My friend Ana Vargas Santos and I often exchange references — articles, podcasts, things that snag our attention (she wrote a wonderfully practical book on attention that you should check out, if you can read Portuguese). Besides this, she regularly writes some of her own at Yellow Pad. After reading my piece about the Saturday that wasn’t, she sent me an essay by Ted Gioia that I can’t stop thinking about. Normally, we would discuss it in person, but this time, as I’m on maternity leave, we exchanged thoughts online. Consider this an experiment: in co-authorship, in writing-as-conversation, in thinking together in public.

Gioia cites Steven Mintz, a history professor at the University of Texas, who requires substantial writing in his 400-person survey course. Now he receives, in his words, “400 variations on the same essay. The wording, structure, transitions, tone, even the closing sentences are largely identical.” Four hundred students. Four hundred essays. One text.

This isn’t a failure of education. It’s the apotheosis of effortlessness — what happens when we grow intolerant to anything other than the immediate satisfaction of desire. As I’ve argued elsewhere, externalising internal conflicts leads to subcontracting capacities we should develop ourselves.¹ The phenomenon Mintz describes is its logical culmination: in an age where everyone must find “their truth,” they all arrive at the same destination — not truth, but its uniform.

Gioia draws a parallel with the TV series Pluribus. An extraterrestrial virus removes individual personalities and blends everyone into a single hive mind. The infected speak the same words at the exact same moment. And — this is the disturbing part — they are blissfully happy. The comparison would be merely clever if it weren’t so precise. Those 400 students didn’t produce identical essays because they were forced to. They chose the hive. They preferred the comfort of a single pre-digested answer to the discomfort of thinking for themselves. The series creator, Vince Gilligan, has built a career writing about independent thinkers: characters whose drive to live according to their own set of values (questionable as they might be) steers them away from their families, their careers, society, and the law. Being your own person, his plots seem to imply, leads to a deep state of solitude. Or is it the other way around?

In another curious coincidence, the series creator, Vince Gilligan, has called AI “a plagiarism machine”. But what troubles me more than the obvious critique of AI dependency is that those essays were likely produced from prompts using phrases like “in my own voice” or “expressing my authentic perspective.” The uniformity emerged disguised as individuality. If my hypothesis is correct, these prompts indicate something more serious: a lack of awareness about the erosion of individuality itself.

I’ve spent years observing what I call the post-depth phenomenon — the transformation of profundity into commodity, wisdom into content, complexity into bite-sized consumption. But Gioia’s example reveals something I hadn’t fully articulated: the self-help gurus who peddle “your truth” and the tech evangelists who claim their own aren’t rebels against the hive. They’re its most sophisticated expression.

Consider the mechanics. Every guru says essentially the same thing: be authentic, find your voice, live your truth, step outside your comfort zone. The message of radical individuality is infinitely replicable precisely because it contains nothing individual. It’s a password, not a proposition. Say the right words and you gain entry to the community of the “awakened.”

Similarly, every tech entrepreneur claims to have the exact same purpose: to make the world a better place. The price of admission to the selected elite who get to build that enlightened vision is, obviously, conformity: it requires suspending individual reasoning. We’ve all seen what happens when tech CEOs become tech gurus (let’s just recall Elizabeth Holmes from Theranos or Adam Neumann from WeWork): questioning gets silenced, critics get fired. And then, of course, there’s the supreme irony of watching these leaders who are supposed to be the ultimate independent thinkers flock to the White House, collectively adhering to the vision of a single man.

As I explored before, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt distinguished bullshit from lying: the liar knows the truth and conceals it; the bullshitter is indifferent to truth altogether. The post-depth practitioner adds a third category: one who mistakes the performance of truth-having for truth itself. “That’s my truth” becomes not a statement about reality but a tribal marker, a way of signalling membership while foreclosing any actual engagement with ideas.

Here’s the first paradox I keep circling: genuine thought resists export. If you can package an insight into a 30-second reel without loss, it was never insight — it was formula. Real understanding requires translation, adaptation, work from the receiver. It arrives incomplete and demands completion. The banalities of self-help succeed precisely because they demand nothing. They’re infinitely exportable because infinitely empty.

The second paradox is more troubling. No one forced those students to use ChatGPT. No one compelled them to abandon the struggle of thinking for the smooth surface of already-thought thought. Gioia puts it starkly: “humans are willing to abandon key aspects of their personhood — provided that the mindset of the ant in the anthill is comfortable and stress-free.” I’ve written about how technology promises liberation while delivering new forms of capture. What I underestimated was the seduction of that capture. The hive doesn’t need to coerce when it can seduce.

We both know what it feels like to not fit in - the discomfort that comes from not adhering to a commonly accepted set of ideas, thinking differently from our peers, envisioning a need for change in a system prone to inertia. Sometimes there’s comfort in blending in. But - here’s another paradox - University is supposed to be the place and the time to develop independent thought. The exposure to different realities and perspectives, combined with the freedom to make your own decisions (and live with their consequences) is meant to expand your mind. However, in the book “The Coddling of the American Mind”, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt argue that in recent years ideas considered uncomfortable have been silenced and banned from university grounds, which might be contributing to this uniformity of thought. 

What the hive offers isn’t just comfort — it’s absolution. If everyone says the same thing, no one is responsible for anything. “That’s my truth” functions as alibi: I was only being authentic. The 400 identical essays about authentic selfhood are 400 declarations of innocence. Each student can claim individual expression while enjoying the safety of the collective answer.

This is what Gioia calls “happiness as a life without individual responsibility.” It’s the inverse of existentialism: instead of being condemned to freedom, we’re liberated into determinism. The algorithm decides. The template provides. We merely execute.

The third paradox concerns the gurus themselves. Their function isn’t to liberate but to provide the script that makes liberation unnecessary. “Find your authentic self” is an instruction that, followed literally, produces 400 identical essays about authentic selfhood.

The vanity of these figures is instructive. They believe they’ve discovered something unique, something that sets them apart. Yet their insights are interchangeable. Swap the names and faces, keep the message, and nothing changes. The supposed possession of truth — which should be the ultimate expression of individuality — turns out to be its complete absence. They’ve confused having followers with having thoughts.

This is the certainty syndrome working as designed. Each creates a “methodology” with a trademarked name, convinced of its originality, unable to see that it’s the same chassis with different chrome. The wellness-industrial complex doesn’t produce individuals. It produces franchises of individuality — each outlet selling the same product under a different sign.

When I shared my first thoughts with Ana, she cut straight to the centre: "How do we live simultaneously through the peak of individualism and the end of individuality? Is the second phenomenon a consequence of the first?" The answer, I think, is yes — and the mechanism is precisely what these paradoxes describe. When "be yourself" becomes a commandment, the self becomes a product. When authenticity turns into method, it ceases to be authentic. The end of individuality didn't arrive despite hyper-individualism. It arrived because of it. This is conformism of the second order: conformity with the demand for non-conformity.

What would genuine individuality look like? Not, I think, the loud proclamation of one’s special truth. That’s the uniform again. Genuine thought announces itself through specific resistance. It doesn’t fit the template. It requires explanation that can’t be compressed into a motivational quote. It often sounds uncertain, provisional, incomplete — because it is. The thinker hasn’t received an answer; they’re still working through a question. All this takes time. Time is perceived as scarce.

Maybe I’m influenced by my recent experience, but I believe there’s nothing like being a parent to remind you that the most consequential aspects of our lives don’t follow a template: caring for a newborn baby is about doing the same things repeatedly and obtaining different results. 

Gioia sees hope in the anxiety our culture expresses through shows like Severance and Pluribus. If we’re frightened by the loss of selfhood, perhaps we haven’t lost it entirely. I’m less optimistic. The students producing identical essays about individual voice don’t seem anxious. They seem relieved. The anthill is comfortable. The friction is gone. And with the friction, the possibility of genuine discovery.

In a particularly disturbing scene in Pluribus, the main character travels to meet the other 12 individuals who mysteriously managed to maintain conscience, hoping to join forces with them to save humanity, only to find out that they have no intention of doing so. There’s that deep solitude that Gilligan seems to know intimately again.

The 400 essays are frightening not because AI wrote them but because the students accepted them. Somewhere in the transaction, the labour of thinking — with its frustrations, its wrong turns, its moments of unexpected recognition — was traded for the smooth surface of pre-processed thought. They didn’t lose their individuality. They surrendered it. And they did so while writing essays about finding one’s authentic voice.

That’s the uniform of uniqueness: the costume we all wear while pretending to be naked. The password we all speak while believing we’ve invented language. The hive mind dressed in the rhetoric of radical self-expression.

We’re building the anthill ourselves, one outsourced thought at a time. All while convinced we’re finding our truth.

1. I explored this through my children’s argument over who controls the pause button during cartoons. Technology resolved what once required internal deliberation: Is physical relief more important than seeing the entire episode? What we gain in convenience we lose in the practice of self-reflection. ↩︎