People Aren't Special and Unique Individuals

There's a person I've known for a long time. I won't say who because it don't matter. And recently I've met another person who is the exact replica of that person I know – they have the same sense of humor, they tell the same kinds of jokes in the very same inflection, they even have the same voice, they have the same sense of dress style, they have the same love for food, which they keep banging on about, particularly through the same tendency to control the conversation with detailed recipes nobody will ever remember, they have the same slightly pretentious love for travel, they have the same taste for vain platitudes about how traveling is an art form, they even have the same face, hell, they even have the same allergies and the same excuses about the alarm clock... And then it hit me – how can it be that I just so happened to meet two extremely similar people who have no clue about the existence of one another? It doesn't add up... I'm not a very social guy, I don't know that many people, I don't go out much, and yet I met two people who are exactly the same in so many ways, people who live in the same city but who don't frequent the same social circles... I can understand that in a world with seven billion people some of them are bound to be similar, both physically and otherwise, but it seems intuitively unlikely that one person would just so happen to run into them. So why did I?

A Yu-Gi-Oh! card, because a picture of a person looking in the mirror would have been too cliché

I suppose the immediate rebuttal to my argument would be that the two people in question aren't that similar. They aren't twins, so the physical similarities are likely to be more tame than what I perceive, and the other similarities are just common occurrences, because I mean, who doesn't like to eat and travel? Maybe you'd be right to argue along those lines, at least you'd be right to suggest it. But I really don't think so anymore... The law of averages has to apply, don't it? We can't all be above average, most of us have to average, and some of us have to be below average. If we are all beautiful, then being beautiful becomes a quality with no meaning. If anything, an ugly person would then become beautiful due to sheer rarity. We can't all be talented, otherwise having talent would have led to no special works, of art or otherwise. If we can all write Hamlet then what's so special about that Shakespeare fella? The sad truth is that most people have to be average, hopefully not in every single aspect of their lives, but certainly in most of them. Then, as far as freewill goes, there are those studies where a pair of twins are separated at birth, they are raised to adulthood in different households, without ever meeting one another, and then we come to find that, not only do they look the same, obviously, but they dress the same, they drive the same cars, they smoke the same cigarettes, they eat the same foods, they read the same books, and they even end up marrying similar women... And we think, well, if environment is out, then what's left to blame except genes?

But of course that's an uncomfortable truth. Does that mean all of your life is predetermined, or at the very least controlled? If you smoke does that mean you are pushed by your genes to light up a cigarette? If you like blonde women does that mean you are pushed by your genes to approach them? If you are prone to lame platitudes does that mean you are pushed by your genes to find such thoughts insightful? I dunno but it seems true to me, it seems like, at the very least, our genetic make-up significantly tilts us in a certain direction. But we don't like that idea, uncomfortable truths always make people feel strange, especially people who aren't used to being confronted by them. They prefer to fall back on the scapegoat of “it depends” or “you can't generalize” instead of acknowledging a truth they seem to readily acknowledge when it's about everyone else, in essence, the truth that most people are sorta lame... I suppose that is yet another trap of solipsism, because we can easily gather accurate and rational information about the world and other people, we can reason that, since most people we come across aren't all that worthy of our attention, that reasonably means most of them are average. But when it comes to ourselves, we never admit to being average because we are doomed to think of ourselves as unique individuals, we constantly think – I am me... But how sure are you that you're an individual when, from the outside looking in, you're likely to be indistinguishable from millions of other people, some of whom live right next to you?

If most people you meet aren't that special to you, then it stands to reason that there's a strong chance you aren't all that special as well. And like Syndrome said – When everyone's super... no one will be... That's quite a punch to the gut though, we need to almost demand that an exception be made in our case, that our experiences really matter, that we are special, more than most people even, but if that can't be the case to everyone, then most of us have to settle for being average. It just seems to make sense, and it also seems quite likely that we don't have that much freedom to choose whatever little things may set us aside from others. I mean, your tastes in music, or books or food, or clothes, or travel destinations, or people, do they really make you special? I don't think they do... But where do people get this absolute certainty of their own individuality? Why is it that people who say nothing of note still find their opinion so darn valuable? They may be right to think so, but where does that confidence come from?

I dunno and maybe I'm being unfair. Maybe I'm judging everyone, but I also know that a whole lot of people know what I'm talking about. Be honest, you know people exactly like that, some of them have even crossed your mind, people who claim to be so free-spirited when in reality they are exactly like a million other people, always following trends while feeling like revolutionaries... And when even the tiny details, our seemingly random preferences which constitute our entire personality, when even those can be so similar from person to person, how can we be so confident that we are a special and unique individual? In all likelihood all those idiosyncrasies we think make us so special are just as predetermined as our eye color. Maybe, just maybe, all those traits we think create our unique personality are actually no different than the traits of our physical nature we can't possibly hope to change. And if that's the situation, which, as far as I can tell, it seems to be, then I really don't know where individuality comes from. Most of us have to be average, most of us have to be boring... And uniqueness, by definition, has to be rare.

But of course nobody wants to be the average one. I don't wanna be average... We all see ourselves as the main character, as the center of the universe, but that is only because we can't help to see ourselves except in any other way. We're forever doomed to our own locked-in perspectives of the world, we see ourselves as unique and special because we know our own story from beginning and in all detail. From our own point of view, since there can be no other, our story is the entire book, and the other characters are all secondary and don't exist in quite the same way as we do. Although the sad truth, as I've come to understand it, is that because people can be so similar, the whole notion of individuality is called into question, and the game of statistics is thus born. But while all of us want to be the exception, the truth is we're way more likely to be just another number.

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