Nobody Has A Personality Anymore

We are products with labels

TikTok: @yasswellness

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.

In a therapeutic culture, every personality trait becomes a problem to be solved. Anything too human—every habit, every eccentricity, every feeling too strong—has to be labelled and explained. And this inevitably expands over time, encompassing more and more of us, until nobody is normal. Some say young people are making their disorders their whole personality. No; it’s worse than that. Now they are being taught that their normal personality is a disorder. According to a 2024 survey, 72% of Gen Z girls said that “mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.” Only 27% of Boomer men said the same.

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

@_lauriefaulkner_I spent so long wondering why I was so different…. I didn’t even consider ADHD until my diagnosis! 🤓#creatorsearchinsights #adhd #adhdinwomen #adhdpeople #adhdbrain #myadhd #adhdcheck #adhdawareness #adhdprobs #adhdtiktok #adhdgirlies #adhdbelike #adhdtraits #adhdsquad #adhdprobs #adhdproblems

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

We have lost the sentimental ways we used to describe people. Now you are always late to things not because you are lovably forgetful, not because you are scattered and interesting and secretly loved for never arriving on time, but because of ADHD. You are shy and stare at your feet when people talk to you not because you are your mother’s child, not because you are gentle and sweet and blush the same way she does, but autism. You are the way you are not because you have a soul but because of your symptoms and diagnoses; you are not an amalgam of your ancestors or curious constellation of traits but the clinical result of a timeline of childhood events. Every heartfelt, annoying, interesting piece of you, categorised. The fond ways your family describe you, medicalised. 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 co-dependent. There are no hard workers, only the traumatised, the insecure overachievers, the neurotically ambitious. We even classify people without their consent. Now our clumsy mothers have always had undiagnosed ADHD; our quiet dads don’t realise 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. Who we fall for is nothing but a trauma response. “You don’t have a crush; you have attachment issues”. Maybe he reminds you of an early caregiver who wounded you. In fact there are no feelings at all anymore; only dysregulated nervous systems. Every human experience we have is evidence, and the purpose of our lives is to piece it all perfectly together. This is the healthy way to think, that previous generations were so cruelly deprived of.

I’m not sure I believe this anymore. That we are more enlightened now than in the past, more emotionally intelligent. My grandma is a grandma, a mother, a wife; we are attachment 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 there were people in the past who needed real help and never received any sort of understanding, but that is not the full story; many were also happier, less self-conscious, actually able to forget themselves. I asked my grandparents who have been married for six decades why they chose each other and got a clumsy answer. They had never really thought about it. Maybe I am too nostalgic about the past, but there is something there that has been lost, that in that moment I struggled to relate to, a simpler way of living. And an arrogance to us now, seeing people in the past as incomplete and unsolved, when we are this anxious and confused.

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 pro-con list and they stop making logical sense. They cannot be calculated or codified. Ask older generations why they started families. Often they didn’t really think it through. And maybe that isn’t as crazy as we have been led to believe, maybe that isn’t so reckless, maybe there’s something human in that.

But of course this generation has a billion-dollar industry involved that wasn’t before. The world is also becoming more complicated; we want control and certainty. We take comfort in the causes of things. And yes there are young people helped by diagnoses, who can’t function and find relief in being understood, but fewer than we think. Many more have been convinced that the point of life is to classify and explain everything, and it’s making them miserable.

I find it strange that we think this is freeing, this brutal knowing. That this self-surveillance is the liberated way to live. That we are somehow less repressed, being boxed in by medical labels. There are young people spending the most carefree years of their lives mapping themselves out, categorising themselves for companies and advertisers. So much of their thinking is consumed by this. They don’t have memories anymore; only evidence, explanations, timelines of trauma. They don’t have relationships; only attachment figures, caregivers and co-regulators. And I think this is it, the cause of so much misery. 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 analysing 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 around for reasons. God, the life they are missing.

Because we can’t ever explain everything. At some point we have to stop analysing and seeing through things and accept the unknowable. All we can ever really achieve is faith. Some humour at ourselves, too. 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.

We keep being told that the bravest thing now is to do the work. But I think it takes courage not to explain everything, to release control, to resist that impulse to turn inwards. And wisdom too, to accept that we will never understand ourselves through anything other than how we act, how we live, and how we treat other people. We are thinking about ourselves enough. We don’t need more awareness or answers. My worry is that after a lifetime spent trying to explain themselves, solve their strong feelings, standardise their personalities, and make sense of every experience, a generation might realise that the only problem they had, all along, was being human.

So free yourself to experience, not explain. Be brave enough to be normal. Do not offer up your feelings and decisions and memories to the intrusion of the market, to the interpretation of experts, to be filed as deviations from what the medical industry decides is healthy. Leave yourself unsolved. Who knows; it’s a mystery. Written in the stars. From somewhere unknown. Holding on to your personality is a declaration that you are human. A person, not a product. No other explanation needed.