Cancel culture. It’s a phrase that’s being used everywhere. A person says one thing and receives backlash for it and immediately the masses cry out “CANCEL CULTURE”! Like so many phrases, this one just annoys me. Probably because it is an example of how we seem to have to label and categorize everything. Like we need to be a part of some type of “movement” every single moment or we cease to exist. I want to break down this latest trend of cancel culture as I see it.
For many years, I’ve hated – actually hated – “personality tests”. Notice the quotation marks around that? I’ve been asked or forced to take multiple “personality tests” over the last twenty plus years. Rarely do I get the same result twice. I’ve done a little reading on the most famous of these “personality tests”, the Myers-Briggs, and apparently if people take the test twice in five weeks, there’s a 30%-75% chance that the results will be different, which to me indicates that the “test” is highly fallible. I’ve personally been labeled as both and extrovert and an introvert on this particular “test”, depending on my mood the day I answered the questions or the scenario I was imagining when answering.
Myers-Briggs is possibly the best known of these “tests” but there are many, many others. They attempt to categorize us as leaders, followers, artists, thinkers, outgoing, quiet, detail-oriented, big-picture oriented and a host of other silly categories. I think they’re all bullshit. There are a few reasons why, and then I’ll get back to cancel culture.
If I’m lucky, I’ve lived probably about half my life, or if I’m even luckier, maybe not quite half. As I write that down, it’s a little scary, but it’s true. Anyone who’s been fortunate enough to be on the planet for more than a couple of decades has enough time under our belts to be able to look back at our personal histories. I’ve changed a lot over several decades. I was going to grow up and have one career, then continued going and became an architect instead. I’ve met a lot of people along the way, some who impacted me negatively and some positively. I’ve been able to move around the country several times and see different regions and regional cultures. All of this has helped me expand my thinking and perspectives and grow and change. The short story is that I’m not the same person I was twenty years ago.
When we take a “personality test” and hold on to the results like they are a definitive summary of who we are, we put ourselves inside those check boxes on the results. We box ourselves into a category that was defined by someone else, and we do it willingly. If we believe that we are a detail-oriented person who likes to have everything ordered based on the results of one of these “tests”, we may not allow ourselves the opportunity to be creative in anything, believing that somewhere along the way we were hard-wired to be only one thing which really isn’t true. If we buy into a result that tells us we are leaders, we may never open up ourselves long enough to listen and learn from people around us, which would actually be what could make us better leaders.
It’s not just us boxing ourselves in, others will categorize us as well. This happened to me in the last few years when I was forced to take a “personality test” for work. Some of my co-workers, who I truly like and enjoy, jumped into the different personalities presented in the results with both feet. To them, we all became who we were on those small sheets of paper. Without knowing it, these wonderful, smart people limited everyone and our individual possibilities of growing. They believed if one of us was “an artist” that person should be more on the design end of work, when perhaps that person really wanted to learn more about putting together a contract. These “tests” create “results” which can have positive and negative connotations. In a career where being outgoing is seen as a prerequisite (that’s another discussion), getting a result that claims a person is introverted can cause a manager, boss or co-worker to immediately pigeon-hole a person’s potential. This makes me sad.
When “results” are presented in a manner which creates characteristics that are either universally accepted as good or bad or are personally accepted as good or bad, it can have detrimental effects on a person’s self-esteem or mental health. For a hypothetical example, let’s say a 35-year-old had a goal of being Vice President of their company one day and had successfully worked their way through the company by being friendly, out-going and a good listener (among other traits). Then that person took a “test” that told him or her they were introverted and would be more successful in a career that had less teamwork involved, he or she might start to question everything about themselves and lose all self-confidence, effectively derailing the goals they were well on their way to achieving.
So what do “personality tests” have to do with cancel culture? It’s this idea of putting ourselves, or others, inside a box and not letting them out. We have become obsessed with categorization. I’ve been saying this for a long time regarding clutter and the organization of our stuff. The inundation of organizational tools and advice is out of control. There’s a chain store call The Container Store for goodness sake! Its sole purpose is about organization. One of the most prolific types of construction projects in the United States right now is the construction of self-storage units so we can organize our houses better by storing the clutter. The sheer number of organization books, blogs, websites and television shows that are all about categorizing and labeling stuff is incredible. And now it seems we’ve allowed the categorization obsession of our stuff to spill into the categorization of one another – and ourselves. What we should be doing is purging the stuff – including all the personality labels – instead of trying to organize it.
There are way too many labels for people. LGBTQ. Strait. Republican. Democrat. Liberal. Conservative. Rural. Urban. Boomer. Millenial. Vegetarian. Influencer. Luddite. Christian. Rich. Poor. This list could go on, and on, and on because we keep creating more labels to put us into smaller and smaller boxes. We want to be so special and individualistic that we try to attach as many labels as possible to ourselves hoping that if we attach enough of them, we’ll stand out as unique. To illustrate this point, within the last year and a half, I was asked to take another “personality test”, one of which has so many different categories, that the test taker is guaranteed to have results like no one else, thus “proving” our uniqueness! I believe the more labels we attach, the more isolated we become until we feel alone and lost. In the last several years, many studies have been done which show Americans feel more-lonely than ever, despite having more ways to communicate with each other than ever before. I believe this is because we keep boxing ourselves away from one another with too many labels.
I don’t want to fit in with anyone. I get angry, and I mean very, very, very angry, anytime someone tries to tell me that I’m (fill in the blank here). I’ve had enough therapy to know that real change and growth inside each of us is possible and in doing so, the world becomes more beautiful and open (well…mostly…but again, that’s another story). If we want to fit in with one another so much and to feel loved and accepted, should we abandon the labels so we can expand our network of friends? Can’t we just have a personal story instead? Can’t we be in the beginning or middle of our own book instead of always trying to write the last chapter? Can’t we just always be a work in progress?
We can be from a rural background and then move to an urban neighborhood and find ourselves relating to both settings. We can agree with liberal viewpoints sometimes and conservative ones at other times. We are allowed to change our minds on something as we grow as people. We are allowed to learn and take that knowledge and question ourselves and our beliefs because of it. We were blessed (or cursed) with human brains and the best part of having one of those is being capable of conscious thought.
I think that we cancel ourselves by preventing ourselves from ever stepping outside the box we’ve placed ourselves in. Someone else created the definitions for those boxes. For example, being a political conservative doesn’t necessarily mean one might live in a small town and be pro-life, but that seems to be a definition someone else came up with for it. A person could be politically conservative and live in the middle of NYC, I have no doubt those people exist. When we look at definitions someone else made up, largely out of thin air, then choose to identify with those definitions because we think that some of those traits fit us, we forget that we are individuals with nuances. Those nuances are what we are made of. We can take all those box definitions that were created by others and we can dump them into a large buffet table in the middle of the room and mix everything together. We can pick up the things we want to and put them on our plate. But it doesn’t mean we have to keep them all. Maybe after growing up Christian going to church every Sunday, we start to question if those beliefs still fit us later in life. Maybe they do, or maybe we decide to take them off our plate. Maybe that opens room in our life for something we hadn’t been able to see before.
I think putting ourselves into pre-defined boxes is a lazy way to go through life. There, I said it. We don’t want to put in the work that life takes and if we just say that we’re (insert box name here), we’ve given up control to a society that created a definition for us. We’ve given up on exploring who we are and who we could be. Then we get angry when the very small definition we gave ourselves is questioned. Questioning society’s acceptable behaviors is how we got to a point in our world where slavery is bad and women can vote. We must always question acceptable “norms” and behaviors, from ourselves and our society. What we should be doing is cancelling the idea of labeling people with stupid, constrictive definitions. We also need to stop cancelling other people and their lifestyles based on those pre-definitions we’ve assigned to them. Just like the examples of my co-workers and the “personality tests” mentioned earlier, if we paint others with pre-determined definitions, we’re boxing them in. We automatically cancel them as valuable to our personal life because we didn’t even give them a chance to tell us who they really are. We rob ourselves of the opportunity to gain new experiences by getting to know other people.
The Super Bowl was a couple of days ago. There was a commercial from Jeep with Bruce Springsteen and it talks about meeting in the middle. I found it to be well done and I liked the message. Just today, I read an article that slammed the commercial. At the end of the opinion article the author wrote something to the effect that if we don’t pick a side, we choose nothing. I was disappointed in the author’s viewpoint. She missed the point of the commercial. We don’t actually have to pick any side to be able to stand up for what’s right. It’s picking sides and views that got us to this angry place to begin with.
I know I got a little more preachy with this post than I like to do but I’ve become very annoyed at crappy, selfish and frankly, stupid, people crying out “cancel culture” when they box themselves into one ideology and one narrow-minded thought and hold onto it like a life-raft in the middle of the ocean. Let go of the raft, step out of the box and maybe we won’t ever have to feel “cancelled” again.
