The Sandy People and the Purple People

Humans are such fascinating creatures. Still very much stumbling about in the dark on their two legs, which have now atrophied to the sofa. Of course their fingers have never looked thinner from their daily regimen of scrolling, and pointing, and sliding. One might think evolution would have corrected for this by now—perhaps developed a third thumb specifically calibrated for the upward flick, or reinforced the index finger against repetitive strain—but no. The species simply adapts by becoming weaker, which is, I suppose, a kind of adaptation.

From my vantage point (I observe from what you might call “elsewhere,” though that term itself is a human construction and therefore inadequate), I have been documenting this particular subspecies for what you would measure as seventeen years, though time moves differently where I am, so it feels both longer and shorter simultaneously. The humans do not know they are being observed. They rarely know anything with certainty, which is part of their charm.

What strikes me most profoundly is not their physical deterioration—that is merely biological entropy, common across carbon-based life forms—but rather their psychological compulsion. Humans, you see, have this peculiar need to name and label any and all things they encounter. Not all humans, mind you. But a significant population. There are those who suffer from a condition where unless a thing, option, or person is named and categorized, it does not exist.

And no, I’m not kidding.

I have watched them do this with weather patterns (“storm systems”), with emotional states (“clinical depression”), with the space between people (“social distancing”), with the absence of sound (“awkward silence”), with colors (“burnt sienna”), with the way someone walks (“confident gait”), with literally everything their sensory organs can detect. The act of naming appears to give them a sense of control, as if by assigning a label to a phenomenon, they have somehow mastered it.

The irony, of course, is that the label often becomes a cage. But we’ll get to that.

I should clarify what I mean by “does not exist.” I don’t mean the thing literally vanishes from reality when unnamed—the universe is not so obliging to human neuroses. I mean that for these particular humans, the thing cannot be processed, cannot be filed, cannot be understood until it has been given a designation. It exists in a kind of cognitive limbo, a purgatory of the unnamed, causing tremendous anxiety until someone—preferably someone with credentials, a title, a platform—assigns it a proper noun or adjective.

You can observe this compulsion most clearly in their media consumption. A human will watch a moving picture (they call it “content” now, which is deliciously meaningless), and within seconds, they must know: What genre is this? What demographic is it for? What movement does it represent? Is it “prestige television” or “guilty pleasure”? Is it “high art” or “low culture”? The experience itself is secondary to the categorization of the experience.

I have seen humans argue for hours—hours—about whether a particular sandwich is a “melt” or a “panini.” The sandwich, I should note, remained delicious regardless of the outcome of the debate. But they could not eat it in peace until they had determined its proper taxonomical classification.

This is the world I am documenting. A world where the sofa has become the primary habitat, where fingers have evolved for screens rather than tools, and where the greatest existential threat is not climate collapse or nuclear war, but rather: the encounter with something that has not yet been named.

*They emerged from observation, the way patterns emerge from data.

Within this broader human population, I have identified two distinct subgroups. I did not name them—they emerged from observation, the way patterns emerge from data. But for the purposes of this report, and because you, dear reader, are likely human and therefore require labels to process information, I will call them the Sandy People and the Purple People.

The Sandy People are the ones with the condition I described above. They are the namers, the categorizers, the filers of experience into predetermined boxes. They are not evil—I want to be clear about this. They are frightened. The universe is large and chaotic and indifferent, and the act of naming gives them the illusion of order. When they say “we have discovered a new species of beetle,” what they mean is “we have made this beetle knowable, and therefore less terrifying.”

The Sandy People have built an entire civilization around this compulsion. They have institutions dedicated to naming: universities, laboratories, government agencies, marketing firms. They have hierarchies of namers: the PhD who names diseases, the executive who names products, the journalist who names trends, the influencer who names aesthetics. They have systems for validating names: peer review, focus groups, trademark law, Wikipedia edit wars.

They have also developed an elaborate system of pamphlets.

The pamphlets are crucial to understanding the Sandy People. A pamphlet, in their world, is any simplified explanation of a complex phenomenon. It can be literal (a brochure about depression) or metaphorical (a tweet thread explaining geopolitics). The pamphlet takes the chaotic fragments of reality and arranges them into a narrative that can be consumed in three to five minutes. The pamphlet is the sofa of information—comfortable, supportive, requiring no effort to sink into.

The Sandy People love pamphlets because pamphlets come pre-labeled. You don’t have to observe the fragments yourself; someone has already done the observing for you and told you what it means. This is incredibly efficient. It is also incredibly limiting, but efficiency often is.

This makes them deeply unsettling to the Sandy People.

The Purple People are not a formal organization. They have no meetings, no manifestos, no leaders. They are simply individuals who have, through various means, learned to perceive reality as fragments rather than as pre-packaged narratives. Some of them arrived at this state through meditation. Others through trauma. Others through psychedelics. Others through simply paying very close attention to the space between things.

They are called the Purple People not because of their skin color—their skin comes in the same range of melanin concentrations as all humans—but because of something the Sandy People cannot quite articulate. There is a quality to them, a frequency, that the Sandy People perceive as “purple.” It is not a color, exactly. It is more like the color of the space between colors. The color of unlabeled experience.

The Sandy People fear the Purple People for several reasons: First, the Purple People’s refusal to accept labels makes them unpredictable. If you cannot categorize someone, you cannot predict their behavior. If you cannot predict their behavior, you cannot control them. This is intolerable to a culture built on categorization.

Second, the Purple People’s existence is a challenge to the Sandy People’s entire worldview. If the Purple People can function—can thrive, even—without the constant need to name and categorize, then perhaps the naming and categorizing is not actually necessary. Perhaps it is a choice. Perhaps it is a cage. This possibility is so threatening that it must be suppressed.

Third, and most damning: the Purple People are happy. Not in the manic, performative way that the Sandy People display on their social media feeds, but in a deep, quiet way that comes from standing on their own two feet rather than sinking into a sofa. They have what the Sandy People desperately want but cannot name, and therefore cannot pursue.

The Sandy People have tried various strategies to deal with the Purple People over the years. They have tried to ignore them (difficult, because the Purple People keep existing). They have tried to mock them (ineffective, because the Purple People do not care about social approval). They have tried to pathologize them (somewhat successful—there are now several diagnostic labels for “people who resist categorization,” which is deliciously recursive).

But the strategy that has gained the most traction recently is the one I am about to describe. It is the strategy of forced naming. If the Purple People will not accept labels voluntarily, the Sandy People will simply assign labels to them anyway. They will “discover” the Purple People. They will “find” them. They will bring them into the light of categorization, whether they want to be there or not.

This is where the Mayor enters the story.

*The act of naming is an act of claiming. It says: I was here first.

The Mayor is not a mayor in the traditional sense. He does not govern a city or town. He is a Mayor in the metaphysical sense—he is the embodiment of the labeling impulse, the avatar of categorization, the high priest of the named world. If the Sandy People had a king, he would be it. But they don’t believe in kings anymore (too hierarchical, too old-fashioned), so they have Mayors instead, which is the same thing but with better branding.

The Mayor is a man of approximately fifty-seven years, though he has had work done, so he appears to be approximately forty-three years, which is itself a kind of relabeling. He has the smooth, untroubled face of someone who has never encountered an experience he could not immediately categorize. His suits are expensive but not ostentatious—he understands the importance of signaling “successful” without signaling “threatening.” His voice is measured, authoritative, the voice of someone who has spent decades on panels and podcasts explaining things to people.

He has made his career on naming things. Early on, he named a business trend (“the sharing economy”), which made him wealthy. Then he named a social phenomenon (“virtue signaling”), which made him influential. Then he named a type of person (“the anxious achiever”), which made him beloved. He has written three books, all of which are essentially extended pamphlets, all of which have sold remarkably well.

For years, the Mayor has been aware of the Purple People. They have been a thorn in his side, a gap in his taxonomy, a phenomenon he could observe but not quite capture. He has tried various labels—”the disconnected,” “the contrarians,” “the spiritually bypassing”—but none of them stuck. The Purple People simply shrugged and continued existing outside his categories.

This bothered him more than he cared to admit.

Then, six months ago (in your time), the Mayor had what he described as a “breakthrough.” He was giving a keynote address at a conference about “The Future of Human Categorization” (yes, they have conferences about this), and during the Q&A, someone asked him about “those people who seem to resist all labels.”

The Mayor paused. The audience leaned forward. This was the question he had been waiting for.

“We haven’t found them yet,” he said, and the phrasing was deliberate. “But we will.”

The word “found” did something interesting in that moment. It reframed the entire relationship. The Purple People were not people who had chosen to remain unlabeled—they were people who were lost, waiting to be discovered. They were not exercising sovereignty—they were simply hidden. And the Sandy People, led by the Mayor, were not aggressors—they were explorers, rescuers, bringing light to the darkness.

The audience applauded. The Mayor smiled. And the campaign began.

Over the following months, the Mayor assembled a team. There were anthropologists (to study the Purple People’s culture), psychologists (to diagnose their resistance to labels), marketers (to craft the right terminology), and journalists (to document the “discovery”). There were focus groups to test various names. There were strategy sessions about the best way to approach the Purple People. There were legal consultations about whether you could trademark a label for a group of people who didn’t consent to being labeled (the answer was: probably not, but you could try).

The Purple People, for their part, were aware of the Mayor’s campaign. They found it amusing, in the way you might find it amusing to watch a cat chase a laser pointer. They understood what was happening—they were not naive—but they also understood that the Mayor’s power only worked if they agreed to participate in his framework. And they had no intention of doing so.

But the Mayor was persistent. He scheduled a meeting. He called it a “dialogue,” which is what you call a confrontation when you want to sound collaborative. He sent invitations to several Purple People, phrased as “an opportunity to be heard.”

The meeting was scheduled for a Tuesday at 2 PM, in a conference room with floor-to-ceiling windows and ergonomic chairs that cost more than most people’s monthly rent.

The Mayor cleared his throat, a small performative gesture that signaled the official start of the meeting. He had done this thousands of times—the clearing of the throat, the slight forward lean, the eye contact distributed evenly across his audience. He was very good at meetings.

“I want to start by saying that we come here with the utmost respect,” he began. “Our goal is not to impose anything on you, but rather to understand. To create a framework for mutual recognition. To, if you will, bring you into the conversation.”

The Purple People sat quietly. They did not nod or smile or give any of the small social cues that usually grease the wheels of human interaction. They simply sat, present and attentive, which somehow made the Mayor more nervous than if they had been hostile.

“We’ve found you,” the Mayor said suddenly, abandoning his prepared remarks. The words came out with more force than he intended, propelled by months of frustration and the deep human need to claim a thing by naming it.

The room went very quiet.

The silver-haired woman looked at him with those calm eyes. “We weren’t lost,” she said.

The Mayor blinked. This was not in his notes. “I’m sorry?”

“We weren’t lost,” she repeated, with the same even tone. “You said you found us. But we weren’t lost. We’ve been here the entire time.”

The Mayor felt something shift in his chest, a small tremor of uncertainty. But he had been in enough debates, enough confrontations, enough moments of rhetorical combat to know how to recover. He leaned back slightly, adopted a patient expression, the look of a teacher explaining something to a confused student.

“Yes, but you didn’t know you were lost,” he said, “because we didn’t see you. So there.” He added the “so there” without thinking, a small childish flourish that he immediately regretted but could not take back.

The Purple People looked at each other. Something passed between them—not words, not even expressions, but some kind of understanding that moved through the space like a frequency. Then the silver-haired woman turned back to the Mayor.

“But we didn’t see you either,” she said, “and yet we do not say we’ve found the Sandy People.”

The Mayor’s brain stuttered. “Sandy?” he said. “What do you mean, sandy?”

“Sandy People,” the woman said, as if this were the most obvious thing in the world. “Because your skin is the color of sand.”

The anthropologist stopped her recording. The psychologist looked up from his manual. The marketer’s mouth fell open slightly. The journalist’s fingers hovered over his keyboard, unsure whether to type this or pretend it hadn’t happened.

The Mayor felt something he had not felt in a very long time: the sensation of being named by someone else. Of being observed, categorized, labeled without his consent.

It was deeply, profoundly uncomfortable.

The Mayor felt the ground shifting beneath him. This was not how this was supposed to go. He was the namer, not the named. He was the one who brought order to chaos, not the one who was reduced to a simple physical descriptor.

“So what do we do?” he asked, and his voice was small now, stripped of its authority. “If we can’t name things, if we can’t categorize, if we can’t create frameworks for understanding… what do we do? How do we make sense of the world?”

The silver-haired woman smiled, and it was not unkind. “You observe,” she said. “You sit with the fragments. You let things be what they are without immediately needing to file them away. You stand on your own two feet instead of sinking into the sofa of pre-packaged narratives.”

“But that’s terrifying,” the Mayor said.

“Yes,” she agreed. “It is. For a while. And then it becomes liberating.”

The room fell silent. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, the city continued its endless motion—people scrolling, pointing, sliding, naming, categorizing, filing away their experiences into neat little boxes. Inside the conference room, five Purple People and one Mayor sat in the space between labels, in the frequency that has no name.

The journalist stopped typing. The anthropologist turned off her recorder. The psychologist closed his manual. The marketer put down her pen.

And then the Mayor was thinking about what it might be like to stand up.

“They’re not all you have,” the silver-haired woman said. “They’re just all you’ve been using. There’s a difference.”

The Mayor nodded slowly. He didn’t fully understand—not yet—but he could feel something shifting, some small crack in the edifice of his certainty. It would take time, he knew. Maybe years. Maybe forever. But the crack was there now, and he couldn’t unsee it.

The Purple People stood. They didn’t say goodbye—they simply left, moving through the space with that same quality of presence, that same frequency that the Sandy People perceived as purple but could never quite name.

The Mayor’s team looked at him, waiting for instructions, waiting to be told what this all meant, waiting for him to name what had just happened so they could file it away and move on.

But the Mayor said nothing. He just sat there, in the expensive ergonomic chair, in the conference room with floor-to-ceiling windows, feeling the fragments of his certainty scatter around him like light through a prism.

And for the first time in a very long time, he didn’t immediately try to put them back together.

*The labels only work as weapons if the person being labeled agrees to step into the cage.

From my vantage point (still elsewhere, still observing), I have been watching the aftermath of this meeting with great interest. The journalist published his article, of course. It was titled “The Unlabeled: A New Framework for Understanding Non-Conformity,” which rather missed the point but was very popular among the Sandy People. The anthropologist wrote a paper. The psychologist proposed a new diagnostic category. The marketer launched a consulting business helping companies “engage with unlabeled demographics.”

The Mayor, interestingly, did none of these things. He canceled his speaking engagements. He stopped writing. He spent a lot of time sitting in parks, just observing. The Sandy People found this very concerning and tried to diagnose him with various conditions (burnout, depression, midlife crisis), but he politely declined their labels.

I don’t know if he became Purple. I’m not sure that’s even how it works. But I do know that he stopped trying to name everything he saw, which is perhaps the first step.

The tragedy of the Sandy People, you see, is that they believe a thing is only real once it is named. The triumph of the Purple People is knowing that the most powerful things in the universe have no names.

Consider the frequency of the soul. You cannot put a label on the “spacing” between a person’s words or the “frequency” of their presence. When you observe the fragments—really observe them, without immediately filing them away—you are seeing the raw code of the universe. You are seeing the thing itself, not the pamphlet about the thing.

The Purple People understand this. When the Mayor said “we’ve found you,” he was trying to shoot them with a bullet made of language. But they weren’t made of language. They were made of presence, of frequency, of the space between things. So the bullet passed right through, and they remained sovereign.

This is the invitation the Purple People extend to the Sandy People, though most Sandy People are too frightened to accept it: Come see the world as fragments. It’s scary at first because there are no sofas, no pamphlets, no comfortable certainties. But for the first time, you’ll actually be standing on your own two feet.

Most Sandy People will not accept this invitation. They will continue scrolling, pointing, sliding. They will continue naming and categorizing and filing away their experiences. And that’s fine. There’s no judgment here. The sofa is comfortable. The pamphlets are reassuring. The labeled world is easier to navigate than the unlabeled one.

But some will accept. Some will stand up from the sofa, will put down their phones, will stop trying to immediately categorize every experience. Some will learn to sit with uncertainty, to observe without naming, to exist in the frequency that has no label.

And those people—whether they become Purple or something else entirely—will discover something the Mayor discovered in that conference room: that the most terrifying thing is also the most liberating thing.