The Illusion of Uniqueness
Imagine that you’re part of an island community busy building a society amongst palm trees and white beaches. Lapping gently against the sand is a docile tide, which you (think you) understand. You know when the tide will advance higher up the shores, and when it will retreat again. You know when it is safe to venture out beyond the shallows, and when it’s best to wait for calmer waters. You know that when the sky turns black and the wind starts to howl that the water will swell with the anger of the tempest and crash violently on the beach, frothy and imposing in its zeal.
You know all this because you have seen these things before and lived to learn about them; to define potential consequences avoid anything that might manifest them. These phenomena are known, and so you no longer fear a blackening of the sky.
Now imagine that one day your community encounters a different sort of phenomenon. The tide has pulled back much farther than it normally does… as if something were sucking it back into the sea. Neither you nor anyone in your village has seen this before, and so no one knows what to make of it. Curious, some may even gather on the shore to gaze perplexedly at the exposed sea floor.
What follows must surely be the apocalypse. An ominous, bulging form emerges on the horizon, appearing for the first time in countless collective hours of gazing out over the ocean. Before those on the beach can react to an encroaching sense of danger, a literal wall of water, 30 meters high and moving as fast as a commercial jet plane, smashes against the island and its inhabitants.
The wave destroys everything in its path, penetrating deep into the land, ripping, tearing and mangling along its way. This first blow is followed by successive, equally terrible ones. As the wave retreats, the suction it creates pulls the victims of its initial impact deep into a watery grave. Then a second wave hits. Then another. Finally, after whole days of destruction, the ocean returns to its deceitful innocuity, resuming a benign lapping of what was until recently a pristine and beautiful beach.
Now, should you or any of your community be lucky enough to survive the catastrophe, imagine trying to reconcile it. You might think it was the act of an angry god or a signal of the impending end of the world. Or, perhaps, it might be the work of a great and malicious sea monster, the likes of which could easily be concealed by the mysteries of the deep.
In any case, the event would seem perfectly unique from catastrophes of the past; a new terror in a universe that did not seem capable of containing such terrors before.
Of course, in the modern world we know better. Although still wary of its destructive power, we have long since named the phenomenon (Tsunami) and begun to collect data about it. We understand the forces that generate it, the signals that proceed it and the general character of its detonation.
In other words, because we enjoy a collective knowledge that stretches far back before our own lifetimes and the geographical boundaries of our communities, we have the context to understand that this event is not, in fact, unique (or even particularly rare, as far as such things go).
This is reflective of a deeper truth of the universe; reality is made of cycles of all conceivable scales – from the birth, death and rebirth of a single cell to the birth, death and rebirth of galaxies – repeating in seemingly endless loops. Although the individual events of these cycles will appear unique to an observer without context, when we zoom out, we see that they are really just another instance of a type of thing that has happened before … and will surely happen again.
The general lack of actual uniqueness of reality’s phenomena should be considered extremely good news. To imagine the alternative – namely, a world in which phenomena like natural catastrophes were perfectly unique in character – is to imagine a world like that of island inhabitants who gather on a beach to unwittingly absorb the full brunt of the harmful forces of their cosmos.
For all but a very precious few of its inhabitants, there is no true uniqueness in the world – only the illusion of it. 1 Though the minutiae of individual instances of phenomena may differ, they are still part of a larger pattern that almost certainly has historical precedent. True uniqueness exists only in the first occurrence, and the probability that one is observing a first occurrence is miniscule.
Uniqueness and the Self
The uniqueness fallacy can thus be defined as an assumption of the uniqueness of phenomena that are really just individual instances of larger, continually repeating cycles 2 Uniqueness again being here defined as so unique that it cannot be understood or managed in a general context.. This illusion is born out of a confusion that variation in a problem’s details makes it of singular character; when we focus only on the patterns in the bark, we habitually fail to see the forest through the trees.
Curiously, we often commit this fallacy even when we have plenty of evidence that speaks to the contrary. For individuals, this is perhaps nowhere more consequential than when it comes to the self. Especially in the modern era, we cling strongly to the idea that our thoughts, personalities and subjective experiences — and subsequently, the challenges inherent to them — are significantly unique. 3 Again, this is not to say that the details of our minds and personal histories do not vary — they certainty do. The point is that we tend to overestimate the extent of the differences between them. Although this may be comforting on a superficial level, in reality it is almost certainly an illusion.
Take our personalities as an example. These abstract qualities of person may seem sui generis, but this intuition does not stand up to closer scrutiny. While still a very imperfect science, personality tests can already be used to categorize how we tend to think well enough to lead to important, actionable insights about decision making. Depending on the test in question, one can create 16 (or fewer!) categories that effectively account for 7.5 billion individuals. It must be acknowledged that is the very opposite of significant uniqueness. That even marginally effective personality tests are possible demonstrates that our personalities’ similarities far exceed their differences. I believe it can be fairly contended that this is true about virtually every other aspect of person.
While it may be a difficult undertaking, dispelling the illusion of uniqueness promises big rewards. Just as with personality, once we realize that the self is only a type of self that has occurred before and will occur again, we can sort its problems into categories of problems and create robust solutions instead of reactive ones. 4 It should be encouraging to consider that when one looks at root problems, what seems to be an infinite number of issues is reduced to a meager few. Take death as a result of aging, for example. This has been boiled down by scientists to a mere seven root causes. This evidences that we can chop even our seemingly most complicated foes down to a concrete set, conquerable of problems.
For an individual, this can be accomplished primarily in two ways:
1. Taking advantage of already existing information.
2. Collecting one’s own data and analyzing problems to identify patterns and root causes.
In regards to the first method, here we have much occasion for gratitude. We have access to a wealth of information accumulated over millennia by humans working on the challenges inevitably faced in seeking happiness and accomplishment in life. This includes countless case studies of tremendous success in these pursuits by people who fall into all imaginable categories of character. Thus, if we are able to accept that we are not significantly unique, we are freed to turn to formulas for success that are already written. In light of this, to commit the uniqueness fallacy is thus to doom oneself unnecessarily to the suffering that follows from suboptimal decision making. Despite the knowledge that lies at our fingertips, when faced with the problems of the self we often find ourselves bemusedly gathering down on the beach.
In regards to the second, the process of analyzing problems and applying the solutions to achieve gradual improvement is integral to the game of self. This will be explored in detail in later posts.
Uniqueness and Failure
One aspect of the uniqueness fallacy that deserves special attention, however, is its implications for dealing with failure. It is generally understood that to play our games well, we must first set goals and then set about the process of pursuing them. In doing so, we engage with things we are not skillful in, and this leads invariably to setback.
Unfortunately, the uniqueness fallacy is one of the most common frames within which this setback is interpreted. When confronted with failure, the belief that the self is unique lends itself all too easily to the conclusion that it is also uniquely bad. This, in turn, leads us to succumb to the idea that the root cause of the problem is an innate deficit of self.
As a result, when we fail where others succeed, we often imagine that it is because they have blessed with something we have not or have life circumstances that are enabling where ours are prohibitive. This is born of the assumption that others are also significantly unique, and thus that tremendous success can only be a result of tremendous fortune. 5 As may be correctly observed, there are indeed those among the ranks of the successful that were born with extraordinary ability. What should also be considered, however, is that the number of people who are successful far exceeds the number that are outliers in this way (and even these outliers are still human, and are thus still identifiable on a plot of ability… as amazing a physical specimen as Lebron James is, for example, he will not be playing basketball until he is 50). This tells us that inherent advantage is not the only way to reach high levels of accomplishment.
This is troubling, then the standard consequence is the player quitting and turning to something else. Many do this over and over again, searching constantly for something that fits best with what they consider to be unique qualities of their person (which they imagine to be one in which they don’t so easily fail).
When they don’t find one, they become increasingly convinced that the self is simply incompetent. In the worst iterations of this self-deprecating loop, they stop playing all together.
To be clear: there are cases where failure is a result of an innate deficit of person. There are overwhelmingly more cases where failure is a result of bad process (or insufficient time to develop skill). The illusion of personal uniqueness causes us to systematically confuse the latter cases with the former.
In this light, a realization of non-uniqueness should be a tremendously inspiring one. As noted above, it means that the systems that lead to desired accomplishments are knowable, assimilable and replicable; that there is truly no reason the principals that have resulted in success for others won’t also work for you. This is not to say that success is not difficult — just that it is not uniquely so. 6 In fact, a lack of difficulty should arouse suspicion that our objective could be more ambitious. Just as our weaknesses are generally not so uniquely weak so as to guarantee failure, our strengths are generally not so uniquely strong so as to guarantee success. When undertaking a worthy project, we should be prepared to struggle before we thrive.
In setting expectations for success in the game of self, an assumption of uniqueness causes us only to misjudge the loftiness of our ceilings.
Additional Thoughts — New Heights on Old Walls
If you’ve ever been rock climbing, you’ve likely experienced how thrilling a game it can be. It is both a mental and physical challenge that pushes you to confront your fears, overcome your doubts and scale walls that seem impossibly treacherous from below. You have also probably experienced failure, which in rock climbing is of conspicuous character in that it involves you literally falling off a cliff. When most of us go rock climbing now, this fall is arrested reliably by our climbing equipment, allowing us to continue playing and enjoying the game.
It should be illuminating, however, to consider that when you go to an established rock climbing destination, such as the famous Gunks in New York, the walls you will scale are by no means being scaled for the first time. The Gunks as a climbing destination was first discovered in the early 1900s by European immigrants (among them Fritz Wiessner, pictured below) who took on the rock faces with boots, primitive safety equipment and a rather remarkable risk tolerance.
When these first adventurous climbers were playing the rock-climbing game, their ceilings of success were limited by the technology of their time and the newness of the walls they were seeking to conquer. Similarly, their floors were deepened by both known and unknown risks that endanger the life of any pioneer. The games the first rock-climbers played at the Gunks were thus of lesser quality than the games played there today.
As the descendants of many similar trailblazers, we have a unique opportunity to succeed in ways never dreamed of before while also enjoying considerably less risk. When we think of the levels of success achieved in past games, we should be awed at the heights that were reached …. and confident that we have the ability to exceed them.
While the particulars of the self may not be significantly unique, the games available to it are, in historical terms, of singular (and increasing) quality. He who would realize this must only learn to play.
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