We are told to be unique (more insistently than any generation before us). To build a distinctive personality, a personal brand and an exceptional life. The instruction is so constant that it rarely gets questioned on its own terms: what exactly are we afraid of when we recoil from being ordinary?

Is uniqueness a form of self-expression, or is it a defense against a specific, unnamed fear; the fear of disappearing into the crowd we are supposedly not part of? But, in this new culture which is  obsessed with individuality, the desire to be unique and exceptional has itself become ordinary.

That claim depends on what “ordinary” actually means, and the word carries more baggage than it should. Ordinary is not mediocre, and it is not insignificant. Mediocre describes a lack of quality; insignificant describes an absence of meaning.

Whereas, ordinary describes neither. An ordinary life, in the strict sense, is simply a common one, and commonness says nothing about whether that life is well lived or not. The anxiety around the word comes from the gradual transition in its perception; where “common” starts standing in for “wasted.”

To see how that substitution happens at scale, it helps to look at how any belief or desire spreads through a society at all. In The Laws of Imitation (1890), Gabriel Tarde argued that social life runs overwhelmingly on imitation, punctuated by rare moments of genuine invention. An idea or behavior originates with an individual. If it takes hold, it spreads outward by imitation until it stops being an invention and becomes custom.

Apply that mechanism to the desire for distinctiveness itself. The first person to reject convention, to insist on being different, is doing something close to Tarde’s invention. But once millions of people adopt that same impulse, the same desire to be unique. People are not inventing anything, rather they are imitating.

The desire to stand out has become one of the most widely imitated desires there is. Which means that, by Tarde’s own definition, it now functions as a custom rather than a break from one. Uniqueness, pursued at scale, is a form of conformity to the demand for distinction.

Robert Merton’s account of anomie (1938), describes a strain that opens up when a culture prescribes a goal for everyone, while distributing the means to reach it unevenly. We are told that a distinctive, extraordinary life is the standard to aim for, but the structural room for genuine exceptionality is small. Most people, working inside that gap, experience their unremarkable outcomes not as normal but as personal failure.

The comparison that produces this feeling is usually not fair. What we measure ourselves against is rarely another ordinary life — it’s a public figure’s curated milestone and a professional profile edited for visibility. Those examples are visible because they were built to be showcased.

Even after granting the society’s demand for exceptionality, every benefit of the doubt, it still cannot be met. “Exceptional” is a relational category. Someone is exceptional because most people are not. The term only has content by comparison to a larger, unexceptional group.

A society cannot make everyone exceptional any more than it can make everyone above average. The moment “exceptional” applies universally, it stops meaning anything, because there is no longer a background against which it stands out.

The demand that everyone distinguish themselves is not simply difficult. It is structurally incoherent, and a culture that insists on it anyway guarantees a permanent supply of people who feel they have fallen short of a standard that was never satisfiable in the first place.

Zygmunt Bauman’s account of “liquid modernity” (2000), describes a condition in which identity is never allowed to settle. It must be continually revised, updated and reinvented, because stability reads as stagnation. Under that condition, routine and long-term commitment, start looking like a failure to keep moving.

The original question was what happens when everyone is trying not to be ordinary. Wanting to be exceptional is, on its own, not an unreasonable thing to want. The problem is the assumption underneath it; that an ordinary life is a failed one.

That ultimately begs a question. Should we continue to conform to the custom of being unique and exceptional, or should we live an ordinary life and deviate from the norm?