Stop renaming things that already exist; you're just feeding the algorithm

As a society, when we label and optimize every human instinct for social media and commodification, we invite the system to score, track, and eventually override us.

In the ‘before times,’ it was known as cause and effect — do something, face the consequences. This was especially true for parenting; a good spanking might be just the thing to adjust unwanted behavior and provide a hard-to-ignore lesson for a child needing a reminder in obedience and respect.

Today, it’s got a name, a hashtag, and a trend story in the Wall Street Journal.

“Goodbye Gentle Parenting, Hello ‘F— Around and Find Out’,” proclaimed the Journal’s Ellen Gamerman in a story on July 25. “Parents are ditching the softer approach to child-rearing that has dominated the culture and taking a harder line.”

FAFO — short for "F*ck Around and Find Out" — is being sold as a new style of parenting, and the brash alternative to the “gentle” parenting that has become ubiquitous in recent decades. Your kid refuses to wear a coat? Let them shiver. Won’t wear shoes? Gravel will teach them a lesson.

Before hashtags were the zeitgeist, we had parents — most of whom had no idea what they were doing. Before there were branded approaches to childrearing, people were just raising kids the best they could — a mix of hugs and hard lessons; a journey of discovery together.

Lately, however, every approach to parenting needs a name, a label, an identity, and a guru: “I’m a gentle parent.” He chooses “free-range parenting.” She’s a “helicopter Mom.” He’s a “snowplow.”

Some think this is a natural evolution in parenting. But those people are mistaken.

It’s erosion.

When every parenting decision is sliced into a category, we turn intuitive human behavior into ideological warfare. Parents stop asking, “What’s right for my kid in this moment?” and start wondering, “Am I being FAFO enough or am I slipping into ‘gentle’ territory?” Suddenly you’re not a parent anymore, you’re a brand manager in charge of a six-year-old’s growth trajectory.

The truth is none of these approaches is perfect, most overlap, and any good parent will use a bit of all of the above — a blend of kindness and consequences, discipline and grace.

Sadly, in our label-hungry culture nuance gets flattened. It’s either soft or hard. Right or wrong. Instagrammed and hashtagged, or passé and forgotten.

Worse, when we brand ordinary parenting moments as "trends," we strip them of historical context. FAFO isn’t new. It’s how children — and adults — have learned for millennia. It’s built into Torah, old fairy tales and fables, and every cautionary story ever whispered around a campfire. Make a bad choice, deal with what comes next. That’s not a revolution. That’s a revelation.

But the cultural milieu in which we find ourselves hates anything that is unbranded and unlabeled. A recent Collapse Life article saw the same foolishness with the concept of “micro-retirement” — a pretentious rebrand of taking a vacation, designed to turn rest into Instagram clout.

We do indeed live in the stupidest timeline

The temptation is to shrug this off as yet another example of the inanity of the times and our egocentric culture. But what if this compulsive urge to rename everything isn’t just about trendiness? What if there’s a deeper psychological shift underway — a kind of preconditioning?

The more we categorize and codify ordinary human experience, the easier it becomes to feed those behaviors into an algorithmic system. Parenting, rest, play, even failure, everything become measurable. Every moment becomes data. Every instinct gets a label. Everything has its sterile compartment. This is the important prerequisite for feeding it into machines to be analyzed, optimized, monetized — and ultimately, controlled.

Another perfect tool of control is division, and the Wall Street Journal article doesn’t miss this trick, either.

As they put it, the split between gentle and FAFO parenting styles “isn’t quite Snowflake Kids vs. MAGA Kids, but there’s a whiff of that.” That “whiff” isn’t accidental. It’s the same old tactic: polarize people, politicize the personal, and turn every instinctive choice into a tribal marker.

What should be a private, intuitive relationship between parent and child becomes a culture war performance. Are you raising a left-leaning, emotionally intelligent empath — or a right-leaning, resilient, consequence-hardened warrior? Choose your camp. Pick your algorithm. Let the system sort you accordingly. The more we fracture, the easier we are to program and worse, pit against each other.

In a world hurtling toward technocracy faster than most of us even realize, where “scientific experts” and predictive models increasingly seek to govern our behavior, none of this is coincidental. It’s foundational. If parenting becomes a taxonomy, then choices can be sorted and scored. If every act has a branded name, the system can decide which brands are “acceptable” or “profitable.”

Essentially, as we quietly succumb to this nonsense, a parent is no longer just a parent — they’re a data point in a behavior graph. And eventually, a parent is no longer needed. Its role can be turned over to the machines.

The more we name and sort our lived experience, the more we accept that everything must be explained, categorized, and externally validated. That’s the shift. From internal wisdom to system-approved behavior. From “I know my child” to “Let me ask ChatGPT the best parenting framework for this tantrum.” It's a dangerous transfer of authority. Slowly, subtly, we’re being trained to defer to systems over senses, experts over elders, metrics over meaning. And parenting — one of the last messy, intuitive, profoundly human acts — is just the next target.

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