Many Internet posts and some self-help articles use negative labels as if they were explanations.

On the Internet, negative judgments and inflammatory attributions masquerade as facts.

Most posts are written to validate feelings and gratify the ego, rather than search for truth.

It can seem like narcissism, but our selfie-culture is more a product of immature thinking than pathology.

An abundance of relationship books, articles, and blogs inadvertently contributes to monocular vision—in the name of validation. It thereby impairs the ability to see other perspectives alongside our own.

Here are signs that you read too much self-help and too many Internet posts:

Using labels like gaslighting, narcissist, microaggressions in disagreements

Confusing judgments with feelings

Confusing opinions with scientific findings

Accepting citations as truth, without looking up the studies and noting their limitations

It’s hard these days to find an Internet post, or self-help article, or family dispute, much less a political speech, which does not pretend that labels are explanations and opinions are facts. In social and political discourse, all sides are likely to use identical or similar labels to devalue each other.

Labels are terrible explanations. They omit more information than they describe, and obscure more than they illuminate. All labels........

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