What happens when we all want to be unique?

This episode discusses the rise in exceptionalism in western democracies and the perverse and detrimental effect it is having when combined with social media.

What happens when we ALL want to be special is that we end up creating, unintentionally, a spiral of self abuse which is harmful to our mental health. This episode discusses ways in which we can get beck on track and help ourselves and the wider society.

How to be a good Hu(man)

Kindly inquisitors (great book explaining the rise of woke)

Transcript

Hi, and welcome to the podcast, that accompanies the book called How to be a good human. I'm Andrew Wilson, aka IAMSHOKUNIN  And today I want to talk to you about What happens, when we all want to be unique. 

Today, we all feel that we can be unique. It’s a truly liberating feeling really - I’m not entirely sure when it all started or indeed why it started at all. Maybe we have always thought that as individuals we were unique, but I don’t think so - I have looked online to see if I could find a source for it, but I haven’t really found any conclusive answer.

It may be a byproduct of what they call exceptionalism, a belief that at an individual level or a group level we are special -  it might be simply the effect that social media has had on all of us which is to ask us to continuously post things about ourselves in order to make ourselves seem more interesting than we actually are.

I rather think we’ve been trained to think that way, we have the internet and social media The more traditional media outlets, the TV, and they're all showing us how we can have our unique talents and celebrate how unique and special we are in everything from being a talented singer to a talented writer to a special person with a gift of some sort -  this is how we have been brought up in Perhaps the last 20 years, 30 years.

I first came across this trait when my son first went to school in about 2005 when he started to come home with medals. When I enquired as to what competition he had won that would land him with a medal I was told that “all the children got one for participating”. This was alien to me as I had been brought up to understand that you won medals by being first and winning whatever it was you were competing in.

I first noticed something was wrong when my son didn’t really want to take part in these events. It turned out he only wanted to compete if he had a chance of winning. All he was getting told at school way “it’s okay just to participate, if you participate you ARE a winner”. Clearly at the tender age of 5 he realised this was a load of rubbish and he could clearly differentiate between winning and being sold down the river like he was being.

So, you know, this was very interesting -  how at a very young age children are competitive, they want to win they want to be good, they want to be rewarded for something they've actually achieved, and yet at the same time we've undergone in western democracies certainly in the US and the UK, some form of transition in the last 20 or 30 years where we seem to believe that participation is what is important, rather than winning. 

Now I understand that if you want to create a collaborative society where people work together  - then participation is important, but we also have to understand human nature which is inherently competitive. 

You cannot protect your children from the horrible feeling of losing or protect them from the need to bite their tongue and congratulate the winner, no matter how hard that might be at the time. 

But we haven’t done that, and we now have a lot of people who EXPECT to be rewarded for turning up and don’t seem to value the idea that there are people who are a lot more deserving than they are because they are technically the winners in a race that was never run in their demographic. 

For some reason we seem to regard capable people as having some kind of privilege. We saw this happen in the UK when we decided that more people should become university graduates. 

It used to be that about 5% of the population were actually capable and motivated to go to University at a time when it was free to go to university. Now 23% of the population go to University and they have to pay. 

How is this possible you might ask - has 18% of the population miraculously become intelligent enough to go to University? 

Anyway that’s for another discussion, but it has certainly increased the sense of entitlement amongst a larger proportion of the population and this coupled with our desire to be seen as unique has led many of our young folk down a road where they feel that they SHOULD be unique, and WANT to be unique and feel that they are privileged enough to DEMAND that they should be regarded as special.

If 30 years ago we had a national crisis of self confidence I could have understood why we went down this particular road, but to be honest I don’t think we did have that crisis.

So here we are, with potentially 50% of the younger generation with a preconceived idea about themselves living in a technological world that drives their beliefs -  wanting to be identified as unique and special in some way.

But here’s the thing about being special and unique - you are only special and unique if everybody else thinks you are. It isn’t something you can decide. and if no one agrees with your point of view, guess what?, you find out you're not that special after all.

Coming to this realisation for the first time in your life  - where you actually find out that the world doesn’t care what you think is a truly terrible thing. What do we think we are doing as a society, selling dreams like this that cannot be realised or at least guaranteed.  What we are doing is asking people to effectively have to start growing up in their 20’s at a time when there is less support from school, teachers, parents or anything. And we wonder why we have an escalating mental health issue in society!

What troubles me most is that we seem to have sold people on the idea that they can be anything they like, we have contributed to giving people a false sense of self, and this is such a dangerous thing if left unchecked by the realities of life. 

How have we managed to create a situation where we have tried educate people that participation is the important thing rather than winning and ended up with a situation where we are fighting for our individuality. Perhaps it is our increased desire to be seen as individuals actually stems for the suppression of our natural instinct to compete. Who knows?

 In the Western world we now seem to be moving towards special interest groups as our way of forming a self identity. 

Let’s be clear here though, we are not in actual fact forming our self identity, because that, should have been what we were learning as children, we are in fact displacing our identity and fragmenting-it in multiple identity groups. In a sense this is pathologically similar to a form of schizophrenia. Without a true and robust and conscious knowledge the self, it is dangerous to self-identify with all of our special interest groups.

You see this experiment won’t work for the following reason:

Firstly - We are not all equal, we are generally speaking not that exceptional, we are on the whole not really that special. The truth is that most of us are really very normal and a small percentage of people in the world are disproportionately gifted. This has always been the case and continues to be so.

This drive towards group identity is not new. It may be accelerating with the facilitation of social media, but it’s not new. We have always been segregated in some way through religion, cast systems, socio economic class systems, nationality, sex, belief systems, history,, in fact if you go down this particular rabbit hole you will realise that the problem we face is how fragmented and segregated we are. 

Let me give you an example of how social media fools us into thinking we are important. I wrote a business book a few years ago and I recently republished it on Amazon. I chose to promote it and give it away to people. So I made it free to download. I gave away 26 copies and am now number 1 in the business book category on amazon. Now, the social media is telling me I am number 1, I am a best seller in the world, I am special, but the reality is if my book can get to number one after 26 downloads, the reality is as follows: not many people are reading books, and even fewer are reading business books and if I can be number 1 after 26 downloads, it means someone is blowing smoke up my proverbial. I tell you all of this because that is how social media and the internet works, they sell you this idea that you can be famous and successful on the back of 26 books or a few hundred likes. It’s a total nonsense.

So coming back to the subject at hand, What we actually need in this world more than anything else is to be less seggregated less special, more normal in our self identifies. We need to take a more rational view of our capabilities in relation to those around us.

But that is not the direction we are heading, we are in fact heading in the opposite direction.

We've seen this idea in business. And it's called markets of one, and it was this idea that we could make one product for one person, and we would be capable of differentiating our product range to such an extent that everything could become personalised. And the result is that the complexity that that has driven in manufacturing and in business has been vast to the degree that no one actually makes any money out of this strategy. 

So, now we are in the process of reversing that complexity. Because we now know it doesn't work. And I think to some extent we're starting to learn that, with regard to schooling, as well, society and this modern desire to be “recognised” for something.

So I rather think that being taught that you are special and unique and should be treated in a different way to everyone else is actually a curse, because the problem is: no one else knows that you're meant to be special. 

So, you have to spend most of your life going around telling everyone that you're special. And what happens? what happens is that no one really agrees with you. What’s worse most people don’t care.

You know they sort of look at you and make a polite nodding action and sort of go “well you know if you think so”. And you kind of know that they're not being genuine and they genuinely don't believe that you're special. So, you end up feeling bad about yourself. 

So what happens when we feel special or we've been taught to feel special and no one else agrees with our assessment of ourselves or cares or even notices  - Well, what we tend to do is we seek out others who are similar to ourselves, we go in search of people that have similar beliefs to ourselves, and we form a group, because that's good, that's self-fulfilling. It's rewarding, it's supportive to have people that believe the same things that we do. 

The next thing we do is we start to promote our group, or in modern parlance our tribe. 

Shortly after this, we find enough confidence in our group-identity to go ahead and try and educate the people around us who previously weren’t that interested in us (and presumably still aren’t) about how special we are.

So rather than it just being me on my own saying, I'm special. I can sort of say look, there's quite a few of us that are special. 

But what happens when that doesn't work either. Because, to be perfectly honest, if you don't really think one person is special, then you're pretty unlikely to think that a group of unremarkable people are going to be any more special than the individual person was in the first place. I know this sounds really harsh, but you have to step back and consider what people really think of you. I mean we all like to think that we are popular and liked and interesting,           but is that really true? Are we? or are we only interesting to a few people and most people are more interested in themselves. I think that’s more likely.

If you are dependent on others for your self validation and support then you have an uphill battle in my view, as most people are only generally interested in themselves more often than not. It sometimes feels like everyone is wandering around hoping that everyone else finds them special and interesting not realising that everyone else is doing the same thing, this is what happens when we focus outwards for our validation rather than inwards. It makes us weak and susceptible to offence and negative feelings. But that is the world we now live in, where we are encouraged every day to share our lives online in the hope that people will “like” us. 

It’s false, it dangerous and it is most certainly damaging to some peoples mental health.

So the reality is that it doesn't work particularly well. 

So what happens!

Well we tend to retreat into our bubble. We self-identify we identify with our tribe and the people around us -  we listen to our echo chamber and we become slowly hostile to outsiders.

We don't like it when the outside world comes into our bubble and disrupts it. So in a way, we've created a form of self-segregation for ourselves. We've segregated ourselves from society, 

 - in some ways, we have gone into exile -  we've been caught up in a form of self inflicted apartheid that we've imposed on ourselves, and as a result we are becoming more fragmented and polarised as a society by the day. We end up fragmented and bitter towards each other, and feeling that we can't communicate with each other, or not wanting to communicate with each other, just wanting to self identify. 

So in the end we end up with identity issues and relationship issues. And so what starts off as a great idea. Initially with people being encouraged to participate, ends-up being a form of self-inflicted-harm, a sort of form of unintentional abuse - in systems thinking terms. This is called a fix that fails. 

It may have been, that the withdrawal of modern societies from religion has had something to do with the need to replace it with a social participation need. Maybe it is our move to a more secular society that has been the stimulus for all of this. The problem is that the church and more specifically God, actually gave all of us something other than ourselves to revolve around. It allowed us to be part of a community of shared values and tolerant beliefs.  I know there will be people out there who will disagree about the tolerant part and that’s as maybe -

What we may see as an end-result of  todays world, is perhaps simply a desire for us all to return to a time when we all had something other than ourselves to think about.

Thats what God did for us - it made us believe that there was someone much more powerful and special than ourselves - in fact God made us realise how unremarkable we really were and how we were all very similar in our unremarkableness. 

So what I’m saying here is that our move to a secular society may have something to do with why we now feel we can be special, because we are no longer comparing ourselves to an omniscient and omnipresent being!

So what can we do? to make things better for ourselves going forward?

If you want to be unique and special, then you have to realise that you actually have to do something to earn that badge. Falling back on how you might feel different or how you think you might identify differently with something isn’t what I mean, we all have to realise that we all think and feel differently about everything most of the time - that’s how we are made. So trying to make a big deal out of that is a bit nonsensical as it doesn't actually MEAN anything.

So in summary - You can’t be special just because you think you are - that’s not how it works. It’s not a thought. It's not something abstract it's not a conceptual idea. Those things do not make you unique. 

Actually, if you pursue that type of belief system you actually end up being what’s called delusional. So the lesson here is don't delude yourself into believing that because you have an idea about your identity that that is a validation in itself - it rarely is. 

Just because you can think it -  does not make it real. 

If you want to do something that is truly unique then you actually have to do something, and you actually have to be unique. 

It's no good you going around trying to persuade other people that what you think you are and how unique you think you are is important enough that everyone else should think the same thing. 

It simply doesn't work that way. 

You actually have to be that unique idea  - that unique thing that you're being and gradually people will recognise you for being unique, they may not celebrate it or get all happy- clappy about it and that is okay too. If you need other people to celebrate your uniqueness, you have a character flaw that needs working on.

So it's not about teaching people that you're unique  - that doesn't work. That, as we have already discussed, ends up in a bad place. 

So, you also have to realise that just existing doesn't count,  if you exist, you are like 99.99% of the rest of the world. So, you're really not unique or special at all.

So just turning up and being human. Well, “welcome to the human race”we're all in that bag. 

The only thing that counts is if other people recognise that you are special and have unique attributes, and you are making a special contribution to society, listening to your tribe all day won’t deliver that. 

So, you actually need to re-engage with the wider society around you. Even though most of them will think you're completely normal. And you need to deal with the fact that if most people think that you're absolutely normal and couldn't care less about what you think you are, it's probably good to take that on board, even though it might seem difficult at the time. 

So don't preach. And don't try to correct everyone around you. You have to realise that if you do that, then people really won’t like you very much. And at some stage you're going to realise that people don't like you. And that's really depressing, because you've actually just created that scenario for yourself and You can’t blame that on anyone else unfortunately.

You know, people are not maliciously trying to harm you, they simply don't care. They're quite happy with themselves. 

So, what this means in effect is that the only reason you are in conflict with people is that you have a mismatch between how special you think you are and how special other people think you are.

And that is all down to you and your definition of who you think you are. 

If you think people have misjudged you, then you need to prove to them that you are special, just berating them because they don't treat you in the correct manner is not going to help you at all, in fact it will lead to misery.

So, you have to understand that if you're living in a rich modern westernised society. Then, at least 90% of the rest of the world, have no idea who you are, don't speak your language, don't understand anything about what you’re talking about and probably have never given your thoughts about the world any consideration at all, and even if they did, they would be of no use to them anyway.

So this poses the question - why are we doing it? That's the question. You know, we stand virtually absolutely zero chance of influencing the rest of the world. So, why are we putting ourselves through so much stress and anger and upset around an idea that we are something that perhaps you know when we sit back and look at it in the larger context of the wider world, we’re not. We are in fact just plain ordinary human beings. 

So ultimately the lesson is this - if we continue to pursue this mission of self identity and uniqueness We’re gonna end up, like most of these complex unique product lines that we have been talking about in the market place, society will just end up seeing us as too complex, too costly and just like the real life product lines we will be delisted. 

When I say delisted, I mean we will be muted, ignored, passed over, sidelined. and That to me is the worst thing that could happen to any human and such a shame when it could so easily be avoided.

The world cannot work. If it has to create special rules for everyone. We've made great strides in the last few years on disability and mental health. But these are broad categorisations, the world can just about manage broad categories for substantial minorities and even then it struggles desperately to implement those rules and regulations and things that it tries to implement to help in those areas.. 

So, we simply cannot continue down this road road of individual representation. It's time for all of us to celebrate our sameness, our shared humanity, our love for each other, and the planet. This, for me, is something worth fighting for, this is worth getting hot and bothered about, this is something we should all be engaged in.

So, for the sake of your own peace of mind and of those around you, stop seeking to differentiate yourself and start looking for your similarities in  wider community. You, the world and everyone in it will be happier more peaceful and safer as a result.

I hope you enjoyed todays podcast. As always I love hearing from people and thank you to those who leave comments and rate my podcasts. I really enjoy the process of producing them and I am humbled by the fact that people listen to them. Please share them with friends if you think they would be interesting or beneficial to them, and I look forward to talking to you soon.

Bye for now