everyone get more niche NOW!!!

hyper-individualism & how identity is misattributed to consumerism & the role of performance

i oscillate between 2 states

• i am unique and it makes me awesome

• the rise of hyper-individualism is repelling community, an obsession with being niche turns you in some sort of spectacle whereby people can no longer understand or relate to you, you have to let yourself be seen.

in an increasingly individualistic society, where youth subcultures run rampant, the need for a personal “identity” grows more poignant. but the notion of identity has been misinterpreted and done injustice. rewind a decade: most people listened to the same radio hits, shopped at the same fashion chains. today, under the facade of “capitalism breeds innovation,” we’re bombarded with endless niches, each demanding attention. and so, the illusion crumbles because capitalism doesn’t breed innovation, it breeds overconsumption. identity becomes synonymous with consumption. what you wear, what music you stream, the layout of your room, every detail must say something about who you are.

we’ve seen this need to be different manifest in various ways, take the phrase “not like other girls” a phrase born from the need to differentiate, to possess something uniquely ours. from a psychological standpoint, identity offers a sense of control in an otherwise conforming world. but ironically, this desperate search for difference renders us alll the same as we are paradoxically unified in our quest for uniqueness.

in a 2010 paper i was reading for my arts class by Joh-Jong Huang, Ming-Yii Huang and Fei-Kai Syu, introduce the term “liberated anomie” as a state where freedom from societal norms leads not to empowerment, but to confusion and disconnection. though their work addresses youth from a social work lens, it extends further than that and speaks more broadly to the effects of capitalism’s hyper-choice: a freedom that isolates.

Figure 1 Liberated Anomie Model - J.J. Huang et al

in a way it is beautiful to see how people can truly find themselves and their niche' - but this is in an idealistic sense, in a real practical sense where we consider the modern capitalist context of our world, identity has been reduced to self-expression, divorced from inner values or moral grounding.

overconsumption

if we look back to the 20th century, there were widely accepted ways of being. deviation was often met with ridicule or social exclusion. those who were “different” weren’t performing for attention but rather stood apart due to their moral or political convictions. take the riot grrrls, women who challenged patriarchal norms, advocated for rights, and expressed their defiance not through curated consumption, but through deliberate acts of resistance, symbolised by their clothing, their makeup etc. in the 1980s, when women began wearing trousers and adopting traditionally “masculine” aesthetics, it wasn’t to be quirky or alternative. it was to reclaim power. back then, self-expression was tied to purpose.

today, it is an untethered aesthetic exercise in novelty. self-expression lacks the philosophical and social connotations it once carried, people want to be different for the sake of being different. people consume in order to signal identity in what i can describe as an outside-in approach. the consumption precedes the character. this is not expression, but performance. rather than being the type of person to consume such things, people consume to be someone. performance is everywhere. men drink matcha and stream clairo to perform emotional depth. it is a consumption of attributes. we no longer embody values, we accessorise them.

this leads inevitably to overconsumption. and as a fellow substack writer P.E Moskowitz writes, “the more capitalism wants us to feel scrambled so that we are isolated, automatonized, and susceptible to replacing our own needs with the needs of capital, the more quickly capitalism needs to sell us an ever-wider array of identities to feel secure and logical within.” identity becomes productised and individuality becomes marketable.

this is the strange logic of the modern world: “you are what you buy.” and this consumption creates an illusion of belonging.

Figure 2

social identity theory, as formulated by Henri Tajfel and John Turner, explains that we derive self-worth from group membership. these groups, once defined by ideology or purpose, are now shaped by brands, playlists, and niche fashion archives. identity is no longer intrinsic. it is stitched into labels, algorithms, and aesthetics. and once a niche becomes visible, it becomes obsolete. and so the cycle continues : create a trend, commodify, abandon.

Durkheim once warned, “to pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness.” in a lacanian sense, this constant yearning is destined to remain unfulfilled. it is a desire driven by lack, sustained by illusion. it is not who you are, but who you hope others believe you to be. five hundred years ago, identity was character that was shaped by values, beliefs, one’s place in family and community. now it is curated.

Freud’s psychoanalytic model places the ego as the mediator between desire (id) and morality (superego), forming the self. but in a society where ego is inflated and guided by spectacle, we become defined by appearance, not by inner coherence. the features that once grounded the ego ie insight, purpose, empathy are replaced by a superficial sense of differentiation.

Tajfel’s studies on group dynamics revealed how easily humans attach meaning to arbitrary affiliations even something as trivial as a shared preference in art. this instinct now plays out in consumer behaviour: yes, i buy archival rick owens. yes, i wear tabis. yes, i wear niche perfume and listen to music with less than 5,000 streams. and that makes me “special.” that makes me “different.” and in being different, i feel a sense of control, that i am not like other people. this obsession with distinctiveness becomes social currency.

but the further one drifts into obscurity, the less one belongs. niche turns into spectacle. and in trying so hard to escape the mainstream, one ends up adrift, unanchored. coming from the microcosm of a sheltered high school where i felt different and did not fit into the mold that was set out for me, i feel a connection to people who do understand my silly little interests and i have a feeling of being seen for once. but in the vast majority of experiences i do quite often feel alienated, almost as if im just a freaking weird girl spectacle.

social media as a 3rd person lens - performance

this curation of identity has only been further exacerbated by social media. rarely do we pause to interrogate the almost dystopian implications of this technology. for the first time in human history, we are granted a persistent third-person view of ourselves, no not just in the occasional reflection or photograph, but in a constant, surveilled, and editable stream of images and performances. this ability to see oneself as an object, as something to be consumed, evaluated, and aestheticised, is profoundly dehumanising. we are no longer simply living but observing ourselves live, in real time, as if through the eyes of others.

and because no one can truly know your values or your emotional depth through a screen, they rely on what is immediately visible. social media transforms the self into spectacle.

even more insidiously, not only are we seen, we are curated. we are both the subject and the stylist. we select the angles, the filters, the fragments of our lives to be seen, constructing identity as if it were a product. and in this process, we blur the line between authenticity and performance. even sincerity becomes stylised. this is not freedom this is a cage made of cool story highlights and perfectly organised photo dumps.

social media capitalises on our longing to be understood while ensuring we never truly are. it invites us to perform endlessly, all under the illusion of connection. and in doing so, it intensifies the crisis of identity. we are not known. we are seen. and in being seen, we are misread as not as who we are, but as what we signal.

conclusion

be yo self? this sounds a bit silly that i’ve gone on this entire tangent to just conclude with the most generic phrase but it is truly a guiding light - at least in my life. don’t curate your identity, its not something that can be defined. don’t buy things to indicate who you are as a person. be the type of person to buy some types of things. because you cannot perform and try and be someone else forever, be yourself and know what you like, who you are. you don’t need to buy things to be ‘cooler’ because cool is an arbitrary construct we attach to material things, cool is something innately within your character - your true identity - detached from this capitalistic consumption. and if you have made it this far i know u cool brah love u all <3