When Identity Becomes A Trend

               

Lately I’ve been watching the cultural landscape shift in ways that are hard to ignore.

Things that once seemed rare or deeply personal are now talked about almost like trends. Identities are being adopted, redefined, and reshaped in ways that previous generations would have struggled to understand. People are identifying as things their biology does not reflect, boys are identifying as girls, girls as boys and some young people are even identifying as different species. These aren’t just things I’ve heard about, one day when Mike and I were driving home from dialysis, we saw a person who probably refers to themselves as a “furry”, walking across a snow covered lawn, on all fours, with a tail attached to it’s shorts. Online communities encourage adopting identities that, a few years ago, most people had never even heard of.

The latest trend that appears to be growing alongside it: the rewriting of childhood. More and more, adult children are publicly distancing themselves from their parents. Some therapists are even advising adult children to cut family ties. Words like abusive, traumatic, toxic, and triggering are used to describe ordinary family conflicts or imperfect parenting. Adult children are being taught that every struggle in life is their parent’s fault. If you’re unhappy or hurt, someone else is responsible, if you’re struggling, it’s because of your childhood. Certainly, real abuse exists and should never be minimized. But sometimes it feels as if every mistake, every raised voice, every moment a parent got it wrong is now being placed under a microscope while decades of love, sacrifice, and provision are forgotten. 

Parenting has never been perfect. None of us who raised children did it flawlessly. We have all made mistakes. We said things we wish we could take back, we handled situations poorly at times. It’s disturbing how anything negative that happened has over shadowed anything positive.

Things that don’t seem to matter are that we also stayed up all night with sick kids.

We worked long hours to keep the lights on.

We worried, prayed, sacrificed, and loved in ways our children may never fully see, yet in today’s culture, the imperfections often seem to carry more weight than the love.

I can’t help but wonder if some of this reflects a deeper struggle happening in our society. People are searching for identity, belonging, and meaning. Those are deeply human desires. But when identity becomes something endlessly reinvented rather than something grounded in truth, confusion can follow.

From a Christian perspective, identity was never meant to be something we invent on our own. It was meant to be something we receive.

Scripture tells us that we are created intentionally and wonderfully by God. Our worth doesn’t come from a label, a trend, or the approval of a community online. It comes from the one who made us.

When that relationship with God is missing, people often search for belonging in other places. Sometimes in ways that promise affirmation but ultimately leave them more confused about who they are.

This isn’t written out of anger, it’s written out of concern.

Because beneath many of these trends I see something deeper,  a generation longing to know who they are, where they belong, and whether their lives have meaning.

Those questions aren’t new, every generation has asked them, but the answers have always been the same.

We were created with purpose, intentionally.

Our truest identity isn’t something we manufacture, it’s something we discover in the God who made us.

“For You created my inmost being;

You knit me together in my mother’s womb.

I praise You because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”

—Psalm 139:13–14