Somewhere along the way, rebellion got a dress code. The people rejecting the mainstream all look identical. The free thinkers think the same thoughts. The non-conformists conform perfectly to non-conformity.
Walk into any coffee shop in any city in the world. The same plants. The same fonts. The same exposed brick and Edison bulbs. The same people on laptops, dressed in the same “effortless” way, performing the same curated individuality.
We’re living through the age of mass uniqueness. Everyone is expressing themselves. And somehow, all that self-expression looks exactly alike.
How did this happen?
The philosopher René Girard had a theory called “mimetic desire.” We don’t actually know what we want. We copy the desires of others. You want that job, that aesthetic, that lifestyle because you saw someone else wanting it. Desire is contagious. And when everyone is catching the same desire while believing it’s their own, you get a world of people who feel unique but are functionally identical.
This is different from old conformity. Old conformity was explicit. The company dress code. The suburban expectations. The pressure to fit in. You knew you were conforming, and some people rebelled against it.
New conformity is invisible. Everyone believes they’re expressing their authentic self. That’s what makes it so effective. You can’t rebel against a conformity you don’t recognise. You just think you have great taste.
Look at what’s happened to counterculture. Every subculture gets absorbed, aestheticised, and sold back within months. Punk becomes a font. Rebellion becomes a brand. The underground surfaces so fast there is no underground anymore. There’s just the mainstream pretending to be alternative.
The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called this “distinction.” We use cultural taste to signal who we are, to separate ourselves from others. But when everyone reads the same articles about what’s tasteful, distinction collapses. The markers of individuality become mass-produced. You’re not signalling difference. You’re wearing the same uniform as everyone else who’s trying to be different.
Social media accelerated this into absurdity. The algorithm shows you what works. What gets likes, what gets shares, what gets attention. So everyone optimises for the same signals. The quirky person performs quirky the same way as every other quirky person. The minimalist lives like every other minimalist. The “authentic” are authentic in identical ways.
You can see it in apartments. The same fiddle leaf fig. The same Moroccan rug. The same “collected over time” look that was actually collected from the same three stores. People think they’re expressing personal taste. They’re executing a Pinterest board that a million others are also executing.
You can see it in opinions. The discourse cycles through the same takes. People feel strongly about the thing it’s time to feel strongly about. They move on when it’s time to move on. They think they’re thinking. They’re syncing.
The philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes about the “hell of the same.” Late capitalism doesn’t suppress difference. It exploits the appearance of difference while eliminating actual difference. You can have any identity you want as long as it’s consumable, as long as it fits the market, as long as it can be sold back to people like you.
This is the trap. You think you’re choosing. You are choosing, technically. But you’re choosing from a menu that was designed for you, based on your demographics, your clicks, your cohort. The freedom is real and the outcome is homogenous. Everyone freely arrives at the same place.
Here’s what’s lost. Actual eccentricity. The person who doesn’t fit any template. The taste that can’t be categorised. The life that doesn’t photograph well. The thoughts that haven’t been optimised for sharing. These are increasingly rare because they’re increasingly punished. Legibility is rewarded. Strangeness is not.
The writer Mark Fisher called it “the slow cancellation of the future.” When everything is recycled, remixed, referenced, nothing genuinely new can emerge. We’re stuck in a loop of the same, endlessly recombining familiar elements, mistaking recombination for creation.
So what do you do?
First, notice the mimicry. Catch yourself wanting something and ask: do I want this, or did I see someone else wanting it? The question won’t always have a clean answer, but asking it creates a gap where genuine choice can emerge.
Second, seek out the illegible. Find people who don’t fit categories, whose taste can’t be easily sourced, who haven’t optimised themselves for consumption. They exist. They’re just not amplified by the algorithm.
Third, tolerate your own strangeness. The parts of you that don’t match the template, that aren’t marketable, that you’ve hidden because they don’t perform well, those might be the only parts that are actually yours.
Fourth, remember that visibility isn’t validity. Just because everyone is doing something doesn’t mean it’s good. Just because your taste is unpopular doesn’t mean it’s wrong. The crowd is not a compass.
The philosopher Kierkegaard wrote about the “crowd” as untruth. When you merge into the mass, you lose yourself. The crowd thinks, so you don’t have to. The crowd chooses, so you don’t have to. It’s comfortable. It’s also a kind of death.
Actual individuality is uncomfortable. It’s lonely. It means making choices that can’t be validated by reference to what everyone else is doing. It means sometimes being wrong and having no company in your wrongness. It means not fitting.
The uniform of individuality is still a uniform. You can take it off. You can find out what’s underneath.
Maybe nothing. Maybe something strange and unmarketable and yours.
Only one way to find out.