The Fallacy of Uniqueness

Here’s a funny thing about human beings: we tend to believe we’re much more unique than we actually are. 

But the good news – and the bad news – is that we’re actually not that special. 

In fact, there’s not a thought you could be having at this moment that countless other people on the planet aren’t also having at the exact same time – or that countless other people haven’t had in previous moments. There have been generations upon generations lost to time, full of human beings that were born, lived, and died, and also had that same thought at some point – and all the other thoughts, too.

People now and people then have lived remarkably similar lives, feeling the same highs and the same lows, navigating the same joys and the same sorrows, working through the same thoughts and the same reactions, so much so that there’s nothing that could ping pong around your head that could ever truly qualify as “unique” or “original.”

…and yet when things inevitably don’t go our way (or when they do), when we succeed or fail or falter, or when we get blindsided by the twists and turns that are simply part of human incarnation, we usually take it personally. We absorb it as a part of our identity and believe that the things we call “ours” are exceedingly uncommon, when, in fact, they’re not. 

In psychology, this phenomenon is known as the Fallacy of Uniqueness – the human tendency to believe our attributes and traits are much rarer than they actually are. Stuck in this mode, we fail to understand the extent of our shared experiences, overestimating our uniqueness relative to those around us, when in reality, most human capacities exist within a relatively small window. This might be a bummer (“Damn, I thought I was special.”) or a great comfort (“Phew, I’m not that weird.”).

Since you’re a human being, you’re no doubt familiar with that busy, restless, scattered, never-seems-to-sit-still feeling that sometimes comes with thinking. There’s actually a metaphor for that – “the Monkey Mind”  – which has been around for at least 2,500 years, but likely longer. When the Buddha taught, he described the human mind as “being filled with drunken monkeys, jumping around, screeching, chattering, carrying on endlessly…[and] all clamoring for attention,” which suggests that human distractibility and discursiveness did not begin with cell phones, email, and push notifications. 

As a species, we’ve always had a propensity for busy, mental chatter, and while people often bemoan how stressful modern life is – and, yes, it is – this isn’t a new phenomenon. Despite what we might imagine, bygone eras weren’t actually so much simpler for the people that lived there: in more agricultural times, farmers would lie awake at night worrying about what would happen if their crops failed during the harvest; in the white-picket-fenced-1950’s, there was pervasive anxiety about the potential for nuclear extinction; amid the explosion of art, culture, and science of the Renaissance, there was a little sickness called the bubonic plague being passed around, and all the way back to Ancient Rome, people sat around complaining about the ways in which things had changed for the worse, saying that society was falling apart. Then, the whole place burned down.

The point is this: people today are pretty much exactly the same as they were 10,000 years ago, and to think otherwise is just a case of recency bias – another human trait that has persisted since the beginning. 

So far as this relates to meditation, our lack of uniqueness is actually a positive, as the obstacles we tend to think would preclude us from practice (busy minds, busy schedules, a perceived inability to sit still) are exactly what everyone else who’s ever attempted to develop a meditation practice has faced, which includes the Buddha, Billy Rosenbeck, and every sentient being in between. 

New York Times Best Setting Author of 10% Happier and former Good Morning America Host Dan Harris says, “The pushback that I hear from people is, 'Yeah, I get it, [meditation] is good for you and I should do it, but I can’t because my mind is too busy.’ The good news and the bad news is you're not special: welcome to the human condition, all of our minds are like this.” 

“It really does display a shocking ignorance about the internal weather of everybody else on the planet with whom they coexist. Do [we really] imagine that everybody else's internal dialogue is all rainbows and unicorns? It’s a strange belief to hold, if examined.”

And this is where comfort in our lack of uniqueness can be found.

Because – lucky for us – our busy minds, our internal doubts, and our “I can’t do this” attitudes aren’t original. 

They’re also not true. 

Plenty of people – literally more people than you could even begin to imagine – feel exactly the same way that you do. They run away with the same thoughts, and yet, they manage to find a way: they get through the doors and into the heat to roll out a mat and try yoga; they run that race they were nervous about signing up for, worrying the whole time that they’ll be the one person that doesn’t finish, and somehow, make it to the end; they get to their meditation cushion, day after day, still wondering if anything of this is going to work, and somehow, find a modicum of peace amid the drunken monkeys jumping around, chattering, and clamoring for attention.

And if they can do it, why can’t you?

No, really: if they can do it, why can’t you?

They’re not special and they’re not unique – you’re not special and you’re not unique, and perhaps more than being one in a million, for once, we might try being just one of many.

We’re allowed to be just another on the path.  

And that, it turns out, might be a very good thing.