Labels

When Barack Obama came to Lisbon earlier this month, my wife and I were curious to hear what he had to say. It was my first time seeing him in person. I hadn't thought about him much in over a decade, and yet within minutes of him starting to speak, the old recognition came back easily, along with a quiet respect I hold for anyone who has carried a job that hard, in any country.

Soon after he started speaking, the conversation turned to artificial intelligence. From there it moved to parenting, and then to tech addiction and what screens are doing to children. These are topics I think about deeply, ones I read about and write about often, and it was clear he cared about them too. Still, I had trouble listening. The words reached me and then left, in one ear and out the other, while some part of me kept waiting for the conversation to go somewhere else. Tell me about the hardest decision you ever made. Tell me what the job did to you. I wanted the politics, the policy, the stories from inside the room where decisions were made, yet Obama was offering something I hadn't come for.

It took me a while to understand why. Somewhere along the way, I had filed him under one label. His label said government leader. When he spoke about politics, my mind knew where to put it. When he spoke about parenting, there was nowhere for it to go, so it didn't go anywhere. My brain couldn't compute what he was saying, and frankly, it couldn't respect it either.

That bothered me more than I expected. Sitting there beside my wife, I started thinking about my own labels, the domains I've lived inside for decades and the ones people tend to give me. Each one, at some point, also became the only thing someone wanted to hear from me.

My first label arrived before any of those. Through high school and university, for well over a decade, my identity was student leadership. I was part of student government and helped start organisations on campus, and that was how everyone knew me. It was a good label to have, and it taught me a lot, which made it harder to let go of than I expected. I remember a coffee with a mentor near the end of university. She looked at me across the table and asked, "Do you want to become an event organiser?" I was shocked. Is that what she sees me as? For me, all of it had been a means to an end, a training ground for whatever came next. For her, the training ground was the whole picture.

What came next was fifteen years as CEO of a technology company in digital advertising. That identity was even more cemented. At events full of other founders, the conversation found its way back to advertising tech. Away from work, it often did the same. There's a strange comfort in being known so clearly for one thing, and also an uncomfortable narrowing, where every room starts to feel like the same room.

Then came Portugal. For five years now, people outside the country who know me want to talk about Lisbon, about moving, about what life is like here. Within Lisbon, over the last two years, the label has changed again. I've written a book about AI, spent countless hours building with it, and helped grow the AI community here, so now I'm the AI guy. I walk into a party and can feel the question coming before anyone asks it. Here we go again.

Every one of these labels is true. I earned them, and I'm grateful for them. There's something in me, though, that resists being reduced to any one of them at a time. When someone knows me as a single label, the rest of me stays folded up somewhere out of sight, the parts that meditate, that write about nostalgia and family and the nervous system, that are curious about things I have no credentials in yet. Being seen in one domain has started to feel like being only partly seen. I leave those conversations feeling unexpressed, as if I'd been introduced by a résumé that stopped updating years ago.

The uncomfortable part is that I did the same thing to Obama that night. He spent eight years in one of the hardest jobs in the world, and has lived many more years since then, years in which he has presumably raised daughters, watched technology change around them, and formed real opinions about it. He was offering me the parts of himself that live outside the label, and yet I wasn't open to receive them. There's an efficiency in filing people, a way of saving the mind effort. I wonder now how often I've been on the receiving end of that efficiency without noticing it, and how often I've been the one doing it.

What would I have heard if I'd let him out? I'll never know exactly. The parenting comments and the thoughts on screens are gone now, lost somewhere between the stage and my seat. What stayed with me was how quickly I had stopped listening, and how familiar that felt after so many conversations where I was the one being filed away.

The labels people have given me over the years still bother me, and I suspect they always will a little. That night, I was the one holding the label, and I didn't notice until most of what he said had already passed me by.