Nobody Wants To Be Regular Anymore
On labels, identity, and actually becoming.
For a generation obsessed with self-awareness, everyday vernacular has been hijacked by a clinical, exhaustive vocabulary designed to map out how we see ourselves. Nobody is allowed to just be shy, ambitious, sensitive, or have an off week. Instead, the modern subject is pre-packaged into dismissive-avoidant, hyper-independent, or ADHD-coded. Standard-issue bad days are rebranded as being âdysregulatedâ or âoverstimulated.â
The internet has turned into a sorting hat, slotting people into increasingly niche psychological tribes before theyâve even stepped out into the world to make a real mistake. It begs the question, are these endless personality labels actually expanding self-understanding, or have they become a convenient escape hatchâa sterile replacement for the actual, agonising process of becoming someone?
The Efficiency of the Box
The internet transforming self-discovery into an accessible, open-source library is not inherently evil. Experiences that once felt deeply isolating can now be named and shared with millions who get it. There is an undeniable relief in finding a word for a problem one has carried for a lifetime. Realising that what youâve always called procrastination may actually be connected to neurodivergence, or that your relationship anxiety follows a recognisable pattern, offers community for those who hid in shame.
But the problem isnât that this language exists. The problem is treating the description as the destination. Somewhere between the rise of the Myers-Briggs renaissance and the TikTok symptom-checklist, boom, self-discovery got gentrified into self-definition. Instead of asking open-ended questions, people are rushing to paste the answer key onto their foreheads.
The Loop: Identify a Flaw> Assign a Trendy Term >Internalise as Identity >Excuse the Behaviour
We are encouraged to audit our habits, diagnose our quirks, and curate a hyper-specific personal brand that is coherent enough to present to the world. The unstated cultural expectation is no longer that you are becoming someone. Itâs that you should already have the user manual printed out.
And boy, does the algorithm reward that certainty.
Platforms like TikTok and Instagram arenât built for nuance; they are built on categorisation. They need to know exactly what kind of container to slot you into so they can feed you the right content and sell you the right matching set. The more precisely you can be labelled, the easier you become to predict, manipulate, and market to.
A person is a chaotic, contradictory ecosystem. A category is just efficient marketing.
What starts as a moment of recognition quickly mutates into a feedback loop. You watch a video about âhigh-functioning anxiety symptoms.â You relate to three of them. The algorithm notes your watch time and floods your feed with identical content. And then, you arenât just learning about a trait; you are actively learning how to perform it. Youâve internalised the script, and youâre playing the part.
Authorisation Over Accountability
This is also deeply psychological. Wrapping standard-issue human flaws in the slick packaging of clinical or esoteric labels doesnât just explain behaviour, it authorises it. It converts a dynamic, fluid action (being rude, shutting down, being needy) into a static, immutable identity trait.
If someone is an âavoidant,â then pushing a partner away isnât a moral failure or an act of cowardice that needs to be remedied; itâs simply the software running its programme. The label ceases to be a tool for self-reflection and becomes a shield against accountability, a neat little border wall built around our worst habits. Itâs much easier to announce to a room that one is âentering their villain eraâ than it is to look someone in the eye and say, âI acted like an absolute jerk yesterday because I was feeling profoundly insecure, and I am sorry.â
Furthermore, this obsession with classification fundamentally alters how relationships form. People no longer take the time to know one another; they read specifications. Potential partners are screened based on birth charts or the most mundane internet standards, looking for compatibility matrices instead of human chemistry. By demanding that people arrive pre-labelled and fully articulate about their traumas and psychological blockages, we deny them the grace of being discovered slowly. Human beings are treated like appliances with instruction manuals, forgetting that the most profound parts of someone are usually found in the chapters they havenât learned how to write down yet.
The Messy Glory of Unlabelled Becoming
The driving force behind this is the ambient fear of being ordinary. In a space that treats visibility as currency, being âregularâ is tantamount to social death. To be regular means being difficult to explain in the shortest time possible. It means containing glaring contradictions that cannot be neatly packaged aestheticallyâbeing wildly ambitious in the spring and totally directionless by autumn, or being stone-cold confident at work but an insecure mess in romance.
If you are just a standard human being who gets a bit tired on Thursdays, occasionally struggles to text people back, and doesnât quite know what your five-year plan looks like, you are white noise in the feed. But if you are an introverted empath recovering from systemic burnout and navigating high-functioning anxiety, you suddenly have a narrative.
The late cultural theorist Mark Fisher wrote extensively about âcapitalist realismââthe idea that capitalism doesnât just dominate economic structures, but successfully colonises the subconscious, desires, and mental health. Under this framework, every aspect of life is viewed through the lens of privatisation, utility, and optimisation. When personalities are treated like a software suite that needs constant patching, version updates, and precise labelling, humanity is essentially converted into a product.
By turning internal struggles into identity markers, this mindset feeds a massive wellness-industrial complex that profits off perpetual self-surveillance. There is an entire economy built on selling the cure to the label it helped popularise last week: journaling prompts for the âanxious attached,â and targeted masterclasses for the âneurospicyâ entrepreneur. The end goal is never actual peace, but a more articulate version of unhappiness.
The normal variance of human emotion has been pathologised. Grief is no longer an ocean to swim through; itâs a âdepressive episode.â Shyness is no longer a gentle personality trait; itâs âsocial anxiety.â
While clinical definitions are vital for those genuinely navigating illness, the casual appropriation of this language by the mainstream has diluted its power and weaponised it against the mundane reality of human suffering.
There is an undeniable comfort in placing a label. It offers a perimeter; it tells an individual exactly where they begin and where they end. But human beings are notoriously bad at staying inside the lines, and the most vibrant parts of life usually happen in the margins.
Relying on ready-made templates cheats us out of the actual process of growth. Becoming a person is supposed to be wildly inefficient. It is supposed to be full of hypocrisies and sharp turns that cannot be neatly summarised in a three-line social media bio or explained away by what the stars say.
The raw truth of being alive is that the most important things cannot be diagnosed or predicted in advance. You do not know how grief will hollow you out until it knocks on your door. You do not know who you become after you fail publicly, succeed unexpectedly, move to a city where you donât know a soul, or fall in love with someone who shatters your perspective. The experiences that shape us mostly arrive long before we have the vocabulary to tame them.
If we spend our entire lives defending labels, we miss out on the profound liberation of being a contradiction. The most fascinating people are never the ones who can perfectly articulate their trauma responses using the latest therapeutic vocabulary; they are the ones who are actively, clumsily working through them in real-time, making mistakes, changing their minds, and refusing to be pinned down by a single definition. They understand that self-awareness is not about finding the perfect box to fit into, but about realising that the soul is far too vast for any box to hold.
Perhaps the most radical, anti-capitalist, and deeply human action to take in a culture obsessed with self-categorisation is to embrace the unlabelled blank space. To step off the optimisation treadmill and accept the reality of being fundamentally messy, entirely un-optimised, and beautifully regular. There is dignity in the slow build, and beauty in not having an answer just yet.
After all, a genuinely compelling story cannot be written if the algorithm has already decided exactly how every chapter is supposed to end. Let yourself be complicated. Let yourself be weird. Let yourself be regular.