The Age of Sameness is here

It was an autumn day in September 2016. After my overseas flight, I had a problem with my Airbnb in Boston — right in the middle of the city’s busiest season, when all the hotels were full and the remaining ones overpriced. I was exhausted, and all I wanted was a bed. Airbnb told me to wait until midnight while they looked for a hotel. But where could I wait for hours and still feel at home? I didn’t have the energy to search for Boston’s cafés. Without thinking, I chose Starbucks. I knew exactly what to expect: it wouldn’t be any different from a Starbucks in Istanbul, even the smell. Nobody would bother me, no matter how many hours I sat there with my luggage. Everything was the same. And that sameness was exactly the comfort I needed at that moment.

It’s not just me. We all love sameness. It gives us comfort and speed. We watch the same shows, laugh at the same memes, and eat at the same chains. This gives us more in common to talk about and, in the end, makes us feel less alone.

This isn’t something new. From Umberto Eco and Roland Barthes to Susana Tosca and Lisbeth Klastrup, pre-AI thinkers have shown how repetition and variation keep culture alive, and how audiences themselves demand it.

Sameness, in this sense, is natural — and we love it. But we also crave the feeling of being unique through our own creations. As psychiatrist Rollo May argued, this isn’t a luxury but a necessity — the very meaning of our lives.

From cultural glue to structural narrowing

In the 19th century, people signaled belonging by wearing the same clothes — women in long dresses, men in hats. It was a cultural rhythm, a way of showing you were part of a class.

The Industrial Revolution expanded this rhythm. Suddenly, we had the same cars, the same soup brands, the same department stores. Sameness increased because mass production gave us more in common.

By the 20th century, sameness had moved inside the workplace. Every corporate worker stared at the same KPIs on their desk. Take Jason, a car salesman. If an idea didn’t help him sell cars, it was considered a waste of time. He was called “creative” only if it helped him sell more. Over time, all his talk, all his thinking, revolved around hitting targets.

Society began to celebrate this narrow definition of creativity. The “creative class” became those who could scale businesses, launch new markets, or drive profits. From entrepreneurs to athletes to artists like Taylor Swift, the heroes we elevated were those who succeeded as business people. Curiosity without a payoff quietly disappeared.

The internet then accelerated this logic. Fifty years ago, it might take a year for a new fashion to spread across countries. Today, it takes hours. A dress posted in Seoul can appear in Paris before lunch. Culture became fast, global, convergent. Sameness was no longer a byproduct. It was engineered into the system.

AI is a new layer of sameness: inside the mind itself

Now comes artificial intelligence. AI isn’t just another step — it’s a different level.

Picture two students: one in Yogyakarta, the other in Stockholm. They type the same question into an LLM and receive nearly the same answer. The internet accelerated sameness by spreading culture globally and instantly. AI goes further: it internalizes sameness by shaping how we think in the first place. Travel may still change the sights and smells you encounter, but the answers you hear in Indonesia or Sweden may soon sound the same — unless we learn to use AI tools more carefully.

AI accelerates sameness and pushes it to a whole new level. Studies already show that writing becomes more uniform with AI assistance, and co-writing with LLMs erases the distinctiveness of different authors.

I call this cognitive compression; the narrowing of our imagination, with sameness moving inside our thought processes themselves. The cost is not only cultural but cognitive: our originality, curiosity, and authenticity begin to dull.

The Age of Sameness

We are entering the Age of Sameness.If the 20th century narrowed creativity under market logic, AI now threatens to collapse it further straight into our cognition. Unless we intervene, sameness becomes the default and originality the rare exception.

That is why I am writing The Age of Sameness. It is the first book to connect our decades-long drift toward sameness with the urgent cognitive crisis of AI, and to explore how we can reclaim creativity as a survival skill — including ways to use AI to support originality rather than compress it.

As Rollo May reminded us: creativity is not a hobby. It is the core of human existence.