Everyone tends to prefer that things they interact with fit neatly into boxes.

In the (excellent!) Netflix animated movie Nimona, the category-bending main character is asked "What are you?" and she replies, with finality, "I'm Nimona."

Each individual is a unique, fractally complex and wrinkled, ever-evolving shape.

What gives them meaning and potential is precisely that complex shape.

But to interact at scale, we need cleaner interfaces and abstractions: putting a thing in a box.

When things are cleanly in boxes, it becomes much more efficient to interact with them, allowing interacting with orders of magnitude more things.

The system you're a part of would rather you just be in a box, and if you're not careful that's how you'll think about yourself, too.

People around you will rarely ask you what makes you special and different, the ways you don't fit in whatever box the observer would rather think of you in.

It's up to you to not put yourself in a box (except when doing so helps you plug into a system you want to be a part of).

This is another thing that what David Brooks calls Illuminators do: they help remind you that you are not the box that you have put yourself in.