our obsession with boxes and conformity.

on personality tests, on 'clear girl' 'messy girl', on the Sofia Richie dance. 

Haley Heynderickx in ‘Worth It’:‘So put me in a line/ Add another line/ Soon you’ll have a box/ And you can put me inside’ 

Trip down memory lane: buzzfeed & soulmates.

As we all grow older and hit different milestones in our life, there is a similar nostalgic lens we view the world with. Birthday nostalgia is a relatable experience and there’s almost this desire to go back in time when things perhaps felt more simple. Or when whatever concerned us and seemed like the end of the world then is seemingly so minimal now. I recently experienced a fresh wave of this nostalgia since I turned 20 and mourned my teenage years (ever so dramatically). This transported me back in time to when my life was dictated by personality quizzes, which I also feel is such a relatable experience that brought so many friendships together. I remember frequently sitting with my best friends and doing countless of them. We’d sit in one of their bedrooms, all giddy and scroll through Buzzfeed for hours, finding out what colour we were, what food we were, what our soulmates’ initials started with (if your name starts with an ‘S’ you might be the one). And for years after that, I’d sit in solitude and partake in these quizzes too. Repeatedly finding out what colour and food I was like it would help me discover some deep inner understanding about myself. 

It started to expand beyond Buzzfeed. I did the Myers-Briggs test in high school when they told us to. I tried to find out what colour compliments me best. I was determined and on a mission to discover if I was a ‘winter’ or an ‘autumn’, if I was more like Katniss or Peeta, what Hogwarts house I belonged in. And all of these were so important to me because they became signifiers for who I was. Specifically the Hogwarts house; I mean, I did that Pottermore quiz multiple times to truly find out where I belonged. 

I used the platform uquiz frequently, doing quizzes on my ‘red flag’ and my aura because I wasn’t entirely sure how to describe myself and found comfort in some online quizzes defining me. I became obsessed with boxing myself up and I think it maybe engulfed me a little, as my obsessions with following these rules of the categories I fell into became so significant to me. And after being on social media for a couple of years, I can see how these boxes keep spreading like wildfire, beyond simple quizzes to create this lack of individuality. It’s the TikTok Effect. 

The ‘TikTok’ effect. 

Social media has seen an increase in putting us into boxes, through categories such as ‘clean girl core’ or ‘messy girl core’, ideas of being a ‘brat’ or being ‘demure’. Recently, there was the rise of the Sofia Richie dance which is just a small snippet she posted on TikTok of her moving around and shrugging her soldiers slightly. I believe this demonstrates how far brain rot has gone. She is amazing and beautiful, but the comments reflecting on her dance signified this ironic lack of personality and individuality that has arisen recently through trying to confine ourselves into certain categories. People have imitated her dance, stating that it has ‘altered’ their ‘brain chemistry’. 

I also often see comments asking ‘what are we wearing this summer?’ or ‘so and so did this so I will too’; it makes me wonder how far this obsession has gone that we’ve all become the same person in different fonts. Why do we all need to fit into these categories? 

Haley Heynderickx’s quote above talks about being put into a box, and it highlights how society constantly finds new ways to put us into these categories. But why are they always so successful? What is our inherent obsession with being put into a box? 

Why do we love boxes so much? 

There’s definitely a fixation with how we are perceived that gets us all so enticed in doing these quizzes. 

Hilary Anger Elfenbein (professor): “like holding the mirror up to yourself and trying to see yourself the way the world sees you” 

We want to see how everyone else sees us and see what category we fit into. It quite often reminds me of the idea of a clique, specifically the live action Bratz movie in which the four best friends (the Bratz) find themselves pulled one way and another to separate and fit into a clique within their high school. It’s the idea of not being able to cross into other boundaries or to be so strictly confined to just one that you cannot possibly be friends with someone in another category. And all of these tests try to mold us into certain shapes. Each test is like a line that eventually makes that box. They also provide some sense of validation in our perception. For example, if I take a quiz and I get ‘Phoebe’ from Friends and a friend of mine has a strong hatred for Phoebe, it inevitably feels like a personal attack because the character that validates my outward perception has been criticised. The character who I now feel this connection to and who I supposedly am being critiqued is a criticism of me. 

I would also argue that wanting to find ourselves through these various ways also indicates our inherent desire for community. People are made to be together and find connection, and so often I think there is this desire to find our ‘cliques’ so we know where we fit in. However, society has been designed in this way to isolate so called ‘anomalies’ and therefore, our obsession with boxes and labels and lines feels definitive of a society built upon a lack of acceptance for differences. ‘What are we wearing this summer?’ demonstrates this lack of individuality and originality and portrays this idea that we should all look the same, dress the same, act the same. 

Of course, a personality test is just a little bit of fun and I still do the ones to find out my soulmate’s name often (hopeless romantic, I can’t help it) but the obsession did get me wondering. There is definitely an obsession with labels and with restrictions that is more of a society constructed ideology with all of these methods throughout history of restricting people. 

Why will it engulf us? 

Labels majoritively restrict us. They try to confine us when people are simply so much more nuanced and complex to be able to fit into one box. We are all naturally fluid in our desires, in our dreams, in our lifestyles. Desiring labels and boxes often correlates with a conflict and fear of venturing beyond them. But exploration and understanding of one’s self and others comes from deriving outside of these boxes and colouring outside the lines. Simply put, people are not linear enough to be categorised in this manner. 

Personality tests, ‘clean girl’ or ‘messy girl’, ‘Rachel’ or ‘Monica’ are definitely fun, but perhaps the results should be taken with some sort of distance. In order to prevent getting caught up in the answer of feeling too restricted or personally attacked. 

We all want to know who we are, and to know how we are perceived. To know where we belong, but why do we need these quizzes or tests or categories online to tell us that? I think that who we are intrinsically comes from our values and our morals and not the labels we add to ourselves like tags to an article. Society has an obsession with boxes, and without realising it, I think these little additions feed our individual obsessions with boxes when we should be breaking the boxes apart line by line and shining in individuality.