The digital world has given us the gift of global culture in a way we’ve never seen before. Yes, a gift. We are now connected to people, ideas, and ways of living that, without the phenomenon of the world wide web, many of us would never have encountered within our lifetimes.

But as our millions of worlds collide, something interesting is happening to our sense of self. A new culture is forming. It is global, sanitised, and heavily appropriated. Its language is a set of phrases, repeated and parroted at the appropriate moments. Its ideologies are not discovered, but absorbed, passed through the hive and carried in a swarm, echoed without scrutiny by minds that adopt them as their own.

This new global culture caters to the masses, but in doing so becomes one size fits all. There is little room for individuality, or for thinking that resists easy categorisation. You are either this, or you are that, neatly placed under a precise label. Once chosen, the rest follows; how to think, how to dress and how to be.

We have reduced ourselves to easily searched terms; ‘corporate girl,’ ‘trad-wife,’ and ‘pilates princess’, and in doing so flattened our existence into something that lacks texture and intrigue. While it is perfectly natural for who we are to be shaped and moulded through lived experience, we were never meant to discard ourselves entirely, replacing one identity for another like winter coats.

The truth is, the human experience dulls when you’re looking out into a world that looks exactly the same as you do. We find comfort in the familiar, but is being different always inherently dangerous? Plurality, a depth of ideas and tastes, should inspire us, rather than compel us to morph into something entirely new.

Instead of chasing an ideal, perhaps it is more prudent to recognise that several can co-exist without subtracting from one another. Without this discernment, we fall into sameness, wearing the seams of individuality in a race to be right. The real danger, then, is that there is no difference left.