Written after an interesting, albeit short, discussion at my workplace about our unique individuality and impression of who we are.
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You. An individual. A unique, special person, with a complex personality, and part of the most powerful species on the planet. That is what you are. Or maybe...?
We all like to perceive ourselves as unique and special, and that is pretty much expected; having such an impression of yourself not only helps you overcome psychological difficulties of the everyday life, like stress, but can even have an evolutionary benefit compared to someone who just perceives themselves as merely a common member of the group.
Our impression of ourselves as special and significant is the starting point of cultural phenomena such as religions promising us an eternal life (how significant are you if your existence is temporary?), and the individual-uber-alles modern western way of life .
The general assumption is that no two persons are completely alike, and that everyone is unique. Neuroscientifically speaking, no two brains have the very same structure and synapses between the cells, but this seems to be the case for life forms we typically perceive as "lesser", such as rats. Yet even if it wasn't so and unique brains were limited to humans, it soon becomes clear that being unique is rather commonplace.
Really, how much does uniqueness matter if there are at least eight billion unique personalities on the planet?
And if we bother thinking a little deeper, even our uniqueness is up to debate; yes, our brains indeed differ, but most of that difference doesn't seem to have much of an impact on our behavior and capabilities. After all, if we were fundamentally different, how would we ever be able to form up societies and collaborate, or even communicate with one another?
It seems like all humans are variations of a common theme. Unless highly neurodivergent (e.g. the mentally ill), we all share the same emotions, see the same colors, hear the same sounds, and have pretty much the same capabilities at various degrees. Use and understand language, extract information by looking at symbols, have a certain understanding of numbers, and making more or less successful predictions of the behavior of the ones around us.
Not only our general capabilities, but even our special personality traits are not really unique or even ours. Most aspects of your personality and behavior are "lent" to you by the people you came in contact, or even your favorite Netflix character.
Your opinions, the way you talk, the way you show your interest to someone, the way you show your frustration or anger, the tone of your voice, even the way you pronounce particular words in particular contexts, most of what constitutes what we call a personality is taken by the people one came in contact with, watched behaving -like a Netflix character-, or empathized with -like a book character. What makes you somehow unique, is which aspects of other peoples personalities you choose to adopt.
In any case, even if we accept we are somewhat unique, unique is not a synonym to special or significant, and for my part I can't find something negative about that. It is OK not to be significant. Grasping this will make you overcome your existential dread. We are the products of a series of statistical accidents, and that is nothing to mourn about.
We are more or less delusional monkeys. We have "extended" the capabilities and traits of Chimpanzees and just "override" some of them (if you are a Java developer, you get the meaning here a little better). There doesn't have to be any real uniqueness or significance in us to take care of ourselves or enjoy life.
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PS: You are not even the most powerful species on the planet; species of bacteria are.
