Why uniqueness is dying in a hyper-digital age

and how to save yourself

Have you come across that video of American school children from the 1960s speaking about what they think the world is going to be like in the future.

What strikes you is not only what they say rather HOW they say it. How articulate a bunch of 12-13 year olds from the past are on camera stuns you.

In a striking contrast if you watch or hear fully grown adults (esp. 18-44 y/o) in 2025 speaking in person or on a screen, everyone seems to sound the same.

Most people’s thoughts sound regurgitated or like something you have read in a comment section under a post, their sentence framing a duplicated version of 50,000 other people on the internet and non-verbal mannerisms aped from influencers online.

If you closely observe people usually aged 45 and above, there seems to be a uniqueness of speech and body language in each of them. I suspect this lot spent a huge chunk of their lives devoid of the influence of people on screens. The present moment was their only and entire experience of life for that duration. A limited, finite experience.

On the other hand, the younger lot’s (esp. 18-44 y/o) lives are infected with constant 24*7 exposure to humans on screen from around the planet. They are subject to what people on screens say and how they say it. They are never where they are. With phones in hand, it’s an infinite existence. Too unlimited, too confusing, too damaging for a single human’s integrated experience.

Back in the days, people would experience life from their own point of view and thus create their own unique opinions around their lived experience.

NOW, someone on the internet already tells you what the experience is, how you are supposed to feel about it and simultaneously gives you the words and mannerisms to describe that same experience.

Think how many times you jump to open the comment section just 3 seconds into the video looking for someone to tell you how to feel about this video.

Platforms like Instagram created the ‘comment like’ feature to support this already forming behavior of its users. The premature opening of the comment sections, liking a comment you agree with on a half-baked thought process, promotes ‘lazy thinking.’

Our thoughts are not ours, our experiences are not ours, our words are not ours anymore.

Its all rotten.

If the younger lot continues down this path, there will come a day very soon, that only a handful of individuals will be left with thinking power and the rest will remain a herd of dim thought followers.

Here are 3 ways to protect yourself from this mindless duplication and cultivate your brain power plus uniqueness: -

1. READ BEFORE BED: Screens present you with images, books force you to create images in your mind. The former is a mindless readymade construct of someone else’s mind for your lazy consumption and the latter is a construct of your own mind for the creation of your own unique experience.

The best time to read I would recommend is before bed, when you have nowhere else to be, nothing else to do, you can read with a free mind. Place a yellow lamp beside your bed, lie down and read yourself into sleep. A lamp that allows you to switch it off from right where you lie is optimum.

This practice if repeated enough daily, will become your new replacement for mindless scrolling and help you feel better about yourself at the end of the day.

2. NO MORE EXPLORE FEED: The explore feed is your worst enemy in the path to uniqueness.

   All an explore feed is mostly capable of is presenting lives of other people, enforcing “is this how I should be living my life” internal monologues and thus inducing anxiety.

   

   Ever since I stopped clicking on the search icon at the bottom of the screen, my instagram sessions have become exponentially relaxing.

   I have a simple rule - only look at reels that a friend has sent in the dms and Never to scroll past that.

   If you think you are missing out on crucial information by not scrolling, I urge you to recall any 1 life-changing lesson you learnt from a reel. Can you?

   Okay, if you said yes to that, I want you to think if you have successfully applied that life-changing lesson into your daily routine that has exponentially improved the quality of your life.

   In most cases you answered with a ‘NO’

   

That is because a research conducted by one advertising firm revealed that whenever there are at least 4 different 15 second commercial videos in a 2.5 minute Time frame, the effectiveness of any one 15 second ad sinks to almost zero.

Social media short-form videos are not much different in their content format and user viewing behavior.

You are much better off viewing limited, selective pieces of content with deeper attention and retention.

3. WRITE AND SPEAK LIKE A MEDIEVAL RESEARCHER: Before you write or speak; ask yourself “how true does this feel to what I am experiencing?” “Is this word the closest possible representative of what I wish to convey?”

Example: Instead of “Is this word the correct word for what I feel?”

I write

“is this word the closest possible representative of the internal experience I am attempting to convey?”

Notice the difference in language used to say the same thing. The dullness of the first sentence and the uniqueness of the second. How fulfilling a correctly represented sentence feels :)

Which emphasizes the importance of having a big bank of words to pull from.

A fat reservoir of vocabulary that can only be gathered by lengthy reading.

Here are some of my favorite quotes about words and vocabulary. Enjoy and see you next week :)

Be sure to taste your words before you spit them out.
-Anonymous

Your understanding of what you read and hear is, to a very large degree, determined by your vocabulary, so improve your vocabulary daily.
- Zig Ziglar

You can't build up a vocabulary if you never meet any new words. And to meet them you must read. The more you read the better.
- Rudolf Flesch and Abraham Lass

Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic.

-J.K Rowling

Yours,

Ipsita