Hi! Welcome to my page :D Online, I go by the name Rata. I'm 16, and I started this site to explore what makes me, me.

What do I mean by this?

I think that our drive to further ourselves in life has stripped us of our individuality; we no longer identify with things like we used to; we make groups, aesthetics, etc. our identity rather than having them be a way of expressing our individuality.

Who's to blame?

Naturally, social media plays a huge part in this. Individuality on the big web means nothing if it is not marketable, and it is only marketable if it fits in a pre-made clique/niche; this results in hiveminds and lack of self-exploration. However, social media is only a symptom of a much wider problem, capitalism. The capitalist system doesn't encourage individual expression, it's simply not plausible to scale it efficiently, nor is it as profitable as, say, grouping together people in different categories.

No one person is the same, so I find it absurd to just treat people as just a collection of different categorizations. How can a person simply be goth? How can a person simply be a liberal? How can a person simply be an accountant? They aren't. Each person is their own complex self, so complex that not even a thousand descriptors could begin to do justice to themselves.

We need to relearn how we perceive people and connect to them. We need to learn to look past these categorizations and enjoy each person for their whole self. Now, I'm not saying that tying people into groups is bad; I ♡ goths, however, we should view them as an extension of oneself, rather than one's whole self. This way, we can actually strengthen these generalisations, by making them a way of expressing ourselves rather than conforming to an aesthetic as a means of finding an identity.