Decades ago in my first abnormal psych course, the prof warned us that there was an almost iron-clad law that students will immediately start self diagnosing themselves with “weak” versions of every disorder we learn about. In my years since then, it has absolutely held true and now is supercharged by a whole industry of TikTok self-diagnoses.

But there are a few things we can learn from this:

- if you give people the chance to place a label on themselves that makes them feel unique, they’ll take it.

- if you give people the chance to place a label on themselves to give a name/form to a problem, they’ll take it.

- most mental disorders are an issue of degree and not something qualitatively different from a typical experience. People should use this to gain greater empathy for those who struggle.

The lovable aphorisms we had for people with character quirks were largely from our original support systems. What no one is talking about is the reason therapy-talk has become so pervasive is because all those support systems: family, friends, and local communities (religious or otherwise), have all degraded so severely for most that therapy is the only option for reaching out and getting help.

When I was young, unsure about myself, and frequently derided when I stated my preference for quiet evenings instead of going out and meeting people, I grasped at the notion of "introversion" the moment I found it. It made my feelings and preferences legitimate during a time when I perceived that people were telling me that I was wrong for being that way.

Now, more than two decades later, after a bit more life experience, I cringe when someone labels me as an introvert - they aren't wrong per se, but they also unload a bunch of assumptions attached to that label on to me, 90% of which are inaccurate/unrelated/tangential.

A good friend of mine told me that labels are useful, but warned me to not make them my entire identity. He turned out to be right.

“mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.”

Because there's now a payoff for those. Those girls proudly display a whole slew of these on their 'bio' because the societal framework they live in 'scores' them on their 'oppression/victim' status.

I'm suspicious of the use of "we" here since I don't feel like I'm a part of this discourse. Also:

>Now you are always late to things not because you are lovably forgetful

In the past from, say, 30-40 years ago, if you failed to arrive at appointments and meetings on time you probably weren't labeled "lovably forgetful," and you probably would face punishments for having certain personality traits. We're changing in how we understand those kinds of differences now, and it's not all for the better, but in general the discourse now is better than how things were in the past when neurodiverse folks tended to receive a lot of punishment, invective, bullying, and ostracism.

I've been autistic my whole life, but I'm from the older set where there was no understanding of such things, we used to get bullied a lot, sometimes quite violently, and social ostracism was typical then for folks on the spectrum. I'd be thoughtful about romanticizing the past or get taken in by the false feelings of nostalgia - it's wrong to imagine people used to deal with the neurodiverse in glowing light and thoughtful acceptance, no one ever said I was "lovably forgetful."

The part that seems to be lost in all this is that there's really no purpose to learning/exploring/explaining unless it points to action.

Knowing you have ADHD, childhood trauma, attachment issues, etc. is useless if that knowledge does not enable you to take action or if you don't intend to take action.

Unless you just enjoy the learning for the learnings sake, seek to learn so as to plan and execute.

Interesting article. It reminds me of TVTropes. It's the most systematizing (as opposed to holistically) way of looking at media, decompose it into parts (tropes) that are shared with other media. It feels like approaching the ultimate in the Western scientific orderly systematizing thought.

Anyway here's the relevant trope: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MeasuringTheMari...

Fascinating article. It's think the author's experiences are fairly context-dependant, with where you live, the political leanings of your social circle, your online community etc. But I have noticed an increase in the pathologizing of normal human behaviours and traits. Maybe not all character flaws should be fixed.

> This is part of a deeper instinct in modern life, I think, to explain everything. Psychologically, scientifically, evolutionarily. Everything about us is caused, categorised, and can be corrected. We talk in theories, frameworks, systems, structures, drives, motivations, mechanisms. But in exchange for explanation, we lost mystery, romance, and lately, I think, ourselves.

This is the rejection of science applied to a less common target.

I always feel like these "We do this new horrible thing that's taking over" articles are always blown out of proportion- sure, _some_ people talk that way, maybe it's even trending to talk that way for a significant group of people, but it's not true of everyone, all the time. To me, this trend seems largely confined to youth culture and social media.

I also found it ironic that part of the OP's argument was that nobody has personality anymore, they just have problems to solve, and this article seemed to be doing the same thing, but for culture at large; reducing it to a problem to be solved.

We live in increasingly complex societies with more and more demanding social dynamics. In the past, it was all much simpler, though at certain costs, that the article fails to mention or romanticises. Not all quirks were celebrated or "funny" and not all people survived to tell beautiful stories.

Moreover, a lot of things were simpler in ways that are becoming less and less ok. People now can divorce; marriage is not even need to start a family. Navigating relationship dynamics was simpler in the sense that there were (more or less) specific roles each gender should abide. Many marriages were arranged, especially if "it was taking you time", thus you did not have to figure out dating yourself.

I don't think that therapeutic discourse is a good strategy. Medicalising personhoods and relationships is bad, but going back to a (romanticised) past cannot be a solution at all. Raising to a higher consiousness would be an actual, good solution, but that takes time. It is uncertain if we have that with the speed that things move nowadays.

I'd say - everybody has a personality which is not who they really are. The personality is "simply" the response and defence mehanism of the ego of trauma inflicted during the early formatory years during childhood. It's really interesting what an automatic-machine a person is. Unaware that he is acting machanically in most cases. Source - the Enneagram and Gurdjieff.

IIRC a "disorder" is a personality trait that is extremely strong; specifically, strong enough to significantly negatively affect one's life and relationships without medication or therapy (real therapy, not "talk to someone" therapy).

For example, sometimes people talk about lowercase "t" and capital "T" trauma. Lowercase "t" is when something affects you enough that recognizing it elicits an emotion, e.g. some people fell uneasy when smelling saline because they associate it with getting shots when they were young. Uppercase "T" is when the emotion is overpowering, e.g. soldiers who wake up screaming or experience lifelike flashbacks when they see military equipment, or people who can't visit a location without panicking because it reminds them of a negative experience. Only uppercase "T" is diagnosed PTSD, although that doesn't mean lowercase "t" is never a problem, it's just not life-altering and can be worked around without medication or therapy.

We have regular adjectives for the manageable "lowercase" version of disorders. "Obsessive" for OCD, "antsy" or "trouble focusing" for ADHD, "strange" or "peculiar" for Autism. I do think someone can be "manic" or "depressed" without having diagnosed Bipolar or Depression. Unfortunately, language is defined by how it's used in practice, so if most people call themselves "ADHD" when they don't have real diagnosed ADHD, you'll have to use their meaning to understand them, and eventually it'll become the norm; but you can speak and write the non-disorder adjective to help counter it. Worst case, we still have "diagnosed X" to distinguish from "X" (unless people start using it like "literally" to mean figuratively...)

We know more now. We can better tease out causes of symptoms.

For example, generosity is not the same as people pleasing. They can look the same, but one is born of love and one is born of fear.

We generally want to help people experience more love and less suffering. Give, not to please people, but to please yourself.

This is a really good article.

There is a lot of this content out there about mental health and there is a lot of it that tries to explain everything people do. Much of the issue I see is that it is taken to extremes and is very much driven by algorithms pushing particular pieces of content. And if it is ambiguous enough it will reach a larger audience, a beneficial sign for the account posting it.

There's no room for nuance that perhaps the person who is generous both has qualities of a people pleaser but is a generous person because once upon a time they did a generous thing and it made their life happier. Where it becomes a mental health issue is when it starts to reduce the quality of your life and your relationships significantly.

The bigger issue is that each of these things seem to be labelled as problems and how they can be solved, not managed nor be normal human behaviors. At the extremes, yes perhaps they need to be managed to a higher degree, but everything else is still what makes up peoples lives.

I myself am swarmed with reels about anxious/avoidant attachment reels with any random man/women and their dog trying to talk ambiguously about human behaviors and providing an explanation for them.

For young people sitting on TikTok and Instagram late at night being bombarded with mental health related reels trying to explain your behavior and other peoples behavior you like or don't like. It's best to give that type of content a break.

> This is part of a deeper instinct in modern life, I think, to explain everything.

To explain everything shallowly by looking for direct cause and effect and not a multitudes of causes and effects. That complexity is too much to think through comfortably whilst living within it and having an unreliable experience of the self, especially in the younger years. Labeling causes with an easy broad moniker provides temporary comfort, relieving the individual of the burden of deeper reflection.

I often see a generalized notion where refusing to be a person doing a bad thing instead transforms into being a person with doing-bad-thing-syndrome, which then distills to doing-bad-thing-syndrome-sufferer. It removes agency, but also accountability, so it's a good way to coast through life with learned helplessness

Unfortunately (but given the slant of all her other articles, most likely intentionally), the author suffers from one major oversight:

The absence of labels is just as much of a marketing gimmick as their presence. Even anti-identitarianism will be weaponized. Even nothing is something. Eliminate all the labels and concepts and redundancies, and you are yet left with a "natural, unspoken, normal default" state of being.

And as it turns out, there are plenty of forces out there willing to exploit that appeal towards the "the unspoken", for either financial or political gain. The question remains, then: who or what gets to determine this unspoken part of life?

1. Weird title

2. Personally, I think the being more knowledgeable about (and conversant in) common psychological issues is great. Much better if we have a label for "depression" rather than just thinking "The world and everything is awful and I'm the only one who feels this way." Same for anxiety, attachment, all of that.

3. If young girls happen to co-opt it in a way you find self-absorbed, get over it, stop trying to police it and make a fake moral panic over it. It's no worse than astrology or whatever other loose avenue of self-exploration would be otherwise happening.

It to me sounds like the author fundamentally misunderstands the whole thing, this just is soaking in boomer energy. That is -- the premise that recognizing these trends is somehow shaming/bad and it's "better" if we all use loosely-defined unscientific terms like "nice-person" rather than looking at and challenging our overly intense and dysfunctional people-pleasing or whatever.

The way gen-z uses these terms, is that they aren't some hardcore disorder, but as a common parlance for real and addressable things to change about oneself (e.g. that talking on the phone can be uncomfortable, or making an appointment is stressful). Like gen-z may say "Oh I have insecure attachment" and they just mean "Sometimes I'm afraid to reach out for fear of rejection" and that's a healthy thing to talk about, even if the term they used is used a different way in the DSM.

The genius of social media is that they propagated some labels and then they let people do the hard work of adjusting their personalities and belief systems to more closely adhere to those labels. Likely driven by mimetic desire for status and recognition. Adherence to well known labels provides instant recognition and validation.

Then when it came to 'targeted advertising', social media advertisers could just target the labels and reach a huge amount of people because those people had already fine-tuned and optimized themselves to be receptive to that kind of messaging.

Their personalities were homogenized to the point that the focus groups ended up being representative of the real people behind the labels.

Could this be an evolution of astrology? Or an evolution of the underlying attraction to astrology? This need to label things (libra vs scorpio vs etc) and the assignment of character traits and behaviors to these labels? This need to push for explanations beyond our control? And perhaps these psychological labels are even _more_ attractive since they have the veneer of science and rationality behind it.

I’m reluctant to blame therapy-speak and diagnoses of legitimate mental health disorders for the lack of personality in a lot of folks.

Instead, I lay blame at several altars of the modern world:

* Late stage Capitalism desperately trying to source novelty and products by convincing everyone they’re a “brand” to be marketed and sold to others

* Social media algorithms forcing people into bubbles for the sake of advertising revenue and data harvesting

* An “awakening” of modern mental health awareness (especially post-pandemic) that’s both (likely) engaging in overdiagnosing while also laying groundwork to understand people for who they are, rather than trying to shove them into neat little boxes of compliance

* The internet and free exchange of information enabling a lot of disparate researchers and experts to realize that these issues aren’t unique to a single cohort, but are likely environmental in nature to some significant degree

Add it all together, and you’ve got the current “label” era of personalities - shorthand for how you’d like others to see you and explain your quirks or eccentricities, but of questionable health if not accompanied by actual therapy (pharmaceutical, medical, behavioral, or otherwise).

I feel like the author is, funnily enough given the context, lumping in self-understanding and self-reflection of any kind into a single category. A tool (analysis) that is used to grant you agency is equated to an identity kit (a label) that removes your agency and puts you in the box that the author describes.

You can have great self-understanding and self-realization about your childhood, your parents opinions and personality without letting it define your life.

You should not blame the analysis itself, but blame the projection of your personality to the result of it, which it encouraged by platforms that make money of it, like TikTok or BetterHelp. It can be fun to do an MBTI or Big 5 test to see common patterns in oneself, it does not mean that you have to structure your personality around the outcome.

To me, it sounds like the author is vouching for being unthinkingly driven by biology, tradition, and impulse in a society where most of this is also commercialized. Your govt wants you to have children to supply pensions, your impulses are driven by the advertisements that you have been bombarded with during the day, there is extreme prodding towards certain kinds of sexual looks or behaviors that influence what people find attractive. You are as much of a product when you follow the impulses than when you dont, the only thing is that with self-reflection you have a small change to question and think about why you want a certain thing.

I personally think that people living by the authors suggested way of living in a western societal moment of individualism have a maximum chance to regret their life at the end of it, doing everything "default" that society and tradition has taught you is "natural and human" instead of living the journey on your own terms and doing what you actually like.

Psychology (professional and layman) has helped me immensely, but I also recognized it can be a trap. I had a therapist for a couple months help me through an intense depression, but I could also feel when it was becoming naval gazing, so then I stopped.

Psychology is a means to an end. But some people are attempting to make it an end. I do feel a cathartic release to get a 'diagnosis', but this catharsis is transient. There is infinite sub-categorizations to achieve infinite catharsis, but each further division, brings diminishing returns.

I hope that this trend is going to burn itself out. There is no promised land in medical psychology as popularly experienced. It can be used as a scaffold to leap into a higher self-awareness, but then it must be left aside.

Someone needs to play Metal Gear Solid 2.

The crowd which is hyper-focused on their "trauma" probably doesn't realize that this is scratching the very same itch as astrology.

> We can’t talk about character either. There are no generous people anymore, only people-pleasers. There are no men or women who wear their hearts on their sleeves, only the anxiously attached, or the co-dependent.

While I agree about the over-labeling (which is a way to be sortable by algorithms that need to push or penalize our social media presence) I wouldn’t throw away the baby with the bathwater. There is a difference between being generous and being a people-pleaser, and it’s an important one to know for people with this trait. Years ago you would have never thought of this as a (mild) neurosis, but it can totally be. Being aware of it can help immensely in leading a more fulfilling life. This is true for all the other examples mentioned.

That said, the piece should just be: social media has polluted and ruined mental health awareness in the same exact way it has ruined and polluted so many other aspects of the public discourse.

Speak for yourself, It's not impossible to uncaringly live your own life of your own choices, quirks and characteristics without agreeing that you're somehow "disordered", and pigeonhole yourself into idiotically cheap social media and pop culture labels of X or Y. Just refuse to participate in the herd-guiding on something so basic as personal tendencies and flaws.

It's a shame that too many young people do the opposite and have bought so widely into a therapy culture of tagging so much of the complex human world into little boxes of psychological disorder (founded on some very, very shaky evidence and clinical understanding) to cause further internal trauma. This itself has become a bizarre and sickly fad but not an inescapable one.

The screwtape letters for 2025: how to completely freeze a generation from having any impact. Oof. This hit hard.

To those with a bit more age and life experience than myself, I ask if you have noticed a rise in "categorical thinking" over time. To clarify, I mean thought processes that are mostly surface level and focus on attributing qualities or conclusions to things based on observable characteristics. Sort of "they display x so they must be y which means z"

It’s tough when everyone feels like just a label. Using Loyally.ai helped me see customers as individuals again by tracking what really matters to them. Made connections feel more genuine and less robotic.

It’s surprising that this article doesn’t mention LGBT or disabilities at all. The same effect extends to those two. And, in the same vein, it’s females “buying” it.

“…between 19% and 22% of women aged 18 to 25 identify as bi.” https://nypost.com/2023/04/18/gen-z-women-identify-as-bisexu...

Eh. There are a loud social-media savvy cohort of mostly young, mostly female, mostly suburban American people and this is the lens they see the world through and they have a disproportionate representation in the available media to consume. The people that don't think this way which is the vast majority of people just don't talk about these things too much and don't accept the premise of the people who do... but don't disagree with them because those people are exhausting.

People who aren't that interested in talking about themselves just have other interests and don't want to engage in the shallow philosophy of psychology of the social media gen-z class.

Lol, I don’t think so, at least not outside branding and corporate circles.

It can still be endearing to have quirks, but I think there is still value in awareness of yourself and your patterns.

I somewhat agree that there is a problem but there is a glimmer of hope. As these medical terms are used more in everyday speech they lose their medical connotations and just become new words for personality traits. A lot of people who casually describe things as ADHD are using it more as an adjective than a diagnosis. We have had medical terms make it into this usage before: moron, hysterical, humourous (we're going all the way back to the four humours).

Clicking around, the last the article the author published accuses porn of causing mass trauma. Does she want us to use these labels liberally or not?

Love this article. If you'd like a book that works deeply through the topic of commodified humanity, Minima Moralia by Adorno is painfully pertinent here.

I can think of nothing more likely to damage one's attention span than a variable intermittent reward loop on short form video.

Kind of old news with a new headline.

Some people have made free lecture series on the topic, like this:

https://rickroderick.org/300-guide-the-self-under-siege-1993...

I think what (may have) changed is that we now have "acceptable" labels. ADHD is fine, autism is fine, alcoholism, schizophrenia, not great, pedophilia, very very bad, even if you have never acted on a child.

I don't remember past "acceptable" pathologies, or what was considered a pathology back then, it included being gay. It you have a pathology, then you are mad, and if you are mad, then you lose your rights, at best, you are considered like a child, at worst, you end up in a place worse than prison.

Now, if you are diagnosed with an "acceptable" pathology, you actually get some advantages, people are expected to tolerate your quirks and you get full freedom like normal people, you may even get some welfare benefits as you are considered disabled.

To summarize:

Before: You are diagnosed as autistic, you end up in an asylum and lose your freedoms. No one wants that, so you avoid the label, it is just a personality trait.

Now: you are diagnosed as autistic, you get welfare benefits and people find it cute on social media. You want the label.

Is there a diagnosis for the tendency to collect diagnostic labels and use them to absolve oneself of responsibility?

On further thought, not sure if this would solve the problem or exacerbate it...

There are no normal people. Only undiagnosed ones.

This is an old observation. The only change was that we started to attempt to diagnose and some people find it useful, some harmful and annoying.

> And maybe that isn’t as crazy as we have been led to believe, maybe that isn’t so reckless, maybe there’s something human in that.

I'm quite certain the author is a Starfleet captain. So few things make me as excited to be human.

Or maybe your community sucks.

The overdiagnosis and therapy talk is real, and is causing way too many people (most of them children) to take brain-altering pills on a daily basis.

I find the article to lack nuance, but it is time that this hazardous trend stops, and if it needs to go through social media shaming for some people to realize this sucks, then I am all for it.

My 6-year-old is a pain in the ass (got thrown out of 2 schools already). His psychologist says he has a hard time controlling his emotions. You wouldn’t believe the number of people who suggested he has some form of mental illness (OD, ADHD, ASD, we’ve heard it all). Thankfully, here in France, both his psychologist and his teacher are really wary of the trend, and are very careful not to put a mental health label on a kid who doesn’t have any other problem than being a pain to adults.

See the main problem is the question of suffering. People would say: but your kid suffers from being a pain to adults. Wouldn’t you want to help your kid not suffer?

Well yes sure, but the suffering is society-induced. It’s not that his personality is a medical problem, it’s that he doesn’t fit within the expectations. If he’d been born the son of a monarch, it would be accepted that he talked back to adults and throw tantrums, and he wouldn’t feel like shit. And I am not trying to say my kid should be allowed to yell at his teacher, but all of that setting isn’t natural - as in primates don’t go to kindergarten - so who’s to say what’s normal?

It is the same for what the person describes in the article. We live in a society where people do suffer from not meeting society’s expectations. The suffering is real, and so the diagnostic is often oozing.

But when 10% of children are diagnosed with ADHD and given amphetamines so that they can get through the day, we should probably ask whether it’s not the society that’s sick.

Saying the quiet thing out loud with social media and truthy articles, seems to track with the diminishing publishing industry?

Adding insult to injury, we also have now the "humans are just bad biological AIs" wave of thinking. Hooray.

I appreciate the spirit behind this article, and yes, something real has been lost in how we relate to ourselves. But it doesn’t go far enough. The problem isn’t merely that we’ve traded quirky personalities for medical labels. The deeper, subtler tragedy is believing that identity itself is something fixed, stable, and real.

Identity is a seductive illusion. It promises meaning, coherence, and comfort. Yet beneath this comfort lies a quiet tyranny. Once we define ourselves, we imprison ourselves. The fixed “I” we cling to doesn’t stand scrutiny, not scientifically, not philosophically, not psychologically.

Consider neuroscience. The self, the stable “I,” is nowhere to be found in the brain. What scientists find instead are fleeting processes, overlapping patterns, temporary states. Neuroscientist Anil Seth, in his book “Being You,” argues convincingly that the self is a kind of ongoing hallucination—a comforting fiction the mind generates moment by moment. There’s no stable core beneath it, only fragments, constantly rearranging.

Philosophy has long understood this. David Hume, centuries ago, searched for the self within consciousness and found only sensations, perceptions, shifting sands. Nietzsche echoed this idea, mocking the notion of a stable self as merely a trick of language, a grammar-born illusion. Ludwig Wittgenstein, too, dismantled the belief in private inner truths. For him, meaning emerges not from introspection, but from the shared dance of language and action. To think there’s a stable self hidden deep inside is to misunderstand how language, thought, and reality interact.

Freud, despite the distortions of modern therapy, never saw us as coherent beings either. For him, the human psyche was a theater of conflict, desires clashing beneath consciousness, forever hidden from full awareness. Freud’s contribution wasn’t mechanizing the mind, but revealing its profound contradictions. Unlike later theorists such as Lacan, who mistakenly reduced humans to mere patterns of meaning—Freud knew that beneath our carefully narrated lives lay irrationality and mystery, impossible to tame fully by analysis.

Yet today’s therapeutic-industrial complex tries precisely that. Therapy, once an exploration of human depth, now resembles a dating app business model. Platforms like BetterHelp and Talkspace profit not by curing distress, but by prolonging it. You pay, endlessly, to decode yourself. Success for them isn’t resolution, but endless self-inventory, endless labeling.

This is where the concept of “mental health” itself becomes subtly oppressive. It implies an ideal state, a normal range, a standard we should measure ourselves against. Ian Hacking described this phenomenon as the “looping effect”: labels shape behaviors, behaviors reinforce labels, and individuals get trapped in a feedback loop of self-pathology. When identity becomes a medical diagnosis, we surrender our autonomy, our ambiguity, and ultimately our freedom.

Trauma, too, has morphed into social currency. It’s become the dominant metaphor for interpreting every aspect of life: attraction, friendships, career choices. James Davies, author of “Cracked,” highlights how the psychiatric model strips our lives of meaning, reducing complexity to clinical symptoms. But not every strong feeling is a wound; not every quirk a disorder. Of course, painful things do happen—sad things, terrible things—but we speak as if these things always happen to us, placing ourselves at the center of a chain of causality and consequence. In reality, events simply happen. There is no inherent meaning, no cosmic intention. How we weave these accidents into our personal story is entirely our decision. How we let them shape or influence us is our choice alone. It is precisely here, in this decision, that our ultimate freedom lies.

Here’s the core of the matter, the radical truth that’s rarely stated plainly: there is no fixed identity to discover, no true self hidden deep inside. Identity is a myth we invent because life feels safer if we pretend there’s something stable beneath the chaos. But life resists stability. We are never fully known—not even to ourselves. The moment we accept this, the instant we let go of trying to pin ourselves down, we become free to live.

Happiness is not the reward of endless self-exploration. It’s not a puzzle we solve or a mystery we decode. Happiness is a decision, a leap, an act of rebellion against the tyranny of labels, against the logic of suffering. We don’t find happiness by understanding every trauma or categorizing every impulse, but by letting go, by accepting uncertainty, by choosing desire, will, and joy despite everything. This is what Kierkegaard called the leap of faith—not into religious belief necessarily, but into life itself.

Ultimately, identity is not something we have. It is something we do, something we perform, something we constantly recreate. The human condition is not static being but perpetual becoming. Nietzsche said it best: we must become who we are. And in doing so, we reject the cage of identity entirely. We are not diagnoses, symptoms, or personalities. We are simply alive, driven by desire, moved by joy, ever-changing and never fully defined.

Yet this does not mean giving up on growth or self-improvement—quite the opposite. It is precisely because we are not limited by a static identity that we can truly act, improve, evolve. But nobody can do this for us. Nobody can save us from ourselves, not a therapist, not a romantic partner. The responsibility for our existence and happiness lies entirely in our hands.

By letting go of identity, we open ourselves up to genuine change. Free from the suffocating need for recognition, our relationships become richer and more authentic. Most relationships are neurotic precisely because they are driven by demands for validation rather than true acceptance. When we stop begging for recognition, when we let go of the myth of identity, we allow ourselves, and others, to exist in all our beautiful complexity. Relationships cease to be transactions of self-worth and become genuine encounters: open, curious, generous.

In the end, perhaps the bravest act is not endlessly “working on ourselves,” but simply living—boldly, messily, without apology or explanation.

“The gray race shrivels trapped inside the world it creates it's black and white” -Bad Religion The Gray Race

How fast we went from "you're unique" to "you're a diagnostic checklist."

I'm a bit dual about this thing. I see it around social media and in people talking. I got diagnosed almost two years ago, and it has been a relief in a way because it finally explained a lot of the struggles I had, helped being less blameful about myself and learn physiological keys around how I am and why. At the same time, I really don't think it would have helped me knowing this much earlier in my childhood, and sometimes the tentation to use this as an "excuse" is strong like described in the article.

I wouldn't wish an earlier diagnostic to my kids, and try to approach things with an empathic approach instead.

Sometimes I think about what I've read in a book about Japan.

Something along the lines that Japanese people are analog while Westerners are digital.

We try to explain everything, every emotion, feeling, how things are. But sometimes talking about things strips them of their mystery, of the unknowns. We talk too much and get entangled in meanings and what was formless and fluid before suddenly becomes defined and limited.

The more I disconnect from the internet, the more insane social network dwellers look to me.

This is the same mental mechanism that makes me hate (pseudoscience) personality tests. Many of my friends that use them fall for similar trap of "labeling" themselves.

When those labels aren't informative or accurate at all, it ends up becoming a chain rather than liberation. "Oh Im MBTI-4acronym, according to that personality test, I'm an introvert so I should skip this public event!".

We are inherently complex and multi-label, even with the worst simplifications. That's confusing and frightening to many, so we seek an "oracle", authority, that can tell us who we are. Problem arise when those are false prophecies.

And they are almost always false. (to varying degrees) Social media mental diagnosis is exactly the same. And crucially they're very wrong over time [1]. So it end up as a shackle to stunt their growth. It completely stops the trail&error process, exposure, and creates a self reinforcing cycle so the label becomes deeply rooted as an identity. There's really no substitute for "trying out yourself to see what works for you, and make sure your trials are set up so you can learn something from it" when it comes to self discovery.

I wish psychology was a bit more scrutinized field. The amount of popscience garbage they give out, and how many people use these model to judge and limit themselves in their life is so sad to see. Probably one of the primary reasons I would keep social media far away from kids (if I had any).

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/give-and-take/201309...

> Only 27% of Boomer men said the same.

There's a lot of boomer men writing in all caps whose special interest is either trains or WW2 who, if were in their 20s today, would easily be categorized as autistic. Older men, for most of their lives, lacked both language and social permission to think of themselves in those terms.

The entire construct of "disorder" is defined by what a given society is willing to accommodate or tolerate at a given moment. Thus, the problem with the article is that it assumes that we live in a homogeneous social landscape. We don't, so things that negatively impact someone life ie: the definition of a disorder, are age dependent. The threshold for "impairment" is not a universal biological constant; it’s a moving, socially negotiated boundary. Diagnostic categories themselves are historical artifacts, trailing behind the societies that create them.

The failure to recognize this is assuming an objective social reality, that frankly, never existed and never will exist. It only serves to reinforce existing, unexamined, contingencies of a specific time and place.

out on the fringe there is lots of personalities as they say, the difference between bieng eccentric and crazy is a million bucks, or comunities with lots of recent imigrants, low density rural areas, people with improbable jobs, pilots and doctors who worked war zones, free divers working on barges for $19.50/hr, smoke jumpers, musicians and movie people, folks working the front lines in not for profits dealing with homeless and people with aids, serial entrepenours, et cetera but then ,I guess, maybe I move around more than most people........but as for the mass of people following "the plan", ya they are a bit extra tweeky and way too easily spooked, way too much into there "feelings", and "comfort zones", "saftey", and "processes".......plus they are stuck in environments where they are subject to people who are outworking and over achiveing the fuck out of everything and bringung out the worst passive agressive shit in people, that they then get to feel guilty about. it's a shit show alright

There are some interested points hidden in a of projection from the author here.

>We can’t talk about character either. There are no generous people anymore, only people-pleasers. There are no men or women who wear their hearts on their sleeves, only the anxiously attached, or the co-dependent. There are no hard workers, only the traumatised, the insecure overachievers, the neurotically ambitious. We even classify people without their consent.

....says who? Who talks like this? I've been fortunate enough to travel a fair bit in the last year and I haven't found any city or country where this is the case.

This advice is cliche at this point but go touch grass. Get off the internet and talk to an actual human, because most actual humans don't talk the way this article says they do.

If everything around you is using therapist talk maybe you're hanging around too many therapists. That certainly happens with people who hang around exclusively with, say, software engineers.

As a child, my dad’s brother fell out of a bunk bed and got a traumatic brain injury that would kill him 15 years later.

My dad experienced real trauma but was told to bottle it up. After 30 years, he finally went to counseling and it was transformational for him.

By contrast, I had some mean fifth grade classmates who still live in my head in uncomfortable social situations…

Did my dad have trauma and need to put a “label” on it? Yep. Do I have trauma? Nope. But I do have some work to do...

As a society, we’re responding to the fact that a lot of our family and friends are living with the weight of a past which haunts them or psychological challenges which deeply affects their ability to relate to the world.

I think it’s ok to be overweight on therapy-talk. Kind of like how a little too much inflation is ok after a long period of zero inflation…

But I do think we should let younger people have more time before they get labeled/diagnosed. There’s a lot of 15 year olds who are just kinda weird…

Something I noticed a few years back. If you click just ONE post/video/reel/advert that is even remotely related to ADHD on any platform with an algorithmic feed, where you have previously never clicked before... It will feed you content implying that that particular neurodivergence both applies to you and is the source of all your problems, for MONTHS, even if you never click another one.

The only other thing I've seen that behaves this way in the algorithm is far right-wing clickbait. Everything else just disappears after a few days if the algorithm detects you've lost interest.

I have a different perspective on this. I've always been interested in reading about the science of left handedness, because I am one. It's interesting to see how my brain is literally wired differently than others. How motivation and language processing are in different hemispheres of my brain compared to righties. But I never thought something was "wrong" with me, I just thought it was interesting.

Those who actually have diagnosed afflictions like autism and ADHD may also be interested in their brain wiring.

I think the trend comes from completely normal people who want to find an excuse to be a victim, which means they can defer responsibility of their lives to their "mental disorders," which of course has the effect of making highly insufferable people.

Its hard to charitably respond to this article. Having more taxonomy doesn't remove anything. You haven't lost anything. You are just angry about change.

Move out of the city, at least 30 minutes past the last bumper-to-bumper traffic area. Wait 2 years. All this will seem not just foreign but very strange, as in how do people possibly subject themselves to this sort of nonsense?

... So we're supposed to see ourselves as static objects, unable to change or without causes of our behavior?

It won't be long before we see our genes as something that happened to us. At some point there will be questions about why our parents didn't change them, or why the government lets some change or select their genes but not others.

I guess this essay rubbed me the wrong way. Where they see — I'm not sure what it is they see, maybe embracing responsibility or self-actualization — I see people wanting to improve themselves, understand.

Personality is labeling, it's just labeling without explanation or goal.

Haha it’s just the quest for uniqueness in a socially acceptable way combined with a desire to be protected by victimhood.

It’s pretty funny to see but it’s just kids being kids. The majority grow out of it and the truly mentally ill develop this Munchausen form.

Hopefully I’ve developed good tools to deal with it by the time my kids are older. The victim form is hard to break out of once you’re in.

The worst is there’s nothing to learn from these people. It’s like trying to learn sprinting from a guy who keeps yelling “As a peg leg, as a peg leg, …”

Useless. But it’s fine, I’ll pay your Medicaid.

For the love of god please touch grass! Nobody outside your chronically online circle lives like this!

Just earlier this evening I had not one but two commenters issue replies to the effect that successful deception in the public sphere, business and politics, is a marker of high intelligence. And that's just a depressingly direct example of what really seems to be a profoundly entrenched worldview "coming out of the closet" in the last decade or so especially.

The thing is, when you can't talk about seriously antisocial behavior with massively bad consequences for large numbers of people, when the real bad guys seem out of reach, all that angst has to go somewhere. And so everything is a disease or toxic behavior in the small, the family member or coworker has is a narcissist or a toxic personality, but like grinding everyone into poverty and pushing the world into avoidable war is just, how the world works.

If you put the small change shit in the swear jar where its always gone, nor you're asking very different questions about why things seem bad for everyone.

Reminds me of the "How did you take that picture?" Reddit meme. Who is the observer when we conceptualize of ourselves as deconstructed beings? Occasional self-awareness and reflection can be insightful, but when will you get back into the cockpit and fly the plane?

90's culture had so much more emphasis on being legitimate (and its many self-defeating imitations). Being legitimate is something that cannot be attempted. Only self-evidence can ever be cool. Only existing as the actualized output and never its abstracted model inputs can be genuine. Through that lens, one's own dignity demands not deconstructing. You should observe and react to what you learn, but whatever fractures are incurred must come back together and be owned. Otherwise you are pretending not to be the person in the cockpit, not the person flying the plane. It's a lack of responsibility. You will not do or do not. You will "try" because you are not in control. You will never be cool.

The engineer wants to isolate pieces of the system. Play the game again to study the situation, learn the pattern, and overcome the error. This is where it applies that no man crosses the same river twice. When people say, "life has no reset button" it does not simply mean that there are consequences but also that that every moment always remains, flowing incessantly, regardless of how it is scrutinized and analyzed to fit into a maze of dots and figures. We cannot own things by going backward in time to try again. Winning the game after many iterations is never cool. The losses must be owned or the pilot is merely creating a lie that they themselves understand while holding a result out to others as evidence of their coolness. It is trying too hard. It is illegitimacy, and its self-knowledge will seek to pull back the curtains on itself so that the pilot will not betray the plane.

Living intentionally constructed is a thought that must itself be forgotten. The idea is a map. Supposed externalized awareness of the being who rides in the skull cannot exist. It is a construction, and once the construction is used, it must be discarded as a map that was used to achieve some perspective. We can remember things far away. We can catalog and connect patterns over time, but the ALU cannot look at itself as lines in memory. The ALU lacks any self-description from which to feign deconstructed awareness beyond control bits that are necessarily less information than the registers, program, and data under computation. It all must vanish to a fixed-point un-calculation.

It's an aesthetic with some jagged edges. You'll always move forward based on what you believe because there can be nothing else, and if you are wrong, you will be wrong. You must own it. There are no outs besides simply admitting mistakes. But what is the opposite of dissociated? Is it worth it to live in your skin? Is it worth it to forget the distances that do not exist between yourself and the controls?

Labels are incredibly simplistic and reductive. Try to compress the entire written works of Shakespeare into a single word. You can, though it would not do his command of the language justice.

Moreover there is the problem of ensuring that when two parties exchange a single label, that label maps to the same referent or construct in the mind of both parties; otherwise you end up in a situation where two people use the same word to refer to different things, yet still think they are both talking about the same thing. Confusion at this layer leads to Tower of Babel-esque effects.

Language is powerful; in a Sapir-Whorfian kind of way, it determines the primitives out of which we compose larger, more complex ideas, but more importantly it also provides a serialization format that allows us to record thoughts and revisit them at a future time. Such thoughts can also include thoughts on ourselves, who we have been, and where we are going; the collection of such thoughts is one's narrative, and "narratization" [0], the process of creating that story of who we are, is an essential characteristic of human consciousness [0].

Subversion of the language we use to describe the self, and the media through which those languages are recorded, is thus altering the life narratives of large groups of people. "Therapy-speak," or overly medicalized language that originates from a fundamentally materialist worldview, does not treat of the existence of a rich inner psychological (i.e. "metaphysical") life, much less offer the terminology to describe it adequately. This therapy-speak gets recorded in our social media as a hyperreal [1] depiction of ourselves, and as one media scholar put it, "we become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." We create this therapized narrative of ourselves, and thereafter this therapized narrative shapes us. The therapy narrative becomes the totality of our self-concept, and, lacking any language to describe the inner life, dispenses with the inner life entirely. Now there is only the label and the physical matter of fact, qualia be damned.

The inner life, after all, is not scientific; it is not an objective phenomenon, nor can the qualia of everyday conscious experience really be adequately quantified in a way that truly captures its character. Science never intended to treat of such matters of the psyche, or the mind, or the soul, whichever of the three terms you would choose to describe the one subject under discussion. Traditionally, such questions would have fallen to spirituality and mysticism; and, I have a suspicion that the sudden interest in "identities" of all stripes is really a resurrection of the old language of souls and psyche into a more modern, secularized context, as a pushback against overly fundamentalist materialist worldviews that do not admit of the existence of any part of the human outside the biological facts of its genetics and chromosomes.

Modern psychology has lost touch with the rich storehouse of symbolic and mystical language used to describe matters of psyche for aeons: that of gods, and demons, and spirits.

[0] Jaynes 1976

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality

If you're getting downvoted you still have a personality.

I feel this is another misplaced conception based on the Golden Age Fallacy.

"dig deep enough and you will disappear"

This has been a common trope since at least the 90s among conservatives.

The author's other post is fanning the "porn addiction" moral panic, and they're subscribed to someone who says that atheism is bad and only Christians can save the world.

None of this really matters to their argument of course, but it does give you a sense of their motivation.

Their argument, of course, is nonsense and is far outside the consensus of research psychologists and medicine.

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Welcome to Net://Anchor, you fools. There’s no escape.

https://dmf-archive.github.io/docs/posts/net-anchor-has-arri...

> Now they are being taught that their normal personality is a disorder. According to a 2024 survey, 72% of Gen Z girls said that “mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.” Only 27% of Boomer men said the same.

Could this be because modern women have far more social expectations placed on them than boomer men did, and are thus struggling generally speaking more than boomer men had to?

LOL speak for yourself- if you're American maybe. Rest of the world, not so much. I deeply resent these articles which claim to speak for everyone but irresponsibly push destructive narratives like this. Like a least have a discussion before shilling your depressing viewpoint as the truth.