps get your brain juices flowing? It’s a bold statement, and it was inspired by criticism given by a representative of another culture. Let me explain:
I saw a clip of an interview on TikTok, that magical place of the most random content, and thus the most interesting social media platform in existence. This interview was between 2 official looking people.
The interviewer was from the US, the interviewee from China. And what the Chinese woman said, was very interesting! Interesting because we here in the West don’t actually know anything about China or Chinese culture. All we know comes from our media sources that are extremely biased and mainly rely on US propaganda against China.
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The male interviewer asked the female interviewee about gay rights in China (or maybe in Asia overall). And the woman loaded some facts on the table:
In Asia it has been very normal for two straight men to walk hand-in-hand in public, f.ex. on the street. And if you, like me, have consumed K-pop related content on social media, you’ve seen how freely those men hug, touch and hang off each other completely publicly.
And perhaps you, like me, thought it a bit strange at first, because in Western culture this simply doesn’t happen. Not PUBLICLY.
The Chinese interviewee then continued that since Western countries started meddling in and around Asia, we brought with us some aspects of our culture that really should NOT have been spread: labeling others. Western countries are all about labeling people!
Why We Keep Labeling People
It was a short clip of an interview but it got my brain racing. I have myself felt like a prisoner of this inadequate labeling system my whole life. And I’ve actively fought against it, still do! I’m Finnish but I’m not, I’m a woman but different to most women, I’m an entrepreneur but not like the rest of them.
Let’s be honest though, even I find myself labeling people every now and then. And it pisses me off! Labeling others means we think of them in a limiting way. So why on Earth do we label people?
Personally, I blame the modern culture that is built on consumerism. People are easier to sell to when they know what their “personal labels” are. That’s why social media platforms are so obsessed with the ability to target ads according to the information they gather about you.
You know how you’d label yourself, right? Basically labeling people is a learned behaviour pattern that we see, hear and feel all around us, and thus adopt it ourselves.
For example:
- When we meet someone new, we immediately, and without realizing label them according to their physical appearance. Skin colour raises connotations in our mind, and we immediately judge them according to how relatable and/or attractive we find them.
- Next we want to know what they do for a living, are they in a relationship, and in the US probably which political party they support. And they want to know exactly the same things about us.
The reason why this part of Western culture is a problem, is that every single label is automatically allocated by us into “this is okay” and “this is not okay” box. And you know exactly what that has brought us:
Discrimination, cancel-culture (aka BULLYING), extremist thinking and racism. Because at its core, labeling people is all about separating ‘us’ from ‘them’. ‘Us’ of course being the “correct” way to exist in this world.
Circling back to the interview, this insane need to label people has in recent decades leaked from our shores into Asia. And as a result men there don’t feel comfortable showing signs of affection to their friends and family members publicly anymore.
And this is a MASSIVE SHAME! Because at the end of the day, the labels we’ve created do not benefit any individual. They benefit capitalism.
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How to Stop Labeling Others
Many of my friends have small children, and I keep thinking how scary it must be to raise a child in this unempathetic, unforgiving, limited-thinking world of ours. And if we want the world to be a better place for us, maybe even for others, we need to start within ourselves. We must unlearn this extremely inconvenient obsession with labeling people.
How do we do this? We start from the basics! The first step is to question what you know right now. What if the way you have been taught to behave and think actually isn’t beneficial to you at all? What would a life without labels be like? Here’s how to start unravelling it all.
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Ask yourself: why do you label people?
Before you can make any changes in the way you behave towards other people, you need to dig deep and find the ‘WHY?’. Why do you label people? What do you get from it?
→ Is it so that you could make more sense of the world? Does labeling people bring you peace of mind because you at least know who your neighbours are, even if the world around you is burning?
→ Is it because of self-esteem issues, which are derived from self-labeling? Maybe you have labeled yourself so “low” that you’re constantly trying to find a way to look/feel better than ‘them’?
→ Is it just because that’s exactly what everybody else around you is doing, labeling people? And you feel like it’s near-impossible to communicate with someone you haven’t been able to box up in your head first?
Acknowledge the absolute carnage of labeling people
If the previous questions made you feel uncomfortable, GOOD! That means that there is hope, and that you are realizing aspects of yourself that are not serving you. It isn’t comfortable, but change never is. But isn’t a little discomfort worth being more free and less judgemental in the long run?
Once you’ve recognized the main reasoning behind why you keep labeling people, it’s time to acknowledge what that labeling forces you to do. And this all happens without you even realizing it.
When you are labeling people, there’s a great risk you are engaging in:
- discrimination – if a person’s age, skin colour or sexual orientation dictates your opinion of that person, you are discriminating them.
- distorting your own self-image – if you’re labeling others, you’re also labeling yourself, and whatever label you live by, it probably isn’t the whole story. What aspects about you are left outside that self-label?
- racism – at the end of the day, that is exactly what labeling people is. Is that something you want to associate yourself with?
What we need to understand, is that labels are always subjective. Whatever labels we give to people, they are just labels created by us, and vice versa. Thus, labels are NEVER a true representation of a person! So much is left out of the equation because a label is never enough to encapsulate a complex individual for everything that they are.
Decide to STOP labeling people, and stick to it
I know what you’re thinking. “Well, it’s easy to say ‘I decide’ something, but it’s a whole other story to stick to that decision!” Is it though?
- What if you’re actually much more capable of making decisions and sticking to them than you’ve allowed yourself to believe?
- What if you (or someone else) labelled yourself as someone who can’t stick to their decisions, but in reality that’s not true?
- Have you ever considered the full extent of your capabilities and potential compared to the limitations you may impose on yourself through negative self-talk or self-doubt?
In other words; could you be limiting yourself and your full potential through negative self-talk? All of that stems from us labelling ourselves and others, so we need to shed those useless labels off!
At the end of the day, we humans are very simple. When we make an actual decision, we automatically stick to it. Now, there’s a major difference between an empty decision and an actual decision:
Empty decisions meaning: “I’ll start eating better next week” or “I’ll go to the gym tomorrow” without any conviction behind it.
Actual decisions are those ones that you actually commit to. And when you decide to commit, something switches in your brain. It remembers the decision and reminds you of it constantly.
And when you remember it, and it’s a decision you have actually committed to, you also start to act accordingly. Consciously at first, but after a few weeks of sticking to it, the decision becomes a habit. And when it’s a habit you act accordingly automatically.
Conclusion
And just like that you unlearned a harmful habit or a way of life, and replaced it with a new, healthier habit! In this case, we taught ourselves out of labeling people immediately when we see them.
In practice this can mean that when you meet a new person, and you notice yourself putting them in a box in your head, you stop and take a step back, look at the person you just labeled one way or the other, and re-evaluate. You give them a chance to show you who they are instead of assuming.
At the end of the day our brains work just like massive software. You give it an order, it saves it up, and remembers it. But then comes the part where we differ from robots: when your brain recovers a decision you made, it is then your job and responsibility to act accordingly. And yes, you can do it. Because it’s for your own good. ♥
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