There are many ways in which I think the mass popularization of psychology concepts we’ve seen over the last 10-15 years has been fantastically unhelpful for actually understanding and loving one another.
From this tweet
In a sense, it has never been easier to objectify people, because the game of identity, labeling an entire person as a discrete list of traits, is incredibly conducive to that, and arises from the decontextualized communication which is favored in our world, mainly through the internet. I am not sure why identity dominates so much in our current world, since it isn’t exclusive to the internet, but if I had to guess, it would be a combination of
A society which squashes real individuality, which can only emerge from meaningful freedom, so much so that people gravitate towards a surrogate in the form of identity
An atomized world, one where people are so separate from real relationships that the only way to relate to others is by viewing yourself and others as lists of traits, since one-on-one time becomes rarer. This process is, unsurprisingly, aggravated by the internet
People becoming far less tolerant of genuine differences since the internet allows one to always remain in an echo chamber, thereby prompting people to make it easier to find others like them by being easily definable and even fitting a narrow cliché
The game of identity then links up to an adjacent one, again very popular on the internet, which is the game of being constantly right. It is not just that there are a bajillion possible mental illnesses and subtleties of what autism really means, it's that if you misuse those words then you clearly must be a bigot and need to be censored.
But at the end of the day, who really cares about understanding those games in precise details? Ultimately, if your concepts about human beings don't give you understanding or more compassion, then what are they good for? As Michael Smith puts it very well16: