i just turned 30. and you know what that means? easy peasy low hanging “end of the decade” content where, and who knows, i may choose to be A) melancholic B) comedic C) angry, or D) all of the above! you’ll have to find out what’s in store by sticking around i suppose, but for this week we’re gonna chat about labels.
Much Ado About Labels
sometime last year i had a(n) manic episode epiphany, i was now (then) going to call (declare) myself as a creative (douche). i live in Oakland, so i’d be an Oakland based creative (douche). but then i was like, why stop there? what else am i? well most people get confused about where i’m from, so i’ll throw in my ethnicities. boom Rohingya-Burmese, what else? well i’m known for my work (creative or otherwise) at @ chaiandvibes so put that there, and i also write this newsletter so i’ll throw that in there.
i embraced the title of creative after reading Rick Rubin’s “The Creative Act,” which, i’m positive, has to be some sort of brown boy cliché. i just distinctly remember feeling strongly “yeah, this is what i am, this is where i want to go, and this is what i want to be.” i love creating beautiful things and i love seeing beautiful things be created, so thus i am a creative. and i want to say that out loud so i get to meet likeminded folk.
he put creative in the bio, but we’re not really sure what he creates
labels are powerful tools because they declare your value to others. they can, in some sense, be thought of as proxies for NPC’s to gauge the value that you bring to the rest of society — or, more cynically, to them. that sounds sort of a dark, broody way to think of them but what i’d like to think of as the inverse is true. inversely, the signaling of your value could be in well received by likeminded folk. and, if there is a sort of “match,” there’s great strength that comes by way of the collective “we”, i.e. being part of a community, group, milieu, scene, et al. and once you’re part of something bigger than you, your membership usually provides you with access to the collective’s resources. this in turn should allow you to provide further value to the group. you benefit and they benefit.
so then it’s unsurprising that there is a sort of cost of mislabeling yourself. generally, you don’t want to be labeled as something you’re not. why? the tribe you’re around could very well loses trust in you. you may no longer be perceived as valuable. you lose social capital. you may appear foreign and different, and to appear foreign and different could lead to the revoking of a membership from which you reap benefit from. labels are these incredibly efficient mental models + linguistic tools that color lines between credibility and character of a person. but while efficient, they may not always be accurate. you may not actually “be” a particular label, shit there may be so much more to you, but a label makes you feel accepted by a group and for a group to accept you. so it’s easier to accept a label than to “fight” to be something else if in the event you’re already part of a group.
why stream upstream?
fleas in a jar
jars are great metaphors for labels. you ever see fleas inside of a glass jar? flip a jar of fleas upside down, let the bounce around, pick the jar back up and observe. the flies don’t move around to dissimilarly from the context you remove them from. likewise the labels that you accept and identify with explicitly draw the parameters of how you move. if you think you’re dumb, you’ll inevitably act like a dumb person does. if you see yourself as a artistic, you’ll think, do, eat, and sleep as what you think an artistic person does. so if someone thinks of you as a “shy person,” and you accept that, take a wild guess as to how you end up behaving.
about 8 years ago, i was forced to come to terms with the limitations of my label. i had just graduated with a degree in Comparative Literature. it was a great time, i learned a lot, but it typically doesn’t result in something that cuts me a check every two weeks. so what’s does a student of literature evolve into?
when you come across such limitations, you try to look to those around you. the “obvious” answer was go to law school. but i had seen a fair share of law students who, despite getting a big law gig, couldn’t seem to be without — at all times — a bottle of Jack Daniels. becoming a depressed alcoholic wasn’t the prettiest option in my hand of cards, so i figured i’d draw a new card. so i started exploring other “labels” or identities. i thought tech was pretty neat and interesting because the allure of startups was basically: if you can find a way to make money, do whatever the fuck you want. i thought that was pretty sick, so i was like dope let me get into tech. after some soul searching and chatting, i thought two things: 1) i like being as close to the point of creation for anything, 2) engineers seem to have a lot of leverage. so i decided to become an engineer.
now what i didn’t realize was how taboo that was at the time. i was mainly met with a fair share of “so your degree was useless huh?” and “you’ll have to go back to school for another 4 years, good luck dude!”, and those were some of the more polite comments. but luckily, i had lived in Berkeley with a roommate with relatively high agency. he’s a genius, like the type of guy people would ask “where’d he go to school?” “Berkeley” then say “Ah, makes sense.” buddy scored 520 (*record scratch* *4th wall break* big short style* ima be real, i wrote this for the story. i don’t remember the exact score, but buddy was smart) on his MCAT, but really used it as a bargaining chip with his desi parents for him to take leave in medicine and go on and do data science at Twitch in the early days. he referred me to Automate the Boring Stuff and that’s how i started to learn to code.
over the course of 2 years: i took open source classes, started projects, read books, watched youtube, did leetcode, started a web dev agency with 1 random customer in the mid west, and finally landed in a coding bootcamp that launched my career. in those 2 years, i replaced a lot of those voices that questioned whether or not i could with podcasts of people that did the thing i was looking to do. eventually, in the fall of 2018, i became a software engineer.
that’s when i noticed an interesting shift in the label around me. for 2 years, i was doing as an engineer does and no one would confer me that title. but the day i signed a contract where somebody gave me money for my labor that was some catalyst. now that’s when i began to think, ok, this ‘label’ thing is either A) really fuckin’ flimsy, B) there’s a sort of lag before people accept it. C) people accept labels, not from you, but via the validation of fringe nodes on their social graphs. i think all 3 things are true.
in 2023, i was blessed to do a lot of creative work. some work is public and visible like this newsletter, and some work was more behind the scenes. all i know is that i received immense joy by doing the work rather than talking about the work. but i realized, somewhere along the line, when i began to introduce myself as a “creative” — someone who does creative things — i was able to connect with other people doing cool shit. and then sometimes the stars would align and we’d even get to do cool shit together. i think that’s where labels really shine is when they get you to a place where you get to be a part of something generative versus being static in some arbitrary social hierarchy.
in 2024, i’m much more interested in just being. i’m keen on doing the work that i enjoy and to see the fruit of my work on display. how it get’s there isn’t a huge concern for me. what i do know is that the labels that i adopt and accept for myself defines the parameters for me. and that i have to be the ones to embrace the label first by means of doing the work. and eventually people may come to accept that label for me as well, but, for the most part, i’m not particularly as excited to wait around for that to happen as much as i am to do the work.
i’ve chosen to be a creative very intentionally. for now, there is no one craft that i feel obsessed about to identify by. i just am. and i just am the same way you see a Donald Glover write, direct, and act or a Tyler the Creator rap and then design fashion. i haven’t figured out what ‘i’m great” at, and perhaps i may never have that chance to be great at a singular craft. but perhaps, perhaps I’m just good enough at quite a few things that’ll allow me to bring beautiful things into the world. and maybe that frames my legacy. who knows?
this is the entry point by rabee
fellow writer and friend Rabee also turned 30 recently. i guess there’s a club of us 30-something-year olds writing on the internet. God, the only thing I ask for is that I don’t end up wearing one of those weird top hats people wear at brunch in their late 30’s. Amen. anyways, this quote that rabee quotes was really interesting. i think hitting your 30’s you’re more like to feel more of what you’re behind on than what you’re thriving in. this quote captures that quite nicely.
in this week’s design wonders, i found this cool ticket to a dog show in LA. i guess what got me is that i’ve spent 2 weeks+ designing in Figma for Chai and Vibes new landing page and i just feel so stuck man. it’s like there’s all this fancy new 2024 web design inspiration, and makes me feel like i’m so far behind. but it’s little things like this that remind me that when something is crafted intentionally and designed well, it can stand the test of time. this looks as cool as it did in 1935 as it does in 2024.
i’ve been getting really into J-Pop recently, and this song really stood out. hope you enjoy it!
Thanks for reading this edition. Share this with your friends, your grandma, or your neighbor. And if you made it to the end of this essay and you didn’t just scroll, dm me a 🥁 on either twitter or instagram. or leave a comment! As always,
Sincerely,
Haroon
P.S. Check out my previous newsletter if you’re curious: Cool Stuff I Found #28