This is The Nooner, a short daily (Monday - Saturday) newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.
Every Sunday, I publish the Dispatches Weekly Digest (DWD), which lets you binge all the Nooners from the previous week. It also includes a meaningful song recommendation, and a short segment I call TMI, where I go off script to bring you backstage, so to speak.
Two more things about the DWD:
It goes on on the main Dispatches channel, so if you’re looking to spare your inbox from the daily emails without missing out on anything, you can specifically unsubscribe from The Nooner section, and still get the Digest on Sunday.
It’s only available to paid subscribers.
The Dispatches Weekly Digest is a labor of love, and I’m really proud of it, and if you want to hear it, I want you to hear it. So, if you can afford it…
And if you can’t, but you still think of yourself as one of my true fans, let me know and we’ll work something out.
I don’t like labels
I came of age in the 90s and early 2000s. At that time, nobody wanted to be labeled. The vibe was a general defiance of labels. It was even a common excuse to avoid committed relationships: “I don’t like labels.”
Fast forward about 20 years, and it seems like the pendulum has swung all the way in the other direction.
I’m not an anthropologist, I’m not even much of a culture writer, and I certainly don’t have the data to back any of this up, but here’s how it looks from where I’m sitting.
Zoomers freaking love labels. They collect them like patches to sew into a quilted cloak of identity.
Here are three increasingly exaggerated examples:
I’m a neurodivergent LGBTQ+ ally.
I’m a solarpunk, anti-capitalist, cottagecore witch, with executive dysfunction and existential dread. My aesthetic is dark academia meets Y2K, and I'm perpetually touch-starved but also touch-averse.
I’m a demisexual, biromantic, chronically online, alt-aesthetic, crypto-curious, eco-anxious, body neutral, INFJ-T with a savior complex and main character energy. My pronouns are they/fae/xe, I'm a Pisces sun, Scorpio rising, and my love language is memes. I'm also gluten-intolerant, lactose-sensitive, and allergic to late-stage capitalism.
The bios are fake, but believe it or not, all those labels are real.
Generation Z is so good at the labeling game that no one else can possibly keep up with them.
Not that we don’t try.
Thanks to a persistent cultural obsession with youth, this stuff bleeds upward, starting with Zoomers who create, collect, shuffle and organize them like trading cards. Then Millennials say hey wait, I’ve got some too. And even though Xers are the OG label haters, they can’t stand not being invited to the party.
Then you’ve got boomers, who are all like, wtf is all this nonsense, but OK I guess I’m a lapsed Catholic who loves rock ’n roll.
And finally, you’ve got cranky people like me, who try on labels every once in a while. But then they get all itchy and so I shove them in a drawer and take turns feeling totally overwhelmed by the whole conversation and smugly superior to it.
I’m tempted, even now, to draft a new bio for myself with a string of labels, but then I’ve got this image in my head of Mr. Oogie Boogie’s three horrible little henchmen from The Nightmare Before Christmas. Do you remember them? They all wear these creepy Halloween masks, which, when they take them off, you can see that their faces have contorted to look like the masks. I think that might be the most genuinely frightening moment of the movie.
I don’t need to explain the metaphor, do I?
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