The Snowflake Syndrome
Ah, now this one is a little bit tricky. I do believe it applies to a majority of people, but the way it manifests is so wildly different from person to person that it's easy to deny. Also, this one seems to apply much more strongly to Americans than it does to a lot of other cultures, if it applies to them at all. Oh, well, i'm gonna give it a shot anyway.
The Snowflake Syndrome is the unreasonable desire people feel to be acknowledged as an individual, but not just an individual, as one who is wholly and absolutely unique, totally different from every other person on the planet. It's of utmost importance for people to be allowed to believe that the other people on the planet have nothing in common with them at all, at least not when it comes to the things they like about themselves. If one writes songs or paints pictures, the last thing they want to hear is whose song or picture it reminds another of. The very idea that the perceived similarity could be valid offends and often disgusts them, and they are more than ready to give you example after example of why that's so.
What I find particularly interesting though, is that this same inclination is just as strong, if not stronger, when it comes to the negative aspects of their personalities. Even though it would seem as if one would prefer to not feel alone in their struggles with themselves, to be able to believe someone else understands these things because they too have been through the same thing, this concept is rejected vehemently. More than anything else, people seem to need to believe that any evil that befalls them is theirs and theirs alone, and no one else could possibly hope to grasp the depth and gravity of their misfortune.
This idea is absurd for many reasons. For one thing, people seem to confuse the concepts of individuality with uniqueness. These are two separate ideas. Individuality indicates the worth of a person as a single unit, and emphasizes the importance of one focusing on the moral worth of oneself. Nowhere in this concept is it inferred that an individual is obligated to be unique among all other individuals, nor is it inferred that this phantom uniqueness has any bearing on the overall value of an individual. The important aspect of the notion is that a single person owes as much to his or her own well being as they owe to the overall society of which they are a part. Essentially, what good are you to everyone else if you can't keep yourself straight in the first place?
The media has taken this benign concept and used it in a fashion that exaggerates the tendencies of our own egos, leading the individual to believe that he or she is not truly an individual unless they are also unique. Somewhere along the line, an insidious precept crept into our thinking that somehow tied the lack of uniqueness with a lack of worth. The problem with that is that it's utterly untrue. Sharing a trait or a tendency in common with another does not detract from one's overall individual worth, and in some cases actually adds to it. Any sane, mentally balanced artist (they exist, I swear,) will gratefully acknowledge the implied compliment when his work is compared to another artist's. All creative productions have a source of influence, and to try and deny that is to deny the validity of the art itself.
By the same token, every person is indeed unique unto themselves, even if it's not in the way they'd like to believe. This true distinctiveness manifests in a very subtle way. An analogous example is the way that everybody has hands, but each individual has their own distinct fingerprints (for the sake of the analogy, we'll ignore amputees and others missing limbs for whatever reason.) it would be ridiculous to take offense to the fact that you're not the only person with hands just because you want to feel like an individual. Hands and individuality are not mutually exclusive concepts, you can indeed possess both. The same applies to many other things many people have, such as ideas, talents, religions, philosophies, tastes, and so on.
It is unrealistic for any one person to assume that they hold the monopoly on any one thing, and I'll show you why. As of 30 May 2010, the human population of the world is estimated by the United States Census Bureau to be approximately 6,824,000,000. That's nearly seven billion, for those of you that get confused by the multiple commas. That means that if every living person in the world were one second, there would be 216.4 years of us. If each on of us was a mile, we would stretch from the earth to the sun more than 73 times over. That's a damned lot of people, and it makes it exceedingly unlikely that any single person can claim to be the only one that does, thinks, has, or says anything.
The thing is, a person's capacity for being unique isn't necessarily correlative to the story they write or the way they dealt with that bad breakup, or any of the other things they can hold onto and hope sets them apart from the rest of us. What makes you different from everybody else isn't one thing, its the series of things that make up your life. Anytime you make a choice, you can assume that someone else somewhere on the planet made the same one when presented with the same options. You can still assume that the next decision you made was mimicked by someone, but the odds that one person made the same two decisions in a row drop considerably. Eventually, you live long enough and make so many choices that the odds of someone else following exactly the same path as you did are so small as to be realistically impossible. Granted, paths will intersect and have bits in common, but your path is wholly unique to you, and the decisions you make and what you learn from the situations you're part of make you who you are.
Just some stuff to think about next time you feel like bitching about how no one understands how you feel because your daddy didn't hug you enough as a child.
The Snowflake Syndrome is the unreasonable desire people feel to be acknowledged as an individual, but not just an individual, as one who is wholly and absolutely unique, totally different from every other person on the planet. It's of utmost importance for people to be allowed to believe that the other people on the planet have nothing in common with them at all, at least not when it comes to the things they like about themselves. If one writes songs or paints pictures, the last thing they want to hear is whose song or picture it reminds another of. The very idea that the perceived similarity could be valid offends and often disgusts them, and they are more than ready to give you example after example of why that's so.
What I find particularly interesting though, is that this same inclination is just as strong, if not stronger, when it comes to the negative aspects of their personalities. Even though it would seem as if one would prefer to not feel alone in their struggles with themselves, to be able to believe someone else understands these things because they too have been through the same thing, this concept is rejected vehemently. More than anything else, people seem to need to believe that any evil that befalls them is theirs and theirs alone, and no one else could possibly hope to grasp the depth and gravity of their misfortune.
This idea is absurd for many reasons. For one thing, people seem to confuse the concepts of individuality with uniqueness. These are two separate ideas. Individuality indicates the worth of a person as a single unit, and emphasizes the importance of one focusing on the moral worth of oneself. Nowhere in this concept is it inferred that an individual is obligated to be unique among all other individuals, nor is it inferred that this phantom uniqueness has any bearing on the overall value of an individual. The important aspect of the notion is that a single person owes as much to his or her own well being as they owe to the overall society of which they are a part. Essentially, what good are you to everyone else if you can't keep yourself straight in the first place?
The media has taken this benign concept and used it in a fashion that exaggerates the tendencies of our own egos, leading the individual to believe that he or she is not truly an individual unless they are also unique. Somewhere along the line, an insidious precept crept into our thinking that somehow tied the lack of uniqueness with a lack of worth. The problem with that is that it's utterly untrue. Sharing a trait or a tendency in common with another does not detract from one's overall individual worth, and in some cases actually adds to it. Any sane, mentally balanced artist (they exist, I swear,) will gratefully acknowledge the implied compliment when his work is compared to another artist's. All creative productions have a source of influence, and to try and deny that is to deny the validity of the art itself.
By the same token, every person is indeed unique unto themselves, even if it's not in the way they'd like to believe. This true distinctiveness manifests in a very subtle way. An analogous example is the way that everybody has hands, but each individual has their own distinct fingerprints (for the sake of the analogy, we'll ignore amputees and others missing limbs for whatever reason.) it would be ridiculous to take offense to the fact that you're not the only person with hands just because you want to feel like an individual. Hands and individuality are not mutually exclusive concepts, you can indeed possess both. The same applies to many other things many people have, such as ideas, talents, religions, philosophies, tastes, and so on.
It is unrealistic for any one person to assume that they hold the monopoly on any one thing, and I'll show you why. As of 30 May 2010, the human population of the world is estimated by the United States Census Bureau to be approximately 6,824,000,000. That's nearly seven billion, for those of you that get confused by the multiple commas. That means that if every living person in the world were one second, there would be 216.4 years of us. If each on of us was a mile, we would stretch from the earth to the sun more than 73 times over. That's a damned lot of people, and it makes it exceedingly unlikely that any single person can claim to be the only one that does, thinks, has, or says anything.
The thing is, a person's capacity for being unique isn't necessarily correlative to the story they write or the way they dealt with that bad breakup, or any of the other things they can hold onto and hope sets them apart from the rest of us. What makes you different from everybody else isn't one thing, its the series of things that make up your life. Anytime you make a choice, you can assume that someone else somewhere on the planet made the same one when presented with the same options. You can still assume that the next decision you made was mimicked by someone, but the odds that one person made the same two decisions in a row drop considerably. Eventually, you live long enough and make so many choices that the odds of someone else following exactly the same path as you did are so small as to be realistically impossible. Granted, paths will intersect and have bits in common, but your path is wholly unique to you, and the decisions you make and what you learn from the situations you're part of make you who you are.
Just some stuff to think about next time you feel like bitching about how no one understands how you feel because your daddy didn't hug you enough as a child.