The author is struggling with the fact that humans are overwhelmingly a mimicry bunch.
Personally I don't think there's anything wrong with it, it's the only way there can be billions of people. The automation & cloning process when it comes to personality, choices, behavior, likes, dislikes, etc. saves an incredible amount of time at scale.
30 minutes spent reading comments on Reddit or Imgur for example reveals that almost everybody is copying everybody else on there. You see witty lines, factoids, memes, repeated ad nauseam for years. The moment someone comes up with something new, it's immediately copied for hopeful points (attention and validation of existence; I think those things lacking is a serious and common issue for most people, which is why it works so well as a system in communities).
Imagine if everyone on Reddit, to post something, had to be original. 99%+ of the site instantly disappears. The effort or type of brain required to come up with new, very entertaining memes for example. Humanity wouldn't get anything else done if that much originality was required of all things, it's a division of labor applied to social everything.
There's nothing to be alarmed about. In my opinion most people have nothing interesting or original to contribute (by default I think it would have to be that way), so they copy everything from the more interesting tiny minority and it gets passed down the chain in a cascade of mimic. Most of humanity is a lifestyle and behavior clone top to bottom. Humanity is a tribe of organized copying, passing down what works from one person to the next to save time.
It takes either a particularly outstanding character/personality/thinking abnormality, or a large amount of effort, to do something original when the composition comparison is a billion other people.
Interesting. Kind of like how the evolution of our DNA works - we are fundamentally just imperfect replicators, introducing random mutations to the information. Ones that are deemed beneficial are propagated further, others are ostracized.
Personally I don't think there's anything wrong with it, it's the only way there can be billions of people. The automation & cloning process when it comes to personality, choices, behavior, likes, dislikes, etc. saves an incredible amount of time at scale.
30 minutes spent reading comments on Reddit or Imgur for example reveals that almost everybody is copying everybody else on there. You see witty lines, factoids, memes, repeated ad nauseam for years. The moment someone comes up with something new, it's immediately copied for hopeful points (attention and validation of existence; I think those things lacking is a serious and common issue for most people, which is why it works so well as a system in communities).
Imagine if everyone on Reddit, to post something, had to be original. 99%+ of the site instantly disappears. The effort or type of brain required to come up with new, very entertaining memes for example. Humanity wouldn't get anything else done if that much originality was required of all things, it's a division of labor applied to social everything.
There's nothing to be alarmed about. In my opinion most people have nothing interesting or original to contribute (by default I think it would have to be that way), so they copy everything from the more interesting tiny minority and it gets passed down the chain in a cascade of mimic. Most of humanity is a lifestyle and behavior clone top to bottom. Humanity is a tribe of organized copying, passing down what works from one person to the next to save time.
It takes either a particularly outstanding character/personality/thinking abnormality, or a large amount of effort, to do something original when the composition comparison is a billion other people.