So, I stumbled onto this phrase online the other day, you know how it is, you’re not even looking for something specific, and then BAM, there it is. It got me thinking, or rather, it got me poking around a bit, trying to figure out what’s the deal with these kinds of specific, loaded labels you see floating around.
My Little Dig
First off, I wasn’t about to dive into the murky depths, if you catch my drift. My whole “practice” here was more about seeing how this stuff even gets out there. Like, what platforms, what kind of corners of the internet are trafficking in these kinds of tags? It’s wild, honestly. You start looking, and it’s like peeling an onion, layers and layers of just… stuff.
I spent a bit of time just observing, you know, like a digital birdwatcher. Not engaging, just watching where these terms nest. And you see patterns, for sure. You see how certain ideas or, well, “categories” get amplified, and others get buried. It’s not always organic, that’s for sure. There’s a lot of deliberate “tagging” and “categorizing” going on.
- First, I just kinda passively noticed where terms like this one pop up. Message boards, weird social media pockets, that sort of thing.
- Then, I tried to get a feel for the chatter around it. Is it challenged? Is it just accepted? Mostly, it seems like these things exist in their own little echo chambers.
- I also looked for people, you know, pushing back. Academics, activists, or just regular folks saying “hey, this is messed up.” And you do find that, thankfully, but it often feels like shouting into the void.
The main thing I noticed, my “record” if you will, is how reductive it all is. People, experiences, identities – all squashed into these tiny, often gross, boxes. It’s lazy thinking, mostly. And it makes it easier to just dismiss whole groups of people, or worse, to fetishize them. Not good. Not good at all.
Why I Even Bothered Looking
You might be wondering why I’d even spend a minute on something like this. Fair enough. It’s not exactly uplifting. But it connects to something that happened to me a while back, totally unrelated on the surface, but it made me super sensitive to labels and how they’re used.
I used to work for this company, right? And they had this new “employee wellness” program. Sounds great, huh? Well, they brought in these consultants who had us all fill out these ridiculously detailed questionnaires. I mean, pages and pages about our habits, our moods, our family life, everything. Then they fed it all into some algorithm and spat out these “profiles” for everyone. Mine basically labeled me as “low engagement potential” and “resistant to collaborative environments.” Can you believe that? Me! I was busting my gut for that place, always the first to volunteer for team projects.
Turns out, the algorithm dinged me because I said I preferred focused work in the morning instead of their mandatory “creative brainstorming” sessions which were basically just coffee and donuts with no agenda. And because I listed “reading” as a hobby instead of something more “team-oriented” like company sports. The fallout was real. I got overlooked for a project I was perfect for, and my manager started treating me differently, all based on this stupid, algorithm-generated label.
I fought it, of course. Showed them my work, my contributions. Took months, but I eventually got them to see how dumb their system was, at least in my case. They eventually scrapped that whole profiling thing after enough complaints, but it left a mark on me. Made me realize how quick people are to slap a label on you, and how sticky those labels can be, even if they’re completely off-base. And how much power these systems, these categories, can have, even if they’re built on shaky ground.
So, when I see phrases like the one that kicked off this whole train of thought, it just hits that same nerve. It’s the same mechanism, different context. Boxing people up. Reducing them. And I just wanted to understand a bit more about how that particular version of it works online. It’s messy, and frankly, pretty disheartening a lot of the time. But I guess understanding the mess is the first step, right?
