A bit of an editorializing title, I know. And I’m a little drunk, I might read this tomorrow and see it form another angle and question myself into oblivion.
But I was reflecting, Is the categorization of sexuality, ideological beliefs, hobbies (I’m a cinephile, I’m a gamer, I’m ‘x’ thing that defines my whole identity), a result of the dominance of the liberal world we live in?
We are taught to think about the world from a young age in terms of good and evil, wrong and right, marvel villains vs marvel heroes… Binary, simple, childish thought, but as the contradictions of our world get more extreme, we’re forced to expand our understanding the world and form a wider perspective of what makes up our reality (or simply bury our heads into a sandpit), be it by simply creating more categories to fit onto our narrow worldview or by accepting the immortal science of dialectical materialism (based).
Thoughts?
Labels are, imo, mostly a shorthand that help identify people with common interests, experiences, goals, etc. I don’t think most people solely identify with a label so much as use them as a means to find people who they’re more likely to find interesting (or not).
Identifying as a g*mer certainly lacks nuance - there’s many genres of games and different people are going to be interested in different ones. People who primarily play sports games or board games probably aren’t as likely to choose that label as people who play shooters, sure, so there’s some implicit nuance about the types of games someone plays when they label themselves that way, but it still provides a jumping off point for someone to determine a level of overlap exists with someone else.
I think that people who identify as one thing are actually pretty rare - people don’t really define their entire selves from a single label, they collect the ones that somewhat fit well enough to make sense to most other people, while signaling to the people who share a given one that there are common interests that could be fun to delve into further together and figure out to what extent they truly are or aren’t shared interests.
I do think labels can be harmful and thought-terminating, but I don’t think they’re inherently so. They can be used to other or marginalize a group of people, yes, but IMO that’s not behavior that’s driven by the people who find that label resonates with them.