Our obsession with putting things in boxes

“But this is just another box” “No. This is the box we put you in if you say ' don’t put me in a box' “ ~Iain Thomas

Perhaps it’s an attempt to make sense of the complex world that we live in. A way to try and make it easier to comprehend the world we are in and it’s many parts. I’m not quite sure what the reason is, but we seem to be obssessed with labelling things and putting things in boxes. We expect the things we’ve put in a certain box, to behave in a particular way.

The problem with this, is our reactions when people or things don’t fit into any of the boxes we have created. Or they fit into more than one box. It’s as if this is a personal attack on everything we know and understand.

I’ll give gender as an example. We’ve created “male”and “female” boxes. And we expect those in the male box to behave in a particular way. Same applies for the female box. These boxes have existed for many generations. When people identify as being outside these gender binaries, they are met with undesirable reactions. People are being abused and killed for not conforming to these binaries. For not fitting in the boxes we have created.

This is just one example, but there are many other boxes that are created. These boxes end up limiting what other people can or can not do or even worse, what they can or cannot be. They become oppressive.

Our obsession with putting things in boxes is limiting, for ourselves and for everyone around us. We need to learn to label and relabel these boxes and create new ones. Or even better, to start thinking about things along a spectrum, instead of in discrete boxes. Perhaps that way we will come to understand that human beings can be one thing or they can be many things at once.