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Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

freyaindia.co.uk

291–300 of 537 posts

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment made me realize that maybe we're just going through the transition to a collectively better understanding of people. Right now we sort of have to pass through the clinical diagnosis/therapy terms in order to recognize something as not being a moral failure/making someone less valuable as a person. And then the next step we're building to is maybe like acceptance of people's differences without needing to…

If someone is overly aggressive, or rarely fulfills promises, or is very negative about things, or has a very fragile ego — it absolutely makes them less valuable as a person to others. Just look up any definitions of the word “valuable”

Thankfully, a lot of cultures also recognize inherent value in humans that does not derive from their usefulness.

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#292
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.

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#293
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.

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The intersection of this with employment, specifically, seems hairy to me. Is time blindness a disability that requires accommodation? To what extent, and who decides? If not, what makes it different from other disabilities that do get accommodation or some kind of protected status? (These are meant to be rhetorical questions, but I’m sure someone has a direct answer, so I’d be interested in that too, because I reall…

JAN[1] says "time management" is a disability (limitation, in their words) that requires accommodation. [1] https://askjan.org/limitations/Managing-Time.cfm?csSearch=10...

[deleted]

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#295

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 th…

When I first discovered that I suffered from a "new" condition called Prosopagnosia - by means of an online "Are you face blind?" test - everything about my life suddenly fell into place. It was a liberating self-diagnosis which gave me permission to admit that it was some small malformations in my brain that were the cause of my troubles, not some selfish malformations in my personality and social skills.

Of course a self-diagnosis is not enough. I discovered my condition while it was still in the early stages of research. I signed up to be a guinea pig for researchers, and got paid a handsome £20/hour to undertake various tests (including brain scans - I still have a 3d image of my brain stored in a box somewhere) to help people better understand the underlying causes of the condition. It was fun for a while, until some of the tests got more disturbing. I also got to learn about the coping strategies I had already developed, and how to use them in better ways to help lessen the impact of the condition on my social interactions.

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#296
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people find excuses anywhere they look. But we shouldn’t stigmatize those who don’t on behalf of those who do; the vast majority of people are not that way, which is why they stand out when they are, imho. And it is more important to not stigmatize talking about it at all than it is to optimize for some people not using it as an excuse.

No need to stigmatize people, but it is very important to stigmatize bad behavior

The problem is that there are people who "stigmatize bad behavior" by stigmatizing other people.

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#297

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 th…

    > now is supercharged by a whole industry of TikTok self-diagnoses.
As I understand, this is mostly affecting young women who are much more mimetic than young men. Is this also affecting men at (nearly?) the same rates? I don't see a lot of short form video content from men talking about their emotional issues. However, there is virtually unlimited content from women.

To be clear about my comment: I am not trying to be anti-women here, just point out a trend that I see.

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#298
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - if you give people the chance to place a label on themselves to give a name/form to a problem, they’ll take it. This one is widespread among the young people I’ve worked with recently. It’s remarkable how I can identify the current TikTok self diagnosis trends without ever watching TikTok. There’s a widespread belief that once you put a label on a problem, other people are not allowed to criticize you for it. Man…

I'm sure there are those who self-diagnose without really suffering from a condition, but you do realise time blindness is a real issue, right? https://www.simplypsychology.org/adhd-time-blindness.html I don't watch TikTok videos, I don't use Instagram, but I have been plagued by these symptoms my entire life, and don't really care about others opinions on it. You probably don't have it if those symptoms don't resona…

Use a timer like the rest of us. There are solutions to the problem

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#299
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but you clearly have no idea what it's like to actually deal with this, at all. If I try to be on time to things, I will be stupidly early, or still think I have time to do tasks A & B before doing C, because they invariably take more or less time than I estimate. Or I start doing tasks X & Y, because I'm easily distracted, you know because it's a deficit in attention. Don't trivialise what you don't understan…

Oh, come on. “It takes me 15 minutes to get to my destination. I should leave 5 minutes earlier than I need to in case there’s traffic or whatever.” Set an alarm for 20 minutes before you need to get there, and leave when it goes off. Done. I will absolutely trivialize it because everyone I’ve ever known that’s like that simply leaves at the time they’re supposed to already be somewhere. Or yes, they get distracted a…

You clearly don't have these issues, and I doubt you care about anyone who does, because your "Oh, come on." response positively reeks of 'that's not my experience, so other people's can't be that different.'

It's never just one thing like travel time, it's scores of steps in a routine, which aren't always the same, and can easily be derailed by anything unexpected. You can estimate how long something you do frequently will take, based on how much time it took previously, and still get an inapplicable answer because distraction is a constant problem, and the executive function deficit means you literally do not think 'don't do that, get back on task' in the moment. You know how long everything should take, and still struggle to apply that when you're doing the routine.

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#300

“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 knew a gal who grew up in a perfect family with everything she could ever want so she had to invent a victim status and write a book about it magnifying non-problems into protected class level oppression status in order to fit into the woke crowd. Grievance entrepreneurship.

Isn't this almost a requirement for getting into some prestigious American universities via selection based on a personal essay? You can't just be like "I had a great childhood in an upper middle-class family with parents who loved me and supported me".
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