As it is described in the article, the world is becoming more bland, more homogeneous. In our daily lives, we are the witnesses of this trend that we find everywhere from the content we consume to the places we visit. As a society, should we go along with it or should we strive for more uniqueness in our lives ? Moreover, is there a way to roll back to a more unique society nowadays ?

The following submission statement was provided by /u/Atienon44:

As it is described in the article, the world is becoming more bland, more homogeneous. In our daily lives, we are the witnesses of this trend that we find everywhere from the content we consume to the places we visit. As a society, should we go along with it or should we strive for more uniqueness in our lives ? Moreover, is there a way to roll back to a more unique society nowadays ?

Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/126frzo/the_age_of_average_is_the_world_becoming_an_echo/je8xnh3/

Not that long ago most people would live their lives without leaving their villages/county, they knew no other cultures or ways of living, life was what it was and all they knew. According to that article life then was boring and bland and maybe it was, maybe not.

I feel like only now we are so expoiled and overstimulated that some people get anxiety if there is not constant change in theit lifes, new places, new food, new people...

It never used to be like that and it isn't nor will ever be more boring or bland than it was few centuries ago when you knew a hundred of people all over your life, 5 places and 3 different food alternatives.

Just yesterday I was looking at the blandness of corporate advertising and all these bland cartoon characters designed to avoid offending anyone at all. We really are starting to live in a world of bland cheap architecture with bland media and nanny state rules only allowing prescribed "fun". I find it funny that there was so much fear about the conformity of communism and yet every day we inch closer to it through cheap/innofensive capitalism.

I think it might help us combat climate change. If we find good ways to reduce our carbon footprint, we can roll them out globally easily since everywhere is basically the same place. Something along the lines of how the proliferation of corporate, chain restaurants has actually been good for food safety. That’s me trying to be optimistic. Otherwise, yea, it’s awful.

>It’s time to cast aside conformity. It’s time to exorcise the expected. It’s time to decline the indistinguishable. For years the world has been moving in the same stylistic direction. And it’s time we reintroduced some originality.

Here's the thing, though: even if you manage to come up with something original and it becomes a success, it won't be long before that itself becomes the new cliché.

And that original thing might have only felt original due to a lack of global exposure prior - if your personal world only really consists of several thousand people, as opposed to the full reach of the internet, a lot of stuff starts to sound/feel more original.

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Break up mass media and consumerism.

This isn't about "average quality" but about everything from architecture to fashion to branding converging on a pseudo-midcentury modern, upper-middle class American aesthetic, due in great part to mass/social media.

I guess people will have to learn to express themselves without material goods. What a concept.

This is why I don’t get ethnic nationalism. Native cultures are endangered more by mass media than they are by migration. Maybe if there are fundamental differences between peoples or extreme resource scarcity that requires people to localize they have a point, but the Internet has done more to erode local differences than anything else.

This seems like part of creating a global society. As we become more interconnected, we'll find they do something better somewhere else, and try to repeat that. It doesn't mean the world has become an echo chamber, only that ideas are no longer as regional as they are individual. Now if someone comes up with a unique idea people in their town don't like, it has a chanced to recognized beyond that. That may end up increasing diversity in many ways.

Fundamentally does not understand where creativity and art comes from. Worthless article.

Thats all it is. A feeling. Its no more original. People are mostly the same.

What bland media are you talking about? Because while Disney/Marvel stuff is a bit cookie cutter that's not all that's out there and it's not hard to look, there's an unprecedented ability for people to create indie media and people have greater access to media created in other cultures and in other time periods than ever before.

Things only feel bland superficially imo.

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Yeah but if you go further back to hunter gatherer times humans moved constantly and ate a far more varied diet than we do now. Maybe our wanderlust comes from those instincts.

It is also happening with trees! Look.

I'm trying to make a serious point.... Probably the article has some validity, but the image blocks inside the article add a lot of weight to the argument. And generating blocks of similar-looking images is pretty easy with search-by-image. This instantly creates a "world is all the same" effect.

For example, look at the block of apartment building images. Every single photo has a white sky (have skies really become more uniform lately?) and the pavement looks like it just rained in six (has more of the world really entered a just-stopped-raining phase?). This kinda looks like an assembly of photographs produced with search-by-image.

Sooo... that seems a little unfortunate to me.

no, its the social peer pressure from the system that is cracking people up. Telling you the world is this when you are born then to find out its the opposite when you get older./

So we all should be non-conformists. like everyone else.

Is this really news? People have been trendy AF since the dawn of time.

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The world is becoming an outdoor cacophony of human nature sounds. The cricket guy and the songbird guy and the frog guy all make their noise, and they pretend they're spouting deep wisdom that the world needs to hear.

When you take your question to a web search, the web search takes you to a message board post. Strong chance it takes you to Reddit these days. OP asks the same question you ask, and then the internet responds with frog noises songbird noises cricket noises and then the question is considered to have been answered conclusively.

"Don't ask that question again, it has already been asked and it has already been answered!" -the internet, whenever you give them a chance for their legendary intellect to shine.

It's funny they note swear words in self help books because I couldn't find a single self help book without a swear word in it. I always bring one hardcopy book with me on vacation just in case I don't have power or internet for whatever reason and all the self help books had F*CK in the title (including that asterix).

But I don't agree with the article. I don't agree that everything is exactly the same only that they've picked things that are the same.

For example when they're talking about hipster coffee. Well, in my time in Thailand I only found one hipster coffee shop. It was this one (with a logo strikingly similar to Starbucks). But then, all the top coffee shops in the area don't look anything generic.

I think if you are looking for similarities in things you're going to find them. A lot of engineering and architectural costs are reduced by using models instead of having something individual. On my street theree are 24 single family homes. 12 of them have garages attached to their homes and 12 of them do not have garages attached to their homes. Other than that, they're identical shapes and aesthetics. There's differences in tiling, roofing, and fences.... but basically setup the same.

Where you find the differences are on the insides of the buildings. We decided we didn't need a huge main floor bathroom. So it's the size of a closet with one toilet and one sink. Instead we have a pantry and a large front closet. We had two large bedrooms and a large bathroom, most of our neighbors have one large bedroom, two small bedrooms and a small bathroom.

And that's really the same with their depictions of "identical cities." They look identical specifically because you have chosen an angle to try and make them look as similar as possible. But inside these cities it's quite different.

People say this all the time, but I just don't see how it's true with our unparalleled access to food and spices from around the globe, or maybe you/they don't eat a very varied diet?

Looking at Americans today, the vast majority of meat consumed is Chicken, Beef, Pork and Lamb. And maybe a dozen kinds of vegetables. Contrast that with Native American hunter gatherers who had access to Bison, Elk, Caribou, Deer, Badger, Bear, many kinds of birds and fish and insects not to mention 1000s of wild plants. There's no comparing a man made monocultural system to the diversity of nature.

So we all should be non-conformists. Like everyone else.

Yeah, and that's what people are choosing to eat. Maybe it's where I live in the PNW and in a foodie area, but monthly I eat elk or bison, and at least a half dozen types fish and seafood, that's without getting into all the imported foods ands flavors from other countries. My point is that people have access to a more diverse amount of food than ever before in history, they just choose not to eat it.

Yeah repetitive. Samething and design with 28 different brands.

Hard to even pick what is best all look so similar

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> they just choose not to eat it

I do get your sentiment but consider that for a lot of people it's not choice, they simply can't afford those more expensive foods.

For example bison meat where I live is about $10USD per lb. If you're trying to feed a family of 4 on a budget, ground beef at less than half that price looks a lot better.

But the whole argument requires picking and choosing your stance, so you're choosing to base it off an average family or four in the US as opposed to a generic "hunter-gatherer of North America," apparently from the north/northwestern region. There were periods long before they could hunt large game, and there are groups today, such as the Inuit, that have extremely limited traditional diets in regard to biodiversity if you don't include the influx of modern foods.

I'm just taking exception to the often-stated but not well-defined stance that hunter-gatherers of specific yet undetermined locations and time periods had such impressively diverse diets compared to modern times.

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I don’t know about the world, but IMO Reddit and several other SM sites are definitely politically motivated echo chambers and do not broker any off message dissent.

Reddit is a prime example of one of the biggest echo chambers in the world. And I definitely don't think it is a good thing. In some ways it is good but there is very little genuine discourse here because of the voting system. I think that is a dangerous thing.

You see it with the random witch hunts and misinformation that gets reposted here from time to time.

Reddit ≠ The world

What a terrible article.

I think my favorite example of their ridiculousness is the "eye movie posters". Yeah, eyes look like eyes. And yet each of those posters is still distinct and, further, is extremely different from most other movie posters!

The only things that they've discovered here:

* When you get hundreds of thousands of instances of Thing, it's easy to find some that will be very similar.

* Some kinds of Things have functional reasons to look very similar - like skylines (there are only so many ways to build a skyscraper!)

Let me explain to you how the internet works

Get a life and notice the difference between that and reddit.

And they are the whole animal, and not just it’s legs.

Someones triggered

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Sorry that is just a load of nonsense. People ate everything because food was extremely scarse, they also ate lot of crap that was barely nutritional because anything was better than to starve. How do you think did we evolve the capability to eat almost everything? It's because those who could digest more stuff had an advantage. If you analyse the skeletons of hunter gatherer remains, virtually all of the have deficiencies for important nutrients

Never said they had a better diet. Simply more varied.