Labels

Most people are labelled into certain groups that, 90% of the time, hold no positive notion. For instance, a "Goth". Long haired, dreary, face-caked-in-make-up types that thrive off the occult and anything dark and spooky. Or at least, that is what the label of "Goth" makes people think. It leaves no room for diversity, and holds a biased negative view of anyone who appears at first glance to be of the "Goth" cliche. Emo, another negative label. Greasy-hair-covering-your-eyes, wrists full of scars, music with lyrics that revolve around suicide, and masochism. Again, pretty negative, and anyone who is a regular visitor to the internet will know that the emo cliche is thrown around as a bit of a running joke. So, it's pretty insulting for anyone to be called an emo.

Once you are labelled as an emo, or a goth, or any other negative-based cliche, a million and one preconceived ideas are thrust upon your personality. It's like an auto-bad first impression. No one ever called someone an emo with a positive incentive.

Due to this, I try to avoid labelling people in any way. The instant you label someone, you thrust a bunch of assumptions on them, and assumptions will effect how you react to anything they do or say. If someone in a suit and tie were to get into a fight with a "chav", before anyone knew why the fight occured, they would assume the chav was responsible and in the wrong.

In a similar vein, this effects how we look at things such as music.

An emo will hate a chav's music choice before he even hears it. The labels either side was given means that they are preconditioned to dislike everything about the other side. If either "group" was given a fresh mind, with no preconceived bias, or any forced ideals, they might actually like different types of music, or different types of clothing.

This works in many ways in our daily lives, but this was the best way I could think of explaining it. Our bias dictates our lives, and opinions more than anything else. Making people realise this is hard, but even harder is making them accept this and change their ways. No one wants to be the first person to change, for fear of being ridiculed. Change is hard, and everyone has inhibitions about it. It takes one influential person to be brave enough to lead by example, and maybe these things will one day be less prevalent in dictating how we live our lives.