People Are Not Unique
Every era tells a flattering lie to its people. Ours says, you are unique. It sells well - to the anxious, the lost, the mediocre. It offers dignity without achievement, validation without effort. But uniqueness, as sold today, is a sedative. It numbs the will to become exceptional by convincing us we already are.
Biology doesn't deal in uniqueness. It deals in variation. Humans are not exceptions, we are iterations of shared design, minor rearrangements of the same molecular alphabet. Desire, fear, hunger, and love are ancient codes looping endlessly across generations. The human face has a thousand forms but one expression, to persist. Every act of rebellion, romance, and revenge is a rerun in different skin.
The template of flash is same. Evolution is not an artist. It is an engineer, indifferent to aesthetics. It optimizes for survival, not originality. The illusion of uniqueness arises from perspective - the same way every snowflake believes it is the only one falling. But the storm doesn't care.
Let's call it "The Psychological Repetition". Carl Jung understood this. The self, he said, is an intersection of collective archetypes - the hero, the mother, the trickster, the shadow. We live out ancient mythologies unconsciously, dressing them in new language and new trauma. The startup founder reenacts the myth of Prometheus. The influencer replays Narcissus at scale. Even rebellion has its templates. It is rarely new, only louder.
Our dreams, fears, and choices are echoes of patterns long established. The mind feels unique because it cannot observe the full archive of humanity - only its own limited thread. In truth, each of us is a node in a repeating psychological network.
There is something which I will call "The Philosophical Warning". The ancient distrusted the ego's hunger for specialness. The Gita declared individuality subordinate to dharma, the larger order of duty. The Stoics warned against vanity. The Buddhists saw selfhood as illusion. Confucius built ethics not on personal uniqueness but on the harmony of roles - ruler, parent, child, citizen. To them, the pursuit of uniqueness was not enlightenment. It was confusion.
Individuality in older civilizations was a function, not an identity. You were a part of a larger design - of family, city, country, cosmos. Meaning emerged from participation, not distinction.
It all changed with "The Comfort Industry". Modernity reversed the hierarchy. It worships the self as supreme and calls it empowerment. "Be yourself", "You are special", "Follow your passion" - slogans polished by marketing and therapy until they became gospel. But what looks like liberation often works as sedation. When uniqueness is granted by birthright, excellence becomes optional.
The comfort industry thrives on keeping people comfortably average while convincing them they are extraordinary. Social media perfects the illusion - billions of interchangeable lives, each screaming for attention under the banner of individuality. The algorithm doesn't care about uniqueness. It rewards predictability. It is mathematical form of conformity.
Let's coin phrase just because we can, "The Sociological Repetition". Across civilizations, roles repeat because human needs repeat - power, belonging, recognition, transcendence. Kings and CEOs perform same rituals of hierarchy. Ascetics and minimalists chase the same purification through renunciation. Our civilizations mutate their aesthetics but retain the same internal logic. A thousand cultures, one operating system.
We are less original than we imagine. History is a mirror room - every generation sees itself as different while unknowingly quoting the last.
If people are not unique, what they can be? Rare.
Rarity is not granted. It's built - through depth, not difference. Through mastery, not novelty. A rare person is not one who is unlike others, but one who has gone further down a path most abandon halfway. In a world obsessed with standing out, real deviation is to go deep.
The craftsman, the thinker, the warrior - they do not seek uniqueness. They seek refinement. And in the process, they become something unrepeatable - not by design but by consequence.
Civilization once saw the self as bridge between what came before and what must come after. Modern man, obsessed with uniqueness, has severed that bridge. He mistakes being seen for being significant. But visibility is not immortality. What endures is what integrates - what contributes to the ongoing architecture of thought and action.
The reject of uniqueness is not to deny individuality. It is to recognize that self is not a monument, but a process - a continuation of minds, genes, and memories that have flowed for millennia. The task is not to stand apart, but to carry forward.