058: Who Are We Conforming For?
And how do we stop?
Welcome to Collected Rejections, a newsletter about writing, rejection, and the writer’s life. Here you’ll find essays, short story prompts, writing challenges, and interviews with other creatives about how they handle rejection. Why not join us?
Well hello there,
It has been a minute since I wrote an essay here. I am so glad to be back. It’s a little uncanny—my time away wasn’t exactly fun or restful, and yet today’s essay poured out of me in under thirty minutes. I had worried about coming back—What if I’m not ready, or don’t have anything to say? But as soon as I opened the page, the words flowed out. It felt good.
Thank you for all the well wishes everyone left on my note about my father’s passing last month. I suspect people often don’t know what to say to an internet stranger about their loved one’s death, but if I’ve learned anything in the last month it’s that saying anything at all is appreciated.
All right, without further ado, let’s crack into this.
A couple of days ago, my friend and I were lamenting that people in LA aren’t weird enough. I mean, people here are weird because this city warps everyone’s sense of normalcy, but it’s a cultivated weird—Instagram weird, come to life. It’s like we all watched Carrie Fisher’s house tour or Guillermo del Toro’s house tour and said “Okay, this is the acceptable way to be weird in Hollywood.” And ran with it.
Then, in her first essay of the year, Anne Helen Petersen talked about reviewing her personal teen archive. As an adult, she could recognize how her teen self was trying to insist on her individuality while still being accepted by her peers. It was a tough negotiation, one that everyone else was making in similar ways, as she found when she posted photos from her archive on Instagram and a thousand people commented “Omg are we the same person?”
Then, in a Twitter exchange I had with another writer, she told me about doing the opposite of binging—purging everything as the new year dawned because she was “burned out on everything being ‘thought leadership’ content.” Everything sounds the same, I complained back, not sure if what I was saying was even fair yet.
Finally, last week I was reading a book that was about witches investigating an Unseelie court member committing a crime in Edinburgh in the 1800s and it felt like I had read the book a hundred times. I felt this feeling strongly, not in a déjà vu sense but in a boredom sense. I felt it despite the fact that I’ve only ever encountered the Seelie and Unseelie in one other piece of fiction—my friend’s (currently) unpublished novel that she let me read a draft of. Somehow that published book that I paid money for wasn’t saying anything new, nor saying it in a new way.
And all of that, hitting one after the other in the first week of the year, got me thinking: It’s starting to seem like everyone’s voices have melted together. I scroll through people’s social media profiles and everyone sounds the same, even when they’re saying opposing things. The New Yorker sounds like The Washington Post sounds like LA Times, and everyone sounds like AP. The History Channel looks like Syfy, and every streaming platform is doing irreverent fictional takes on history.
It’s like after years of struggling to adapt to the internet, we figured out what works, how to package it and sell it, and everyone started doing it. But now, everyone sounds the same. Thanks to facetuning, we even all look the same. Scrolling through quickly, one person’s Instagram and TikTok is indistinguishable from anyone else’s. Just swap out the faces.
Obviously, this isn’t a new phenomenon. Trends come and go in every industry and field. About eight years ago my friends in coffee and I were all complaining that every new coffee shop was a white box with birch wood everywhere. Then the reaction against that rolled around and for a while everyone was doing neon and rich colors and Instagram-worthy bathrooms. Now, something a little more grungy—even goth—is coming back, and everyone has at least one skeleton in their lineup of merch.
Conformity happens because people want the guarantee, they see what works and want to do that instead of rocking the boat. When everything else—in business, in creativity, in life—feels like a risk, why take on one more risk than you have to? Do what works. People make millions doing what works.
The problem is that “what works” gets boring. I can only have so many shirts with sketch-style dancing skeletons before I desperately want anything else. And that’s true of what I’m reading too.
Hell—it’s true of what I’m writing rightthissecond. I am currently falling into the very trap Shirley mentioned of writing thought leadership content, and I didn’t even mean to. This entrapping format, so easy to get sucked into, is part of why I decided at the end of last year that I was tired of writing personal essays. Not only was I sick of having to cut myself open to bleed for clicks, but it sucked trying to conform what I wanted to say into a Chelsea Handler/Joan Didion/Roxane Gay format that isn’t really my format. I am unhitching my wagon from that horse. (It’s not a bad horse! It’s just not the horse I want to follow! Have I killed this horse metaphor yet?!)
That novel I read last week, about a witch being stalked and the witch detective who figured out that it was an Unseelie, should have felt unique to me. I have literally only read one other fictional work that remotely deals with the Unseelie, and my friend’s work-in-progress isn’t a detective story set in 19th-century Edinburgh. But it didn’t—this novel felt like every other novel set in the 19th-century British Isles that I’ve ever read. It shouldn’t have! It had no right to! And yet.
There’s a new writing software that shows up in my Instagram ads every day. It’s called AutoCrit. It touts, among other features, an ability to compare your writing to the great novels in your genre. Want to write a magic-teens-in-boarding-school novel? Cool, here’s how it stacks up to J.K. Rowling’s. Trying your hand at crime fiction thrillers? Great, let’s compare your work to John Grisham’s, sentence by sentence. Ope, historical conspiracy adventure fiction? Yeah, okay, let the algorithm calculate how well yours resembles Dan Brown’s.
I understand the compulsion to want this. I get feeling so close to a project that you don’t know if it’s any good anymore. In a crowded marketplace, I don’t fault anyone for seeing something successful and thinking, “Is my thing as good as that thing?”
But I’m begging people to stop.
Do you know what made Rowling and Grisham and Brown (and every other successful author) successful? It was that their work didn’t sound like anyone else’s. They came along with a unique voice, a unique perspective, a unique je ne sais quoi. It’s popular to shit on them now, when millions have come along and copied them, but when each of their first novels came out, people were blown away. They were unique.
If you’re trying to write, or film, or do anything creative or entrepreneurial, the key to success isn’t making sure your work closely resembles something that came before it. Because even when people want more magic teens solving mysteries at boarding school, they still want something new. Harry Potter, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and Wednesday all exist on the same genre spectrum, but they are very different from one another. They look and sound different, they have unique voices. That’s what makes each good.
You have to find your own voice. Don’t get AutoCrit and find someone else’s voice.
No one can tell you how to be unique. If there was a formula for it, well, it wouldn’t be unique anymore. So I can’t help you there. We all have to find it for ourselves.
People have to be able to be their own version of weird, not Carrie Fisher’s or Guillermo del Toro’s. Stop being Instagram weird, acceptably weird. Be your weird.
This is the first essay I’ve done voiceover for—I’d love to hear what y’all think of the new format. Does it change anything for you? Is it fun? After January, narration will go behind a paywall. If you liked this feature and want to get more of it, upgrade now:
Not ready for the commitment of a full upgrade? I get it. I’m commitment phobic too. But if you like, you can tip me, as a treat.
Want more of my work? Yesterday on my podcast, Unruly Figures, I talked about Catherine de Medici, the Renaissance Queen of France who has been long maligned by historians as a poisoner. Together, we’re going to reclaim the Serpent Queen.
I haven’t been writing much at all lately while I grieve my father’s passing. But, a piece I wrote last October went live this week on Sprudge: When Coffee Becomes a Religious Experience. It explores the varied relationship coffee has had with religions around the world, and I had so much fun researching and writing it.
If you liked this and think your friends might too, please forward it on! That’s how we all discover new fun things, right?
(Do more voiceovers. I love how animated you got as it went on. 😁 Quality rant.)
Yes, I agree with your concern here. And it's...the hardest thing to tackle, in whatever form of writing you're doing, because most of everyone is asking "what's the best way for me to do this?" which really means "what's the most socially acceptable and therefore least weird way?" (which also means "how can I stand out the least?").
I used to attend travel blogger conferences, and almost their whole schtick was "here's the best way / the least weird way which you NEED to learn to get anywhere." And - I kinda get it. Especially with conferences trying to make a profit. Weirdness is so hard (nearly impossible?) to teach. And asking folk to gamble on their own creative experiments is also a hard ask - even though I reckon it's the ask everyone really needs to get somewhere fast? (Fortune favours the farter-around.)
(As for the rise of AI - as you suggest, again, isn't it just taking the average of everyone? The least weird through-line of everything?)
The job of any creative artist is to be a pattern-interrupter. Or at least that's *part* of the job. (Maybe another part is, eg, being really good at convincing a client that the work you're doing for them needs to be weirder. Or having that talk with yourself.)
"How could this be weirder?" said not enough of us, not enough of the time, always. (Myself very much included. Still working on that every day, because I think I need it more and more as I get older.)
Great essay and like Ali, I completely agree!
I abandoned social media years ago because it felt a lot like my high school cafeteria. Both deeply hierarchical and very, very loud -- everyone talking at once, trying to both conform and stand out just enough at the same time. It’s hard to hear yourself think and originality or complexity of thought isn’t generally rewarded in this environment, anyway. Sometimes it is, but it so hard to predict it, and the alternatives, either being shouted down or simply ignored, can be so devastating.
Simply abandoning social media isn’t the right answer for everyone, I get that. But in my experience, getting off it does reduce the overall noise and some of that sameness you’re describing.