Are we as special as we think?

Challenging our obsession with individuality

When I was little, I used to write stories for fun. Strange, fantastical stories that pulled me out of the hum of day-to-day life.

My characters were uncharacteristically eccentric: a depressed clown, a young girl who could travel to dimensions outside our own, a French woman who could singlehandedly overthrow a murderous plot.

They were, in other words, unique individuals — and I was a unique individual for having written them. And there was something delicious about that, a joy in being one-of-a-kind, unlike the others.

Paradoxically, though, that desire is thoroughly unoriginal. At least within contemporary individualistic cultures, like the one in which I live. The craving to be a unique individual underlies just about everything here.

We’re told from a young age to “be ourselves” and praised when we successfully differentiate ourselves in sports, art, and music. Blending in has become a curse — a surefire way to plummet to the bottom in a capitalistic world that rewards distinctiveness and ingenuity.

Where it’s planted, individualism runs deep. It’s a way of moving through the world that consistently centers individuality — your own, or even that of others. Within such cultures, we describe ourselves by our personal attributes, not our social roles. We’re driven to achieve and make a name for ourselves, conscious always of our own actualization. The rest of us are left in the dust while you chase an ideal version of that one and only self you inhabit.

However, if the world revolves around the individual, and not the collective, then you must constantly be in the process of distinguishing yourself. And, unfortunately, that’s a long, tiresome, doomed process. While we’re all screaming into the void about our uncontested originality, we sound less like individuals and more like this hilarious Life of Brian scene.

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But, surely, I’m different

I had a stint where I was obsessively checking online notifications. It felt so good to see a bright circled number, something that I’d been conditioned to view as a source of validation, reassurance, social connection, success. I had succumbed to that pesky little cycle of variable ratio reinforcement — or when the reward comes unpredictably, sometimes there, sometimes not.

But it didn’t feel like conditioning or reinforcement. I simply felt good whenever I saw that badge notification. It felt private, unique to me. I wasn’t thinking in global, psychological terms. No one does; we think in individual, immediate terms. We think about other people in big, lofty, psychological terms.

In fact, we’re so prone to think of ourselves as unique and unlike everyone else that we often forget that we’re subject to the exact same forces that govern everyone else.

Being human invariably means being a creature susceptible to a host of largely unavoidable conditions: cognitive biases (how many of us think we’re above average again . . . oh right, a LOT), imbalanced blood sugar, aging, the rush of neurotransmitters that makes us feel happy or stressed or angry or loved.

But, again, it doesn’t feel like this. Most of the time, we couldn’t articulate what factors are influencing our moment-to-moment perception. Whether it’s conditioning, biases, or blood sugar, we feel justified in our behavior. Even if, intellectually, I know that perhaps I’ve been conditioned to frantically check a notification, I can easily summon the excuse that it’s just what I wanted to do in this specific, freely chosen moment.

And this makes sense . . . our individual perspective is so limited. We quite literally only have direct access to our single experience, which is bound tightly by space and time. So, of course, to us everything feels monumental, significant, personal. Our particular desires and inclinations and distractions feel unique to us, but that’s likely because we don’t know what it feels like to be anyone else — not because we’re actually different from the rest.

At the same time, you are still certainly a unique blend of genetic material interacting with a very specific environment, which yields the one and only you. In this way, the illusion of the self is incredibly persistent. There really is only one you, and you might very well differ from the average on any number of metrics. But you’re still one of the herd, so to say. You’re not immune from the human struggle, no matter where your specific disposition falls on the graph.

This is why, despite all the dramatic variation on the individual level, psychological data is nearly always captured in the aggregate. We look at big samples, divided randomly to control for all the idiosyncratic quirks that accompany each person — knowing that if our variable has any effect, it will cut across all our layers of difference.

I had an anthropology professor in college who lamented this big, impersonal nature of psychological research. She preferred the granular approach of cultural anthropology: in-depth interviews with a handful of people, painstaking notes, the gradual piecing together of a narrative.

The argument was that it was only through this approach that you could truly understand the circumstances, motives, and behaviors that constitute a person. And I suppose that’s true — if detailed knowledge of the individual is your goal. But often, this isn’t our goal.

You are infinitely interesting, but you have a lot more in common with the rest of humankind than you might think — so for efficiency’s sake, let’s not start from scratch with each individual.

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Big numbers, small brains

There’s something deeply unsatisfying about the deindividuation narrative I’ve just set in motion above. As research psychologist Paul Bloom says in his most recent book, Psych: The Story of the Human Mind:

In our everyday lives, we care a lot about differences. If I’m telling you about my sister, I wouldn’t say, “She has short-term memory and long-term memory, and can understand sentences she’s never heard before.” If I wanted to introduce you to a potential date, I wouldn’t say, “He enjoys eating when hungry and gets angry when treated unfairly.” Tell me the interesting stuff, you’d say. Tell me what makes these people special . . . Only scientists, thinking as scientists, care about universals. Most of the time we are interested in how individuals are different.

Particularly in individualistic cultures, we’re drawn to a person’s intriguingly distinctive features. We want to know what makes you, you.

Ironically, though, we don’t have a lot of bandwidth for all of the many, many individuals we now meet, hear about, or scroll past during the course of our modern, media-saturated lives. We can’t keep all those unique personalities straight — so we default to stereotypes and other heuristics to organize people into convenient groups.

While organization and stereotyping aren’t uniformly bad, they become problematic when we start to separate the world’s population into in-groups versus out-groups — with in-groups being all the groups to which you happen to belong, and out-groups being all the rest to which you don’t.

Within the confines of our in-group, we’re happy to consider each other discrete, fully complex, multitude-containing individuals. But it’s among our out-groups where we fail to appreciate the nuance of that once-prized individual.

Even worse, it’s not just out-group members that give us pause. It’s big groups, too. In his book Enlightenment Now, renowned psychologist Steven Pinker describes us as “by nature illiterate and innumerate, quantifying the world by ‘one, two, many’ and by rough guesstimates.” His observation explains why when tragedy strikes a big, distant group of people, we don’t drum up as much sympathy as we do for a single, local incident. Or why large groups of people who don’t align with us politically are simply dumped into a big out-group category that we don’t like.

Yet, the real individuals in our lives with whom we don’t agree are infinitely more complex; we’re much more likely to excuse their behavior because we view them as actual individuals with complex webs of background, reasoning, experiences. The mental shortcuts we take for everyone else don’t apply. Unfortunately, our minds simply don’t stretch that far by default.

All this homogenizing, while much more pronounced for our out-groups, still comes into play within our in-groups, though, too. We want differentiation — but only within a very strict, socially acceptable realm. We want to be just a little bit better than our peers, not wholly different, not overly unlike our in-group of focus.

Because, in fact, there are many times when we crave the comfort of sameness and aspire to lose our precious individuality at all costs. Much of the tension of adolescence can be boiled down to: I want to be different, yet blend in at the same time . . .

When it comes to our in-groups, we favor them precisely because of their sameness, their predictability, their mutual understanding. In stress or anguish, we want to be like our fellow creatures — our isolated differentiation is the source of our problems, not the solution. It’s why phrases like, “You’re not alone” or “Don’t worry, this is normal” are default comfort language. It’s why we turn to support groups and forums, looking for solace in situations that mirror our own.

In the midst of our small, sometimes painful existence, we don’t ultimately want individuality. We want connection, familiarity. We want to dissolve what makes us so starkly us.

And as we start to expand the boundaries of who we are and to whom we belong in an increasingly globalized world, we’ll ideally also start to loosen our grip on the goal of distinguishing ourselves, of prizing individuality above all else — without succumbing to tribalism and stereotyping. We’ll see the past the big numbers and group-based identities without forcing everyone to put on a show of uniqueness.

It’s a lofty goal — but don’t you already feel the pressure lightening up a bit?

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As always, thank you for reading. If you found this article valuable, I hope you’ll press the heart at the top or bottom of it to help others discover my work.

Coincidentally, writing here allows me to express my own individuality in a vibrant, intellectually stimulating space — and you make that possible.