Everything is made up
The title is a slight exaggeration. Not quite everything is made up. However, some of the most important things in the world, are in fact, made up.
Money, for example. Humans weren’t placed on this earth with the existence of money, it’s something that’s been invented by us. The same goes for the education system and earning qualifications - it’s all something we’ve made up in order to give people a sense of worthiness. The idea that someone deserves more respect due to a random number or title, is just a lie.
Another interesting example is mental disorders. Yes, this absolutely helps people understand more about what’s going on in their brain, and more importantly, it can help people find the right treatment. However, not every country uses the same diagnostic grading (Stein et al., 2013) and you can be diagnosed with something in one country, but not the other. For example, in some cultures, hearing voices would signal psychic abilities, but in western psychology they generally prefer to think it’s schizophrenia. The United Kingdom and United States also use different grading criteria, with the UK using the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) and the US using the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
Again, these diagnoses are all labels that we’ve invented. We’ve analysed patterns within symptoms and put them into groups (Shorter, 2015), such as ‘Borderline Personality Disorder’ or ‘anxiety’. All of these diagnoses and treatments are useful and helpful, but it’s not consistent, and honestly, sometimes doctors and psychologists get it easily wrong. Yes, the system is important, but there are significant flaws, and there’s still a lot we don’t know about the human brain.
We place a lot of weight on labels these days. Especially the idea of personality types, which are also constructed by humans. As long as they have shown to be reliable, these tests do have their time and place and are useful for analysing people, particularly in sport psychology. However, I’ve noticed that some people like to put Myers-Briggs personality types in their bio, or share it with their peers, as if fitting into one of these 16 categories carries significant meaning. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) test is one of the most unreliable out there (Wareham, 2022), which is surprising considering it’s one of the most popular personality tests online. There’s enjoyment in taking these tests, but sometimes it’s as if people want someone else to tell them who they are and what they’re good at. This also places further unnecessary importance on what others think of us, instead of trusting what we think of ourselves.
A lot of people don’t even know who they are themselves, let alone who other people are. You won’t find yourself through receiving a label from a personality test that someone designed. You should find yourself through gaining the courage to be authentic and expressing yourself naturally to the world.
The things that stress us out the most and have the most weight in the world, have all been created by ourselves. Sadly, humans are the root cause of other humans suffering, after all.
Maybe tomorrow, we can all put extra thought into taking care of nature - something that was here before humans ever were.
xoxo
References
Shorter E. (2015). The history of nosology and the rise of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Dialogues in clinical neuroscience, 17(1), 59–67. https://doi.org/10.31887/DCNS.2015.17.1/eshorter
Stein, D. J., Lund, C., & Nesse, R. M. (2013). Classification systems in psychiatry: diagnosis and global mental health in the era of DSM-5 and ICD-11. Current opinion in psychiatry, 26(5), 493–497. https://doi.org/10.1097/YCO.0b013e3283642dfd
Wareham, D. (2022). How accurate are personality tests? Evaluating Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/382935255_How_accurate_are_personality_tests_Evaluating_Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator