Nobody has a personality anymore

 

This recent article I just ran across, with the same title, seems a good starting point for adding some meandering thoughts here.  I think a lot about how social media and the now-changed forms of human experience shape people in different ways than were familiar in the past.  In general it all works.

So I'll summarize what I take this article to say, highlight what seems to not work, and then extend it a bit.  The general point is that people now overanalyze their personas, especially in relation to identifying disorders, so that instead of seeing themselves as a balanced, good person they identify as a series of gaps, as having anxiety, depression, OCD, ADHD, and so on.  I see this in younger people, but more in the US than in Thailand.

credit that article source

Let's let the article describe their take on that:

My generation is obsessed with treating every trait as a symptom of a disorder. You’re not shy, you’re autistic. You’re not forgetful, you’ve got ADHD.

Today, every personality trait is seen as a problem to be solved. Anything too human—every habit, every eccentricity, every feeling that’s too strong—has to be labeled and explained. Therapy-speak has taken over our language. It is ruining how we talk about romance and relationships, narrowing how we think about hurt and suffering, and now, we are losing the words for who we are. Nobody has a personality anymore.

Actually, it’s worse than that. Now, we are being taught that our personalities are a disorder. According to a 2024 survey, 72 percent of Gen-Z girls said that “mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.” Only 27 percent of boomer men said the same.

This is part of a deeper instinct in modern life to explain everything—psychologically, scientifically, evolutionarily. Everything about us is caused, categorized, and can be corrected. We talk in theories, frameworks, systems, structures, drives, motivations, and mechanisms. But in exchange for explanation, we lost mystery, romance, and lately, ourselves.

We have lost the sentimental ways we used to describe people.

It adds a lot of depth to that in another page or more of text, but this is their general point.  At a glance this is definitely one trend in self-definition and a general description of reality.  It goes further:

Every heartfelt, annoying, interesting piece of you, categorized. The fond ways your family describe you, medicalized. The pieces of us once written into wedding vows, read out in eulogies, remembered with a smile, now live on doctors’ notes and mental-health assessments and BetterHelp applications. We are not people anymore. We have been products for a long time, and these are our labels.

We can’t talk about character either. There are no generous people anymore, only people pleasers. There are no men or women who wear their hearts on their sleeves, only the anxiously attached or the codependent. There are no hard workers, only the traumatized, the insecure overachievers, the neurotically ambitious...

It's an odd word choice, describing people as products.  That seems to relate to the sense of how we are identified as outcomes of prior conditioning, of trauma, genetic flaws, and distinct cultural factors, but maybe mostly the first two.

An online interest related contact shifted over past several years from seeing himself as normal enough but also quirky, in terms of personality, and then "on the spectrum" related to autism, and most recently he's fully accepted that he is autistic.  Is he?  Who knows, really. 

All of this sounds more judgmental than I intend it.  We all struggle with working around our quirks, and defining what they really mean.  We all have very significant limitations; more of those than our strengths.  The range a person could possibly span is broad, and we can each only cover so much of that.  

This article is about papering over the limitations with labels, that put the blame on others, past events, or genetics, versus accepting that we are responsible for ourselves.  That other example, of someone wanting to be in one generation versus the one prior, is about identifying more with that stereotypical character.  They're different things, but of course they can overlap.

In my youth, and among my generation now, we didn't have an inclination towards so much acceptance of weaknesses, or so much doubt and insecurity.  We weren't self-aware enough to describe ourselves in terms of a long list of gaps, so we just set out to do whatever interested us, typically learning by failing.  If you define yourself as a set of limitations you end up switching the order around, and not trying things that aren't going to work, because you can see how the gaps in your capacity map together to ensure that failure.  But that cuts short the exposure and learning process.

More of the article explains how this basic premise extends further into our experience:

Now our clumsy mothers have always had undiagnosed ADHD; our quiet dads don’t realize they are autistic; our stoic grandfathers are emotionally stunted. We even—helpfully—diagnose the dead. And I think this is why people get so defensive of these diagnoses, so insistent that they explain everything. They are trying to hold onto themselves; every piece of their personality is contained within them.

And it’s not only personality traits we have lost. There are no experiences anymore, no phases or seasons of life, no wonders or mysteries, only clues about what could be wrong with us. Everything that happens can be explained away; nothing is exempt. We can’t accept that we love someone, madly and illogically; no, the enlightened way to think is to see through that, get down to what is really going on, find the hidden motives.

Therapy-speak has taken over our language. It is ruining how we talk about romance and relationships, narrowing how we think about hurt and suffering, and now, we are losing the words for who we are.

This never even seems seems to cross over to what seems to be one main drawback of this kind of perspective:  people end up reaching for drugs as a crutch, and relying on years of therapy to sort out internal issues, instead of working through actual instances of the problems, by experiencing personal relationships.

Of course this is a bit exaggerated.  And this kind of culture and perspective is quite advanced in some places, and lags in others.  I remember visiting an ex-girlfriend living in LA in the 90s, how I was surprised that she was being medicated to deal with social anxiety.  That whole paradigm was brand new to me, that such an issue could seem unusual, and could be treated by drugs.  Of course that treatment is problematic; there are significant side effects, and whenever you take drugs to adjust for any sort of condition over time the effectiveness of the drug wears off, and you need to take more to get the same effect.  Or change drugs later, which involves a new set of problems, new side effects.

All of this pointed towards a new way of framing reality itself, not just self definition:

Every human experience we have is a data point, and the purpose of our lives is to piece it all perfectly together. This is the healthy way to think that people were so cruelly deprived of in the past.

I’m not sure I believe this anymore—that we are more enlightened now than previous generations, more emotionally intelligent. My grandma sees herself as a grandma, a mother, a wife; young people identify with our disorders. She is selfless and takes things to heart; we have rejection sensitive dysphoria and fawn as a trauma response. They are souls; we are symptoms.

Of course it does go on to accept that in some cases significant and pronounced mental disorders are defined, identified, and treated through a related therapy process.  It's not just about people using new ways to describe themselves and reality, changing the experience some through this redefinition.  But it points out an interesting example of such a broach change:

I think this is why my generation gets stuck on things like relationships and parenthood. The commitments we stumble over, the decisions we endlessly debate, the traditions we find hard to hold onto, are often the ones we can’t easily explain. We are trying to explain the inexplicable. It’s hard to defend romantic love against staying single, because it isn’t safe or controllable or particularly rational. The same with having children. Put these things in a pros-and-cons list and they stop making logical sense.

This reminds me of parts of younger people's experiences I hear of, maybe both in the US and in Thailand.  Almost no one where I work has children, or maybe even ever plans to, because it would be a costly endeavor, trading out both freedom and expense, and it doesn't make it as a goal through the evaluation process.  Just speculation on my part, of course; everyone has their own experiences and perspective.

That article's conclusion circles back to roughly the same place:

We taught a generation that the meaning of life is not found outside in the world but inside their own heads. We underestimate it, this miserable business of understanding ourselves. I feel for the girls forensically analyzing their childhoods while they are still in them, cramming their hope and pain and suffering into categories, reducing themselves down to trauma responses. It hurts to see this heartbreaking awareness we have inflicted on a generation, whose only understanding of the world is this militant searching, this reaching for reasons. God, the life they are missing.

Because we can’t ever explain everything. At some point we have to stop analyzing and seeing through things and accept the unknowable. All we can ever really achieve is faith. And a sense of humor about ourselves, perhaps. It’s impossible to heal from being human, and this is why the mental health industry has infinite demand. Explain anything long enough and you will find a pathology; dig deep enough, and you will disappear.

Maybe a little exaggerated and negative, but for sure plenty of this goes on, and some people must be debilitated by it.  

Younger people today couldn't imagine how far we were from that perspective in the 80s, as Gen X kids.  I had heard of a personality type test, at one point, but I didn't try to do much with it.  I didn't have a single self-description available in relation to a mental health condition or trauma response.  We didn't even have "trauma" then, in the same sense.  People who were severely abused as children were intuitively aware that some related cycle was playing out for them, but not in the same detailed and explicit sense as today, where they are defined by it in a list of distinct ways.

We took so much risk back then that it seemed as if we had a death wish.  I have no idea what all that was about, the drinking, drugs, and high risk behavior.  I only tell my son about it bit by bit, so as not to overwhelm him, or endorse that kind of ridiculous behavior.  He shouldn't be drinking a lot when he is in high school, as I did.  I shouldn't have been.  

The drugs that are around now could easily be deadly, versus us barely having access to weed back then.  Now weed is sold in a booth that looks like a garden shed in the alley we live in, in Honolulu, 15 steps or so from the front door of our apartment complex.  It's not illegal.  Kids can't buy it without ID, but then the drinking age was also 21 when I was 18.

one version of those booths (photo credit)

In one sense it's great that greater awareness of real risks narrow down kids' range of behavior today.  That's very appropriate.  In another sense they really might be averse to the potentially awkward parts of a normal life, like getting rejected when you ask someone out.  That was my first "romantic" experience, rejection, and I guess at the time it did seem rough.  I think that I was 13 then, and it probably delayed my participation in that scope by a few more years.

If social media had existed back then there might be an awkward photo trail of lots of it, or at least we would've had a chance to evaluate such patterns as experienced by others, before we blindly did foolish things.  We would've heard stories of lots of people dying doing them, and it was just dumb luck that none of my friends did.  Or maybe it's just that one in thousands would die, and I had less than 10 close friends; the odds were in our favor.

I've not really critiqued this article's content much.  To a large extent it seems to work.  It may be a little overstated, but I think that's in part because I can't fully relate to a young person's perspective today, even though I talk to people at different stages essentially every day.  If I were out there actually living it I'd be more familiar with a few dozen other examples, and the patterns would seem all the clearer, and more pervasive.