The trials and tribulations of a nameless peon

It is a  profound necessity of all  most humans to feel unique. You can call it the “special snowflake effect”. One can of course argue indefinitely about what exactly it is that makes humans “different by definition” : their genetic structure, unique upbringing, different-initial-conditions-of-the-non-quantum-mechanic-particles in their body etc. One can equally well argue about what makes them “all the same”: Their universal need for food, shelter and unconditional love. Their craving for happiness and meaning and countless other issues that accompany the so called “human condition”.

Here is a simplistic overview of the “evolution of uniqueness” as I imagine it.

ATTENTION: the phases described below are not backed by any “hard” data because I”m  simply too lazy to perform such time-consuming research  into the matter.

1. The age of “primordial uniformity”: Before the evolution of spoken language, I assume that humans had a hard time differentiating themselves from the flock through their  interests or personality. The only people who were doing something distinct were probably the tribal rulers, shamans or similar.
2. The age of “small societal clusters”: With the advent of spoken language and clustering of humans in small societies, it became easier for people to acquire a distinct role as more and more professions emerged. Of course for the vast majority of anonymous serfs toiling away 16 hours a day it must have been hard to establish some kind of “recognizability” since they were doing exactly the same unskilled labour. Nevertheless in such small societies it was relatively easy to be distinct through specific character traits. E.g “Aristides the Just” or “Nebuchadnezzar the Greedy” – both names are randomly picked because they sound “ancient” and not in order to refer to the historical personalities associated with them.
3. The age of  ”industrialization and urbanization”: This stage mostly overlaps with the ensuing one but I still believe it merits separate mention because there were times when large numbers of factory workers were either illiterate or had only a very rudimentary education. In this age people are becoming cogs and wheels in the early “industrialization machine”. Huge numbers of them flock to cities and  it becomes hard  to avoid being anonymous and indistinguishable from others.
4. The age of “mass education”, approximately coinciding with the beginning of the 20^th century: Society and culture becomes ever more complex and an increasing number of educated people are demanded by the economy. People can now carve their very distinct niche by taking up a specific vocation or profession or by pursuing other interests thanks to the newly found notion of “free time”.
5. The age of mass tertiary education which roughly starts in the early 1950s in most industrialized societies. It is an extension of the previous age where society is rapidly shifting from manual/industrial labour to “intellectual/white collar labour”. People still face the challenge of differentiating themselves from professional colleagues – what makes a lawyer different from the millions of other lawyers?-  but they can at least identify themselves as belonging to a certain “professional class” that is different from others.
6. The age of “Mass graduate education” and “Information/Automation society” . Can also be called “The age of  STEM ”. This is the current era and its beginning can roughly be traced to the late 1980s/early 1990s. It is an era of frenetic computerization, automation and globalization. To support and maintain this growth, an ever-increasing number of people with a highly specialized education in natural sciences and technology is needed. As technical systems grow in complexity, more and more scientific fields that were previously considered separate now tend to merge or overlap and the dominant trend in research worldwide are the so-called interdisciplinary groups.

And this dear reader is where I come in – because ultimately it’s all about me, me , me. As a grad student and scientific collaborator of a gigantastic technical university, living life among gazillions of scientists and engineers, how do I carve my niche?  How can I be anything else other than a guy “who does stuff with math and computers” among thousands of others who do “stuff with math and computers”? Sometimes I feel that the only thing that separates me from the nameless peons who spent their lives driving a particular rivet in a Ford-Taylor assembly line is that  I am running a 4th order Runge-Kutta solver using a C++ routine. Like the guy next door . And the guy in the basement of the next building. And the Indian guy at the Technical University of Punjab or something.  Can someone explain to me in what way I am not replaceable and expendable?

Of course one could argue that I am just ranting and all I need to do is to move to a place that is not dominated by science and engineering and “everything will be ok”. But will it? As the world becomes more and more automated eventually “everyone” will be a scientist or engineer. And then what? Singularity? AI? Robots that will turn us into batteries?

I think I’m moving to NZ and becoming a shepherd.

PS

I am fully aware of the fact that humans are complex beings that are defined by a lot more than their profession/area of work. Nevertheless, people tend to unconsciously assume that there is a high correlation between one’s area of work and one’s personality. E.g engineers are supposed to be down-to-earth, ‘mathematical’ and taciturn whereas bankers are assumed to be greedy. This means that once a large scale occupational uniformity  is established in a societal group, it becomes a lot more difficult for an individual to project and demonstrate those characteristics that discern him or her from ‘all the others’.

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