Recently, after I did a silent retreat, I was trapped on a five-hour car journey (long story) with someone who was obsessed with labeling everything. People have “math brains” or “creative brains,” there are “boy chores” and “girl chores,” and in any relationship you will have “the person who reads the map” and “the one who is social.”

I hate this tendency. But I notice myself fielding these kinds of conversations not infrequently. This labeling tic is all over the internet too; indeed, much of the content I see online seems premised upon the idea that everything can be better understood if we simply group it as a type. Sometimes morbid curiosity gets the better of me and I find myself trawling all the content related to the various attachment styles, for example. There are endless posts of grids showing how to find which type you are, with bullet-pointed lists of symptoms. In therapy, this kind of framework might be a useful introductory point to help you think through certain patterns that you’d like to change. But the stunted nature of how this content lives online means that finding your type, having a label, is presented as the end of the process rather than the start. The groupings feel as deterministic as the idea of having or not having a “math brain.” The relief in the comments is palpable: Oh, I’m that label! Everything makes sense now.

Usually when I find myself dealing with a “labeler” in real life, it’s because this idea of there being two types of brains has come up. I find this happens quite a lot because I work as a writer but I did a degree in physics and mathematics. In a normal conversation, the other person will say: Huh, that’s interesting. Or: Ah, how did you get into writing, then? And I will say: Oh, I wanted to do something that would definitely lead to a job, then I decided to screw that up, didn’t I?

At which point the other person will realize I don’t really want to talk about it much, so our conversation will move along. But with a labeler, a script of our interaction will run something like this. (I am forced to reproduce it here in full to most accurately convey the maddening frustration it engenders.)

Them: Me? I can’t do math! I have a creative brain! [Accusatory face] That’s weird you write if you have a math brain.

Me: I don’t think that’s how brains work.

Them: No, it’s left and right brain. One is math and one is creative.

Me: But we each have two halves, which together form one complete brain.

Them: But either you’re good at math or you’re creative. That’s the whole thing about the two types of brains.

Me: I don’t think it works like that.

Them: There’s studies. Right and left. [Here, they might tap their head, as if I am unaware of where in the body the brain is housed.] One side is math. I’m creative, so I can’t do math.

Me: Yeah. I don’t think it works like that. I think math is creative.

Them: No, the thing with math is there is a right or wrong answer. You just have to learn it. I can’t think like that. I have a creative brain.

Me: No, I think it’s the opposite. I think the enjoyable thing about math is you don’t have to rote learn anything if you understand how certain rules work. I think writing is basically the same.

Them: I can’t do math.

Me: I know what you mean about finding things harder or easier. Because when I was at school, I thought I couldn’t learn foreign languages. Now I think, Well, there are bilingual babies all over the world. So it seems like something we all can do at some point. I doubt that vanishes as we grow up, even if it seems harder. I think math is probably the same for some people.

Them: I can’t do math. I don’t have a math brain.

At this point, though, they are looking around, trying to find me, because I have climbed out a nearby window. Later, I will lie in my bed, thrashing around under my covers, as I rerun the conversation over in my head. The stubbornness of it. The idea that we are all going about the world with only one-half of our brain fully operational.

Then, for the sake of my sanity, I force myself to forget about it entirely. I file it on the shelf of my brain where I put all the things I can’t think about regularly so that I’m able to function. The texts I have sent while drunk. The embarrassing things I have said during sex. That I once cried at the ending of Sweet Home Alabama. All filed together, a few shelves above the box where all the math lives.

Until I meet one again. Or until I come across one of the various pop culture iterations of this, the psychology disseminated on TikTok and Instagram and elsewhere. It’s not just attachment styles. All over those platforms, you see vlogs and infographics declaring that people can be understood best as bundles of fixed, unchanging symptoms, related to corresponding bundles of trauma, grouped neatly under buzzy labels.

This kind of therapy content feels only one step removed from the kinds of quizzes that help you find out which Girls or Sex and the City character you are (yet another labeling instinct that is weirdly rife at present). Then there is the enormous popularity of astrology meme accounts. I find it hard to take exception with this iteration of labeling, though, because my star sign is Aquarius, so the @costarastrology account (with its 2 million followers) always presents me with flattering personality reads that position me as a cool, aloof, intellectual sort. My small talk, for example, is “explaining the science behind the weather we’re having,” whereas a Cancer is “wary of anyone who tries to approach them at parties.”

Elsewhere, there are the pieces (I can’t call them literary criticism, sorry) that address novels not in terms of their content or style but with labels that appear to refer to either an imagined reader or the imagined personality of the author. Sad-girl novels. Cool-girl novels.

Obviously the idea of grouping together works of art with stylistic or thematic similarities to discuss how they relate to one another is not a new, or counterproductive, instinct. But these labels, which force together works with clashing themes and styles under a janky, misshapen umbrella, serve essentially the opposite purpose of a term like modernism or naturalism. To call a novel an example of naturalism, a practice that refers to a coherently defined style of writing, acts as a shortcut to a more expansive understanding of the work by positioning certain style choices within, for example, the societal context in which the book was written. A label like “cool-girl novels” instead encourages only the most superficial reading. The protagonist is a woman. Yes, and? What does it mean to say that a certain book is read by cool girls? How might we better understand how to engage with the work if we declare that it was written by a sad girl?

Again, I see echoes of the senseless, impenetrable anti-logic of having or not having a “math brain.” I start to imagine myself trapped in a conversation with someone who would describe literature like this. I can’t help it.

I imagine them saying, happily: I don’t read cool-girl books.

Then I would say: What is that? What is a cool-girl book?

They would say: You like them because you’re a cool girl!

Me: But what is that? You haven’t said what it is.

Them: I don’t read cool-girl books.

Me: What is it, though? You haven’t said what it is.

On and on it would go. When I come across something like this, I have to get away as quickly as possible. I close all my tabs and turn the computer off and go straight outside.

On that five-hour car journey with the labeler, though, I could not simply go outside. They were always rushing to finish my sentences too, with an ending they expected might fit with the kind of thing I had been saying. There was a manic, frantic energy to every exchange. As if something terrible might happen if I were permitted to finish a sentence by myself. Then we would have these big back-and-forths because I’d been trying to say something different all along.

It drove me mad. But seeing it up close for that length of time gave me a different perspective from the one I usually have when I leave a conversation like this. And speaking about it, I should admit, to my psychoanalyst a few days later helped me clarify my thoughts further. (That’s right, my psychoanalyst. This essay was not eccentric and unhinged enough already.)

That car journey was a form of exposure therapy, in its way. I couldn’t run. I couldn’t hide. I sat there as it went on, pinned in place by my seat belt, examining every proposed dichotomy to within an inch of its nonsensical life. Like: Why would the social person not be able to read the map? When I was finished, rather than being cleansed, I was still right there in the middle of it. In the middle of a conversation about which jobs are done by introverts and which by extroverts. And then which kind of people wear shoes to a festival and which kind go barefoot, and how this depends on the kind of music they like.

But in the wake of the silent retreat, everything seemed bathed in a rosy glow of calmness and goodwill. My thoughts were infused with peace and love and so forth. So, after my frustration had exhausted itself (and, mind you, that did still take a while), I had a sort of epiphany. After all, wasn’t there some of the labeler in me? Even by calling this person a labeler, I was assigning them a type. Wasn’t I treating them much the same as the person who believes they do not have a math brain treats math? As something incomprehensible, undeserving of curiosity, and ideally to be avoided at all costs.

Anyway, back in the car, we were talking about how status-obsessed people in London can be, always asking everyone their job as a first question. I said I used to think I hated that because I didn’t have a very impressive answer. But then my work situation improved. They declared: Now you like it! I explained that no, I was going to say I still hated it. But we got stuck in a web with them explaining what they had expected and me explaining that that wasn’t what I wanted to say. We never got into why I still hate it. Round and round we went, and I thought: Why am I not allowed to say something different from what you expected? And then the question came into my head: Why do you need to see the world this way?

Up close, the quality I had read as stubbornness (repeating over and over again the same information even in the face of new and contradictory data) and the manic energy seemed like something else. Something that I couldn’t quite place.

A few days later, with it still bugging me, I relayed the encounter to my psychoanalyst. I explained that there is a kind of person I have met before but whom I avoid spending time around. I started to describe the labels. The back-and-forths. Oh, God! she practically shouted. One of these!

She explained that what I had read as manic, frantic energy could be better understood as anxiety. A desire to be in control, to fit everything into neat little boxes, and that, to this end, interactions must follow a certain script. This person registers ending a sentence with a different conclusion from what they expected (going off script) not as new information but as a loss of control. If they come to analysis, they come in with all these labels, explanations for why they have to do all the things they do. They are this type or that type, and because of this they are fixed—they have to behave a certain way in a group, for example, because they’re an extrovert. They have no choice. It takes months and months to ever get beyond that, my therapist said.

I had been so preoccupied with how the labelers do my head in. Given more time to think, I saw a new side of it: They do their own heads in much more. I feel I increasingly understand where it comes from too. You go about life, and you do notice certain patterns. Making certain assumptions based on these can be a way of making life feel safer. The kind of man who is rude to a waiter is not one I would pursue a relationship with, I can see that. The overdrive of it still strikes me as facile and not true to life at all: I know for a fact that many social people can also read the map. But I can relate to that instinct to make life feel more predictable, less like a thing that can never really be understood.

Recently, I found myself in the math-brain conversation. It started as it always does.

Them: Me? I can’t do math! I have a creative brain! [Accusatory face] That’s weird you write if you have a math brain.

Me: Ah. I haven’t heard of that before. I’ll look that up.

And then we moved on to talk about other things.