Get Out of That Cookie-Cutter Mentality

We live in a cookie-cutter world. In other words, although we want to be original, there are multiple forces that subconsciously and continuously push us toward being like everyone else.

Social media and streaming commercials inundate us with messages that happiness and life satisfaction can only be attained when we think and behave in alignment with advertising systems; and conformity to norms and practices with the allure of false wealth, status, and power. This embedded undermining is so ubiquitous, we hardly notice it.

If a fish was asked what it was like to live in water, the fish could hardly respond, since it only knows a watery existence. How dissimilar are we to that fish in water if all we demonstrate is how to replicate others’ originality?

Think about the TikTok dance crazes. One day someone originates a dance video, then a flurry of videos imitate, and a bandwagon of videos imitate the initial imitators with mashups and compilations. Think about phone apps. One successful app that solves a need, then a flurry of imitators appropriating and capitalizing. And on and on.

The behavioral regularities impinging on our lives can sometimes only be appreciated by considering what it was like to live in earlier time periods. If we lived a few hundred years ago, and suggested a network of airplanes could circulate the world 24 hours a day, we would be labeled “crazy.” If we traveled a few centuries earlier, and maintained that the world was round, we would be challenged and possibly executed. Throughout history, anyone able to imagine a process, item, or experience beyond what existed often had to keep silent and endure a cookie-cutter world.

Is it also possible that a primal sense of interconnectedness and the need to participate makes us want to be like others, in both body and soul? Yet at a deeper level, revolutionary advances in the domain of consciousness and artificial intelligence might shatter this need to merely replicate. We might experience an inner neural net-connected brain in vast new ways, where we can cast off fears and courageously pursue our creative individuality and artistic expression.

Appreciating individuality and differentiation might help us perceive and experience a world where outward appearance and social identities are not a determinant for resource access and equitable treatment, but rather a pathway to living an original, fulfilled life. Multiple systems could profit from such a liberating perspective. Policing systems might seek service-based practices like mental health interventions over enforcement and punishment. Banking systems might support consumers with healthy financial stewardship and responsible consumership over excessive debt accumulation and financial stress.

We expect a world of the need to be like everyone else—appropriating and commodifying—will one day end, and that event will be as monumental as the earth slammed by a gigantic meteor. A day that the dinosaurs of cookie-cuttervilles will meet their earthly extinction.

In these days dealing with a 2+ year pandemic, and increasing resistance to racial and social equity, we need to value meaningful originality beyond external rewards and superficiality.