The world makes it easy for you to believe in your own specialness, but incredibly hard for you to truly discover your own ordinariness. A side effect of specialization under modernity is that everybody gets fractionally distilled from birth to "special" by age 21 or so.
Special doesn’t equal superior or positive. Just encouraging you to see yourself in a narrower category than “human” IS performing “special”. You’re more aware of “middle-aged woman” aspects of you than aspects you share with many more, like having 2 legs.
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If the point is that we pick or are given micro-traits to identify with to build our self-conceptions (positive, negative, neutral, and pre-packaged, i.e. branded) but that these things don't actually matter, sure. Coupland made a similar point back when he wrote Generation X.
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We’re talking past each other. That’s not really my point at all.
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