What if we stop with the categories?
What if we stop categorizing things and people and we just start seeing everything for exactly how it is? We spend our life surrounded by categories, surrounded by things which categorize things for us. Data is constantly being collected from our devices, our search history, our alexa’s to figure out our preferences, to categorize them so we can then be put in a box of what we like, what we want to buy, what we don’t like, what we see on a regular basis. Maybe the categorization is helpful, in some ways it makes our lives easier, predicting what we’ll write, what we will buy so we don’t have to spend hours searching. But it also makes me wonder, how much of our time do we spend having the world filtered for us. I recently met a new friend and we’ve been treading the friendship waters hanging out some, going for food and drinks. Recently over drinks she explained her family backstory and afterwards said she’d always felt like she had to do that to connect with people, “I hate having to do it though.” It made me stop and think because I’d never felt the need to hear her backstory before. When we met I felt like I just knew her, like I could see through everything else and just see her for exactly who she was. Sometimes you don’t need to know the biographical details of someone’s life to understand their being and existence in the world. It made me think of how often we try to categorize people and how that categorization often prevents us from connecting with something or someone. Those biographical details, that history, and the judgment we make off of that often blinds us of seeing everything for exactly how it is. It makes us hurt, it makes us hurt others, it makes us call names, it makes us feel hate, it makes us separate from the one true thing we all have in common: humanity. And while it is wonderful to celebrate our differences, to uplift our history, it should never come at the cost of exclusion, of hate, of hurt.
