Pedants hate the term “very unique” and spend quite a bit of time protesting it. I can’t blame them. They are right. Words mean what they mean. Unique means one of a kind. Although my sympathies lie with the pedants, I’m now willing to bend on this term. It is perfectly acceptable to ascribe degrees to uniqueness. The reason is simple: Everything is unique and/or nothing is.

Unique is dead.

I grew up in a primitive time. Sure, we had a vast communication network that spanned the globe but it was the telephone. And long distance calls were expensive. You only called people you already knew. You never just sat around dialing numbers at random or performing google searches.

At a time like that, before the internet, it was very easy to believe in the superstition of uniqueness. Cut off from the insane ramblings of the vast bulk of mankind, anyone could believe that they were a special little snowflake. Many of us did. We were taught to believe that.

But it was a lie. Now that we have the interwebs, we know that whatever weird shit we’re into, someone else is into the exact same thing, in the exact same way, and they’ve already formed a club. None of us are as unique as we were led to believe. We may be different from something but we are the same as something else. It all depends on how you look at it and what you’re being compared to.

And this is just about human personalities. I’m not even going to get into bits of information endlessly replicated, not going to discuss the copies and frauds made of any object you care to mention, the peak of mass production and the stuttering return of the handcrafted. I’m just saying that unique is a lot rarer than it used to be.

But don’t worry. It was never that important.

Well, cute cat, I’m not really being mean at all. I think that being unique, at some point, became more important than being good. And that was a troubling weight on all of our backs. We all wanted to be different. We’d even like garbage that no one else, in their right mind, could possibly like, just to be different. How else can you explain indie-rock?

We’re now free of that because we have six billion people on this planet and a lot of them have webpages. We know we’re not unique. We’re not different at all. Those people across the planet are into the same things we are. Maybe even more so.

Umm, yes rape cat. That was another problem. If we suffered, by let’s say by being a cat who was raped, we thought we were alone in this too. Uniqueness, you see is a double edged sword. Quite often our suffering is added to by the feeling of facing it alone.

But now we can be sure that, no matter how miserable we may be, there are others out there who share our misery. Maybe they’re even more miserable than us! Isn’t that a great thought, Rape Cat? A whole world full of incomprehensible suffering.

That’s right helmet cat! Now you’ve got it.

You can still wear your handsome helmet and not worry about being different. You can wear it just because you like it. There’s cats in helmets all over the internet. So if you want to do that, you just go right ahead. You’re now part of a tribe that knows no geography, probably has a proud history of some kind or another, and is looking forward to a bright, shining future. You might not be unique but you’re still pretty unique.

You have a degree of uniqueness. Just not the whole thing. That’s not so bad is it?