Or the cubby hole. Or lockers. Whatever.
As humans, status roles and desire for affiliation drives a lot of our behaviour. These are the two fundamental drivers that typically underlie Seth Godin’s thinking and ideas about humans and most phenomena in the market and societies. Both of those ideas involves some categorization of grouping of some kind. A taxonomy if you may. Within our minds at least.
Status roles are driven by some ideas of dimensions, some basis by which to compare. How much more money, talents, capabilities, or recognition. The values that matters, they are in a bucket. The values that don’t are in another and hardly even thought about. You’re putting attributes into pigeonholes of different labels and kinds.
Affiliation is once again about groupings. Wanting to be in one bucket rather than another. Only this time, you’re putting people and yourself into pigeonholes. You actually want to be occupying a hole.
What if we can no longer compare. And when everything is just moving around rather than being in neat, tidy drawers? What happens when things or people tries to defy the pigeonhole? Does it cause anxiety? Or creates peace?