Today, every personality trait is seen as a problem to be solved. Anything too human—every habit, every eccentricity, every feeling that’s too strong—has to be labeled and explained. 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.

Actually, it’s worse than that. Now, we are being taught that our personalities are a disorder. According to a 2024 survey, 72 percent of Gen-Z girls said that “mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.” Only 27 percent of boomer men said the same.

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

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, but because of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (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—nope, it’s 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 a curious constellation of traits but the clinical result of a timeline of childhood events.

Every heartfelt, annoying, interesting piece of you, categorized. The fond ways your family describe you, medicalized. 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...