My Uniqueness Has Been Discontinued

Globalisation killed my uniqueness.

Not my talent, necessarily. Not my ability to think, write, or look at things from an uncomfortable angle. It killed something much more delicate: my belief that being different was, in itself, a distinction.

Before the internet, I competed with people who shared my geographical location. We lived in the same cultural environment, were exposed to roughly the same intellectual influences, and had access to more or less the same information. Our differences were shaped by our personalities, our experiences, our education, and whatever peculiar arrangements our brains had made with reality.

And I competed.

I didn’t want to sound like everyone else. I didn’t want to look like everyone else. I wanted to offer something different, something unexpected, something that might make people raise an eyebrow, reconsider an opinion, or feel slightly uncomfortable with an idea they had previously accepted without question.

It didn’t necessarily have to be better. Better is a questionable concept, anyway, especially when applied to things that cannot be measured with a ruler. It had to be different. It had to challenge something.

And, in my little corner of the world, it worked.

Then came the internet, that magnificent machine designed to connect humanity, democratise knowledge, and give every individual an opportunity to express themselves. Nobody mentioned that it would also put every individual on the planet in direct competition with every other individual on the planet.

A minor omission, perhaps.

Suddenly, my little corner of the world became the entire world. The pool of competitors expanded from a manageable number of people to several billion potential participants, many of whom had access to the same information, the same cultural references, the same philosophical debates, and the same collection of ideas that I had spent years believing made me different.

I could have lived with that. Competition has never particularly frightened me. What I hadn’t anticipated was the discovery that the competition wasn’t merely producing similar results.

It was producing me.

I read something written by a complete stranger and recognise my own reasoning. I encounter an argument and find myself agreeing not just with its conclusion but with the precise route taken to reach it. I notice the same peculiar combination of logic, irony, contradiction, and provocation. Sometimes even the rhythm of the expression feels familiar.

And I sit there thinking: Excuse me. Who gave you permission to think like that?

The rational part of my brain understands that nobody needed my permission. The less reasonable part would like to speak to the management.

The most disturbing discovery is that these people are not necessarily copying me. Many of them have probably never heard of me. They have arrived at similar conclusions independently, through their own experiences, observations, and intellectual journeys.

Which is considerably worse for my ego.

If they were copying me, I could claim influence. If they were stealing my ideas, I could claim ownership. But when strangers independently arrive at the same thoughts, construct the same arguments, and express them in strikingly similar ways, the whole business becomes much harder to negotiate.

Apparently, my intellectual fingerprints are not as exclusive as I had imagined.

Perhaps they never were.

This is where the problem becomes more interesting than a bruised ego. What does uniqueness actually mean when millions of people have access to the same world, consume the same information, and observe the same absurdities?

We like to believe that our thoughts are the products of our individual minds, as though each of us were a small, self-contained intellectual factory, manufacturing original ideas from privately owned raw materials.

But the raw materials have always belonged to the world.

We inherit language. We absorb culture. We learn patterns of reasoning, even when we later reject them. We react to the same human behaviours, recognise the same contradictions, and become irritated by the same nonsense. There are only so many ways to observe hypocrisy before somebody else notices the same thing and reaches for a pen.

The internet has not necessarily made us more alike. It has made our similarities impossible to ignore.

Before, I could be the most unusual person in a room without knowing that somewhere else, in another country, another person was thinking exactly as I was. My uniqueness was partly a consequence of limited exposure. I could compare myself with the people I knew, the writers I read, the artists I encountered. My sample was small, and my conclusions were therefore conveniently flattering.

Now the sample is enormous. Every day, I encounter evidence that my particular way of thinking is neither as rare nor as unprecedented as I once believed.

There is something almost indecent about this abundance of intellectual resemblance. I thought I had discovered a private exit from conventional thinking, only to find a queue of people waiting at the same door.

And some of them have better shoes.

Of course, there is another possibility. Perhaps I am confusing uniqueness with exclusivity.

Being different does not mean being the only person who has ever thought a particular thought. It does not even mean being the first. It means bringing something of yourself to the thought: a history, a sensibility, a collection of experiences that changes the way you see it and the way you express it.

Two people can arrive at the same conclusion without having travelled the same road. They can use similar arguments while attaching different meanings to them. They can write about the same subject and leave entirely different traces in the reader.

An idea can be shared. Its precise place in a person’s life cannot.

I understand all this perfectly well. Understanding, however, does not prevent disappointment. Knowing that a thing is irrational does not make it less irritating, as anyone who has ever attempted to have a sensible conversation with another human being will confirm.

What disappoints me is not that other people are capable of thinking like me. It is that the very things I once used to distinguish myself have become so familiar that I struggle to recognise them as distinctions at all.

The unusual has become ordinary. The provocative has become a content category. The contrarian has acquired an audience, a posting schedule, and possibly a personal brand. Even rebellion has developed a recognisable aesthetic, complete with the correct typography and a carefully selected colour palette.

We have industrialised individuality.

Everyone is encouraged to be authentic, original, unconventional, disruptive, and unapologetically themselves. Millions of people are following this advice simultaneously, which produces the rather amusing spectacle of humanity collectively trying to stand apart from humanity.

The result is not necessarily a world without originality. It is a world in which originality is immediately surrounded by its relatives.

You publish an unusual thought, and somebody has already written an essay about it. You formulate a provocative argument, and someone else has expressed it more elegantly. You find a fresh way to describe an old contradiction, only to discover that the internet has been discussing the same contradiction since before you learned to type.

There is no longer any reliable silence in which to hear your own voice.

And perhaps this is the real cost of globalisation, at least for those of us who built part of our identity around being different. It has removed the comfortable distance between our own minds and the minds of others. We can no longer mistake the limits of our immediate environment for the limits of human similarity.

We have been forced to confront the possibility that we are not rare creatures after all, but variations on a theme. That our supposedly exceptional thoughts may be shared by strangers who have never crossed our paths. That the qualities we consider defining may be common, while the combinations in which they appear are what make us recognisable.

I am not entirely reconciled to this discovery.

There was something satisfying about being the person who said what nobody else seemed willing to say. There was pleasure in challenging familiar ideas and watching people struggle with the possibility that their assumptions might not survive the encounter. There was a certain freedom in believing that I was operating outside the established patterns.

Now I sometimes read something online and feel as though I have arrived at a party wearing the same dress as everyone else.

Worse, some of them are wearing it better.

But perhaps the mistake was never in wanting to be different. Perhaps it was in believing that difference could be secured, possessed, and defended against the rest of humanity.

It cannot.

Uniqueness is not a certificate issued by the universe, confirming that nobody else has ever had the same idea. Nor is it a permanent condition. It changes as we encounter other minds, discover new possibilities, and realise how much of ourselves is shared with people we may never meet.

I can continue to write what I think, challenge what I find questionable, and search for expressions that feel true to my experience. I can refuse to imitate the crowd, even when I discover that the crowd has independently developed a taste for my particular kind of nonsense.

What I can no longer do is assume that being unlike the people around me makes me unlike people in general.

That illusion has expired.

And, if I am honest, I am not sure what replaces it.

Perhaps freedom. Perhaps humility. Perhaps the rather less glamorous responsibility of creating something worthwhile without needing to believe that nobody else could have created it.

I suspect that last possibility is the most difficult. It requires us to separate the value of what we produce from the flattering belief that we are uniquely qualified to produce it.

It also requires us to accept that somebody, somewhere, is probably thinking along the same lines, using similar words, and reaching a similar conclusion.

I would prefer not to know about them.

Unfortunately, the internet has made ignorance a subscription service I can no longer afford.

So here I am, competing with the entire world, discovering daily that my intellectual neighbourhood is considerably more populated than I imagined.

My uniqueness has been discontinued.

No replacement model has been announced.

And the truly annoying part is that I may have to carry on being myself anyway.