I was listening to the If Books Could Kill episode on David Brooks' Bobos In Paradise and at one point, they get to talking about mass culture’s takeover of everything and how people latch on to cultural signifiers like North Face gear and pickup trucks to prove their individualism.
It made me think of the snide posts that are routinely circulated showing how thousands of people would post basically the same photograph.
The thing is, there are 8 BILLION PEOPLE in the world. Of course a lot of us will be basically the same, making the same stuff and liking the same things. No one should be made to feel bad for that. The problem is that fifteen or twenty years ago, it was not constantly in our faces the way it is now. I don’t think we are built to be constantly connected with and compared to so many other people all the time.