Sameness & the Fear of Being Ordinary (1)
What mimicry, spiritual identity, and Jung teach us about the real “do the work” and why healing doesn’t happen in homogeneity.
Speaking of soul tribes, echo chambers, and judgment, we encounter these dynamics in nearly every online community today: sameness is often mistaken for safety. When others mirror our beliefs, we feel less marginalised, less rejected. We feel seen, included and, interestingly, less ordinary.
I. The Commodification of the Self
Today, neoliberal values are not just economic, they seeped into the soul stream as quiet tyrants. Popularity became the new proxy for truth and we ended up copying the covers of magazines with our lives.
These values framed our lives as personal brands. Our architecture of identity has been reshaped, embedding a compulsion to optimise, level up, constantly become someone. Stoicism became Instagrammable. Independence (or more so avoidance!) became a brand. Self-worth became a performance. These values tell us that we are solely responsible for our success or failure.
Today, spirituality too, has become a branded lifestyle. It is no longer a journey inward or a descent into mystery. Spiritual growth is now aligned with market-driven goals: efficiency and measurable outcomes are prioritised over the communal, the ancestral, and the transcendental.
The sacred became a service. Ritual became routine. Each tailored to fit within a consumerist framework that exalts individual achievement over collective awakening: eg. mindfulness and yoga are repackaged to enhance productivity and personal branding, health and spiritual well-being are now “packages” sold in the wellness industry as aspirational identities.
Let’s be clear: it’s not wrong to charge for spiritual services. Could we even avoid it? In a world shaped by capitalism, globalization, and financial instability, most of us must exchange energy to survive: rent, food, care, bills. This isn’t betrayal. It’s reality.
The real issue arises when these offerings become entirely market-driven, severed from depth, soul, and truth. When spiritual work is shaped more by algorithms than archetypes, more by optics than integration. But this is a larger conversation, one I’ll return to in a future piece.
Let’s be clear again: what we’re witnessing in much of modern spirituality is not individuation. Not by a long shot. It is not the slow, sacred descent into the Self. It’s assimilation, wrapped in the illusion of uniqueness. It’s the ego learning to perform depth, just in more aesthetic ways.
It’s curated spirituality that mimics the signals of transformation while avoiding the surrender, grief, and humility the soul demands.
Branding is not becoming.
Optimizing is not awakening.
Copying sacred language is not embodiment.
All of it comes down to one word: performance.
This is a timely and necessary discussion. In the chapters that follow, I’ll explore this distortion more deeply and begin to trace the true contours of individuation: what it actually requires, and why so few choose it.
☆ Further Reading?
If you are interested to read about the neoliberal influence on spirituality today, I recommend these books in the footnotes1. Let’s look at one example. The first book: “Spirituality, Organization and Neoliberalism: Understanding Lived Experiences (2020)”, is about how businesses and corporations co-opt spirituality (e.g. mindfulness, yoga, emotional intelligence) to manage labor, reduce burnout, and increase productivity. The authors argue that modern spirituality today is often commodified, self-development tools are aligned with market-driven goals (eg. People are encouraged to engage in self-transformation which mirrors neoliberal ideals of productivity and competitiveness).
But this research is expanded: neoliberalism isn’t just in companies. It’s a logic that infiltrates every space where performance is prized over presence. For example, mindfulness is taught in schools and universities as a concentration hack, spiritual institutions measure growth in output or branding, and online communities reshape spiritual identity into content and performance.
II. The Science of Conformity
Is conformity always bad? In many spiritual spaces today, we hear calls to “deprogram” from systems of control, often directed at organised religion or mainstream ideologies. Liberation is the buzzword. Subtle political alignments slip into “conscious conversation.” And dogma ? Dogma wears a mala.
But look closer, and you’ll often find spiritual tribalism mirroring the very structures it claims to transcend!
Take away: Hence the question isn’t just what we’re breaking free from, but what we unconsciously recreate.
1. Why Do We Conform?
Human brains are wired for social grouping. We naturally seek out shared values, familiar language, recognisable signals. This tribal instinct is underpinned by neural mechanisms that reward cohesion and mirroring.
When we perceive others as part of our group, the brain’s reward centers light up and dopamine is released. We feel good when we belong. We feel safer when we match, when we blend, when we are mirrored. This neurological response reinforces loyalty, preference, and conformity.
Our brains also contain mirror neurons, which activate both when we take an action and when we observe others doing the same. This allows us to learn socially, to empathise, and - more importantly - to adopt group behaviours without conscious analysis.
But this isn’t just about individual wiring, it’s also about group survival. From an evolutionary standpoint, conformity increased the chances of cooperation, harmony, and mutual protection. Early human communities needed cohesion to survive.
Studies2 show that even in the absence of explicit pressure or frequency bias, social learning alone can lead to population-wide conformity. Other studies suggests that cultural homogeneity - created through shared behaviour and belief - helped stabilize group identity in small, fragile societies.3
Conformity, in this light, isn’t a flaw. It’s an ancestral survival mechanism. But in modern contexts - especially in spiritual or ideological spaces - what once kept us safe can become what keeps us asleep.
2. Animals Conform Too!
Conformity and collective behavior are not exclusive to humans. In nature, many species exhibit synchronised behaviours that enhance survival. Group coherence is vital for protection, cohesion, and efficiency.
For example, studies on bird flocks4 have shown that individual birds adjust their movements based on their neighbor, leading to coordinated group dynamics that can evade predators more effectively. Similarly, social spiders5 demonstrate group-level selection, where colonies maintain specific ratios of behavioural types (e.g., aggressive vs. docile) to optimise survival, suggesting an innate mechanism for preserving beneficial group compositions.
3. Is Conformity Necessarily Bad?
Here’s the tension: conformity is not inherently negative. It enables shared meaning. It helps create bonds, rituals, and ethical codes. It can protect the vulnerable, nurture identity, and stabilize communities.
But when conformity becomes unconscious, namely when it is presented as freedom while functioning as control, it becomes spiritually regressive. Especially when cloaked in the language of awakening. This is the trap.
III. From Survival to Spiritual Bypassing and Reprogramming
New Age and spiritual communities often speak of “deprogramming”: liberating oneself from religious dogma, societal conditioning, and ancestral trauma. But is it truly possible?
The real trance isn’t just political propaganda or religious control. It’s the unconscious performance of transformation within the very tribal survival structures we claim to have transcended.
The spiritual ego says, “I’ve left the system.” But its voice is still shaped by it.
What is often called “awakening” today is not necessarily a deepening into truth nor is it true liberation from conditioning. It’s often a more aesthetic adaptation to mimetic conformity™: a curated echo of awakening that mimics depth without entering it.
This isn’t transcendence. It’s learning the language of transcendence, adopting the aesthetic of insight, and striking the posture of sovereignty, without touching the raw, unglamorous labor of the soul.
A new script begins:
“Raise your frequency.”
“Cut out low vibrational people.”
“You must do the work.”
“This is a safe space” (unless you disagree).
And so we find ourselves conforming again, not to old traditions, but to new codes, new postures, new aesthetic dogmas. The tribe has changed, but the psychic mechanism remains the same. We don’t escape programming. We simply replace the source code with a prettier font.
This is not individuation. This is tribalism in sacred robes, still rooted in the primal drive for sameness, still seeking safety in the familiar, but now covered in crystal grids and curated vulnerability.
And it goes deeper still. This new aesthetic of awakening often becomes a spiritual bypass: a defence mechanism masquerading as insight.
Instead of descending into our own unconscious, we skip over the grief, anger, shame, and contradiction that true transformation demands. We adopt transcendent language to avoid our humanity. We wear the language of depth to protect the ego from disruption.
In Jungian terms, this is the refusal to integrate the Shadow. It is a false reconciliation with the Self, an attempt to “ascend” without first descending into the mess of the psyche.
Spiritual bypassing limits our freedom to truly be.
It avoids the Other.
It avoids complexity.
It avoids growth.
We find ourselves caught in the myth of collective awakening: the desire to ascend together, while still needing to feel exceptional. We want to heal, but we also want to be mirrored. We want to be safe, but also seen as unique. And in this, we remain in orbit around the same central fear: the fear of being ordinary.
IV. The Collective Unconscious
1. The Hunger for Sameness
Carl Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious helps explain why the pull toward sameness is so powerful and so invisible. The collective unconscious is not merely a vault of myths and archetypes. It is the psychic atmosphere we all breathe. It holds the inherited blueprints of human experience: our symbolic instincts, archetypal roles, and our deep drives toward safety, conformity, and group identity.
In times of uncertainty or rapid change, the ego seeks anchoring. It reaches into this vast psychic field and pulls up what feels familiar, safe, “normal.” And what does it find?
The desire to belong at all costs.
The glorification of the exceptional Self.
The fear of ordinariness as a kind of death.
In this sense, the rejection of being “ordinary” is not merely cultural, it’s archetypal. It is the modern ego’s attempt to assert uniqueness within a system that both seduces and swallows. We want to shine, but in a way that’s still recognisable to the tribe.
2. The Symptoms of Sameness
Sameness is not the disease, it’s the symptom. The surface-level performance of something deeper: a collective wound around visibility, significance, and belonging. Beneath the mirrored beliefs, the branded vulnerability, the collective language of “light” and “authenticity” lies a terror that is both primal and existential:
Will I matter if I am not unique?
Will I belong if I break from the group?
Can I survive if no one notices me?
So we participate in the choreography. We mimic depth. We perform healing. We adopt spiritual scripts not because we’re inauthentic, but because we’re scared: scared of disappearing into the mass, scared of being nothing but another voice in the void.
And here’s another paradox: mirroring. The more we try to stand out by mimicking uniqueness, the more we dissolve into a new collective. The “healing tribe.” The “conscious community.” The “awakened ones.” Same frequency. Same fears. Same faces under different names.
Hence, sameness is the soul’s camouflage. It’s what we wear when we’re terrified of being truly naked in the ordinary light of day.
Take away: We do not fear being ordinary. We fear being unseen within the ordinary.
3. We Don’t Heal and Grow in Homogeneity!
This may go against what many communities assume: we don’t heal with people who are just like us. The more we reject dissonance and cling to the comfort of sameness, the more fragmented we become: internally and collectively.
Yes, support is necessary. We do need groups. We need safe spaces. We need shared language, especially when we’re breaking out of old systems. They help us feel seen, understood, and less alone. This kind of resonance can be incredibly healing in the early stages of awakening, grief, or transformation. It’s also true, those who resemble us often mirror our wounds.
But healing through sameness has its limits. At a certain point, the mirror becomes a cage. We stop being reflected, and start being reinforced. And this is where individuation begins, not in rejecting community, but in risking differentiation.
True maturity asks something far more difficult: to leave the nest of sameness. To differentiate is to emerge from the tribal dream and come into direct contact with the Self not with the persona, not with the brand, and not with the borrowed scripts, the ideologies that shaped us, the safe reflections of people who agree. We must dare to meet the world without a reference point without an echo. Just us, our intuition, and the wild soul beneath the programming.
Carl Jung understood this tension innately. He taught that the collective unconscious binds us through shared patterns. but that individuation requires rupture. Not to reject the collective, but to rise beyond unconscious identification with it.
“To become whole,” Jung said, “is to differentiate.”
We are always penduluming between the need for belonging and the call to become. Between the comfort of the familiar and the discomfort of soul growth. Between being mirrored, and being transformed.
The goal is not to abandon the group, but not to disappear inside it. The group is a nest, not a final home.
4. There’s no “personal branding” in the Self
As I wrote in the introduction, modern spirituality - under neoliberal influence - pushes us away from individuation, not toward it. Carl Jung warned: the Self is not something to optimise or brand. The Self is not a curated identity or a spiritual aesthetic. It is a transcendent center: a psychic totality that includes the shadow, the contradictions, the forgotten, and the deeply unmarketable.
And this is where neoliberalism and the collective unconscious converge. The collective unconscious does not only hold the ancient gods. It holds the modern illusions too namely:
We are only valuable when we are exceptional.
If we are not curated, we are invisible.
If we are not evolving, we are failing.
Jungian individuation is not about becoming special. It is about becoming whole. And wholeness includes the broken. It includes the boring. It includes the ordinary.
V. Two Paradoxes: Belonging vs. Becoming
The tension between sameness and individuation is not just psychological, it’s archetypal. It lives in the split between the Persona and the Self, between the need to belong and the soul’s call to become.
Carl Jung warned that the larger a collective grows, the more negligible the individual becomes. Without discernment, the collective unconscious morphs into mass psychology, where differentiation is feared and sameness becomes sacred. This is where the soul contracts flattened into roles, trends, and signals of belonging.
Individuation, then, is not rebellion. It’s the return to significance not as performance, but as presence. It is the refusal to measure the soul by metrics. The slow, sacred return to your deep root: untouched by trend, untouched by tribe.
But let’s not pathologize our need for resonance. Sameness isn’t weakness, it’s ancestral wiring. It lives in the nervous system. It whispers safety through mirroring. In times of rapid change, the ego doesn’t reach for truth. It reaches for anchoring.
And what does it grasp?
Familiarity.
Echoes.
What others are doing. Who’s being praised. What’s trending in the soulscape.
So even as we try to escape the collective, we often find ourselves recreating it.
We trade one archetype for another.
One group for another.
One script for one with better fonts and higher frequencies.
Take away: The shadow of modern spirituality is not ignorance. It’s mimicry. A reprogramming that promises sovereignty but delivers repetition.
2. Can we really “flee“ the collective unconscious?
This is the deeper irony: The more we try to transcend the collective unconscious, the deeper we may fall under its spell. The archetypes don’t disappear when we “awaken”, they shift form. They become influencers. Healers. Mystics. Guides.
The tribal mind goes nowhere. It just changes masks. So we move - often unconsciously - from one paradox to another. And this is where the individuation path begins in earnest.
3. The Paradoxes
In the next part I will look in more detail at these two paradoxes:
★ Paradox 1:
If I individuate, would I become obsessed with myself?
Would I become rigid in my ego or in my shadow?
★ Paradox 2:
If I surrender and belong, will I lose myself in the group mind?
These paradoxes aren’t just personal dilemmas, they are collective tensions, archetypal crossroads. The more we remain in identification with the Persona (the mask), the further we drift from the true encounter with the Shadow, the Anima/Animus, and the Self.
Here is why then individuation becomes your best path:
Take away: Individuation is the sacred flight away from imposed identity into the unknown Self.
How do we reconcile these paradoxes?
How do we belong without dissolving, and differentiate without dissociating?
This is the threshold of individuation. And it’s where we now turn.
~ To be continued ~
