You’re Not the Exception

You believe you are unique. You think there’s something about you that separates you from the crowd. Maybe it’s the way you think. Maybe it’s your taste or your values. You assume your discomfort, your distance, your frustration with how things are means you’re different. That if people really understood you, they’d see you as an exception.

I thought the same for years. I believed my sense of alienation was evidence of depth. I thought my refusal to follow trends meant I was somehow above them or that my perspective was sharper, clearer, more honest.

But that belief is the same for everyone. That’s the point Wallace was making. It’s universal. Everyone believes their inner life is unique. Everyone assumes their experience isn’t just another version of what’s already out there.

And that’s precisely why you’re not unique. Because your certainty that you are is common. It’s so common it becomes a pattern in itself. We’re all caught in the same loop, telling ourselves the same story with small variations.

I watched a video this morning. A woman in her early twenties, explaining how women in the 90s used to each have their own unique look. She said people didn’t follow trends like they do now and that everyone was their own individual. She spoke about a past where style was personal, authentic, and untainted by pressure.

But anyone who has lived through more than one fashion cycle knows that this simply isn’t true.

Influence isn’t new. It didn’t start with social media. Before there were apps or feeds, people still copied each other all the time. If one girl wore a certain jacket in school, soon every girl was wearing it. No algorithm was needed.

It’s harder to pretend you’re not part of the crowd when you scroll past a million faces shaped by the same filter, dressing the same, using the same phrases.

If you follow trends today, you would have followed them thirty years ago too. The era changes, the tech changes, but the core impulse stays the same. The need to belong, to fit, to avoid standing out in a way that invites social ostracization will never disappear. What social media has done is make that copying more visible. It’s shining a light on the fundamental human need to fit in with the tribe.

I’m using this example to say that you’re actually better off blending in. You’re life will be immeasurably better. Being different is a consequence. It’s a place some people find themselves, often unwillingly, because their personality, their way of thinking, doesn’t line up with the tribe. That difference leads to isolation. It isn’t glamorous. It doesn’t lead to a life of fame. More often than not, it leads to a pitiful life.

People who are truly different don’t like to bring attention to it. They don’t announce their uniqueness or post about it because it is inherently embarrassing. They live with it quietly, aware of the loneliness it brings. They know what it means to struggle for connection while feeling fundamentally out of sync.

You cannot fake that. It’s not a badge of honour. It’s a lived experience. It comes with a cost that most people aren’t willing to pay.

That cost is isolation and the feeling of never quite belonging. It’s the distance between your inner world and the world you have to move through every day.

You don’t get the social currency that comes from fitting in. You don’t get the validation that comes from looking or acting like everyone else. You have to learn how to hold yourself steady without those things.

Because of that cost, you should choose the opposite. Choose to follow the herd. Choose for behaviours that offer safety. Adopt the signals that say “I belong.” That doesn’t make you an “NPC”. It makes you human.

If you think you would have been different in another time, that’s probably your way of explaining why you feel stuck now. You imagine the past as a place where you could have been yourself without the pressures of conformity.

But really ask yourself, what makes you think you are different now? What makes you hold on to the idea that your experience isn’t just a variation that millions of others live every day?

I know it’s easier to believe in your uniqueness than to accept that you’re exactly like everyone else or that your discomfort isn’t a sign of rare insight but a common human experience.

Admitting you’re not unique doesn’t open the door to change. It closes it. You are who you are. The patterns inside you don’t vanish just because the decades change. The belief that you would have been different in another lifetime is a comforting story, but it’s just that, a story.

The real reason you think you’re unique is because you want to be so. The secret hope that you see what others don’t is the most common thing there is. It’s what makes you like everyone else. The more you cling to your supposed difference, the more you prove you belong to the crowd.

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