Pseudo Individuality

     When I was reading about pseudo individuality I found the topic very interesting, then professor Stein described it as, “Individuality is an illusion”. This is something that stood out to me from all of the readings, the reading from Adorno and Horkheimer’s “The Culture Industry” describes this as, “What is individual is no more than the generality’s power to stamp the accidental detail so firmly that it is accepted as such. The defiant reserve or elegant appearance of the individual on show is mass-produced like Yale locks, whose only difference can be measured in fractions of millimeters.” 

    This topic instantly reminded me of a Tik Tok trend where people are posting about their thoughts, feelings, and experiences and other users are realizing that they have had the same thought, feeling, or experience at some point in their life. It's a trend where people are saying “I’ve never had an original thought in my life” or “I’ve never had an original experience”, and then telling a story of something they did that they just found out other people have done as well. This trend is so interesting to me because it really is pseudo individuality at work. Pop culture and the world has in some ways taught us what to wear, say, think, and more, where everyone has had a lot of the same thoughts and life experiences. Take other trends like fast fashion for example, somehow a clothing item becomes “trendy” and everyone wears it for a while and then it becomes outdated. That is something that a lot of people fall into. This Tik Tok example, is a way people are expressing their life experiences or thoughts and posting them online, and other people are realizing that they are experiencing pseudo individuality. Is there anything that you have done or thought that when you heard of someone else doing the same thing, it wasn’t as individual to you anymore?