Impacts of Stereotyping and Importance of Individualism

Over the last few decades, humans have been relentlessly evolving through a variety of innovations and ideologies for solving societal problems. The progression of humanity has brought many changes in terms of lifestyle and social interactions; advancements in living quality is evident while improvements in the state of mind are neglected. This rapid development of various societies became the catalyst of drastically different lifestyles, leaving many with unique personalities confused on where they belong. To that, the natural response was to form stereotypical communities amongst themselves, but does this help people feel included or overgeneralize various individuals?

Typical stereotypes and communities form from people’s longing to feel accepted in society; this helps individuals find an identity amongst our confusing and intertwined urban world. It is a human instinct to want to feel included within a community; social bonds helped our ancestors survive in the wild through recognizing one another with similar personalities. This was of key importance to advancement in our society, through human evolution it became a natural instinct to form social bonds. The need to form communities helped our ancestors provide for one another, it was what developed our social skills. And to this day, the tendency to try and create communities with others that are similar to oneself still creates a sense of belonging amongst various cultural backgrounds within a society. Especially for students and teenagers, student communities play a big part in their lives, and they come in the form of school clubs and friend groups. The various communities created ensure students feel included in a school community, so they are able to express themselves fully with people that have a similar personality, diminishing the feeling of isolation and loneliness.

However, following our human instinct to assimilate with others - which was essential to ancient survival - can be inappropriate for modern lifestyle; different passions and lifestyles are emerging in our modern society through technological and informational advancements. This greatly increased the quality of our lives in the material sense, leading to the human civilization advancing as a whole. It seems that humans have had the largest material advancements in the recent few decades, however, our psychological development was not mirrored with it. With the development of the internet, there is a constant overload of information and rumors in our lives due to rapid globalization; various individuals share their lifestyles on the internet, and this information is shown to many daily. This can cause people to feel the need to imitate the lifestyle that everyone agrees with, dwindling away any individuality and uniqueness in their personalities. People in our age group often try to fit a certain stereotype in order to belong, even if it may not truly reflect their preferred lifestyle; this causes many students additional social stress to fit in a certain stereotype. In this age and time, there is so much diversity that is hindered by unconsciously exerted pressure, shaping everyone into a standard person devoid of uniqueness through globalization and the internet.

This is an emerging problem that many are facing in our time, we are all slowly succumbing to the addiction of gaining material possessions. With this addiction, we do not take care of our mental health, and stress to “fit in” to a certain stereotype; however, the celebration of diversity is unconsciously disappearing, and stripping us of our identity and personality. We should all make the initiative in order to not pressure others into being a certain “type”, and celebrate diversity of personalities the way it should be.