mainstream syndrome

the median is middling at best

Imagine your dream car. Now think about the car you have, and the car your neighbor has, and the car your parents and your siblings and your partner and your barista and your bosses have.

Now remove everyone from the list who is objectively upper middle class — if this leaves your list as only the barista, congratulations and fuck you. Moving on: what about any of your cars stands out?

Perhaps one or two are in interesting colors — one of the writers is obsessed with capturing photos of unique-colored cars. Anything else? Shape, style, features, anything recognizable at all? Most critically, if you debadged these cars of their logos and put them together like in a police lineup, how many people would be able to identify the brands?

Probably a small smattering of car enthusiasts among the general population know the intricate details of these cars well enough to be able to tell them apart, and few of them care about Toyotas and Nissans and Chevys as much as they enjoy Land Rovers and Porsches and Audis. Even Teslas, the once eye-catching cars of choice for the optimistic middle-class coastal driver who just got a job where they could max out their retirement contributions if they wanted to, are now ubiquitous enough to be insipidly omnipresent. They may not fade into the background, but you won’t look twice at one unless it’s puke-green or decked with Christmas lights.

You’ve got your basic sedans, your basic coupes, your typical hatchbacks and minivans and massive lifted trucks with enough space between the rims and the ground to fit a basic sedan (or coupe). Apart from the typical white/black/red/blue/silver, there has been a rise in putty-like matte colorways like sage green and burnt sienna and concrete grey.

The sameness doesn’t stop in the automotive world. Tried to go work in a coffee shop lately? No matter where you are in the world, the best place for a unique $7 latte probably comes in one of three flavors: industrial chic with exposed beams that make you wonder if it was mildly inspired by Severance, wholesome farm-to-table “gathering places” that moonlight as yoga studios and offer seven different types of low-carbon milk (don’t mind the G-Wagons in the parking lot), or plant nursery that happens to occasionally sell a coffee. Cat cafes are the exception, and they will always be appreciated for that.

How many times have you been to a bookstore or library in the last year? If the answer was less than 2, feel free to skip this paragraph. Hello, sophisticate: is it just us, or do most book covers for the typical metropolitan adult novel look completely unmemorable? It’s like the publishers thought, Color! That’ll be good, except they all thought it all at once like some sort of radio frequency that was transmitted to the entire city of New York and only infected the people with loose printer paper in their apartments.

Even classic novels and old-school gritty stories are now being republished with this modernist design lean - the original cover for Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn is a far cry from the cover one of the authors just saw on their coworker’s desk.

Many of the storylines have also become familiar enough to evoke a recurring feeling of déjà vu. Maybe there isn’t anything new under the sun — but the number of instances where we’ve picked up a book, read the synopsis, and put it down thinking it sounded like another book we’ve already read is worrying; and while we may seem like prolific readers (read: nerds), our annual reading goals are respectable and we spend at least as much time on articles as we do on books. We score two and four respectively on the “likes memoirs” scale, but we imagine even those more keen on the genre can only handle so many iterations of “member of minority group grows up and processes trauma” or “quirky relatable memoir by recently-famous actor or comedian.”

Mainstream perfumes are now the same general varieties of flavored water: flower, green, sandalwood, musk, and if-vanilla-punched-you-in-the-face. One clothing brand makes an interesting top, and two days later its knockoffs are plastered over TikTok Shop and the Shein home page. Makeup and lifestyle brands cannot come up with many more ways to differentiate themselves, so all their advertising blurs in our memories into a vague conception of sans-serif fonts and either neutral or bright colors (depending on what kind of personality they want to convey to buyers).

There have always been, and will always be, people who like to go to the same Starbucks and read the same type of classic mystery novel, listen to a formulaic true-crime podcast, and drive a functional-but-boring car to work and back — people for whom this routine is specifically what makes them happy. The final item in the list makes both of the authors happy, in fact. But we believe that what has led us down this asymptote to the median and mediocre is excessive optimization: basically, people see that something works, and they use it to be similarly successful, leaving much of their originality out of the equation in an attempt to maximize the probability of profit.

Not only that, but we have so many options today: who to date, where to travel, what beverage to consume, what concert to attend, which Korean sunscreen to trust and which influencer’s lipstick performs the best. Having little to truly distinguish between these unexceptional options exacerbates choice fatigue and decision paralysis, with product loyalty as an unintended consequence — this brand’s product works, so I’m going to keep using it rather than fall into the research-and-comparison trap involved in finding a new version. If the brands don’t care enough to stand out, why should we care? One of the authors (you can guess which one) has used the same drugstore-brand 2-for-$5 eyeliner since high school and is now old enough to require their own insurance plan in America.

There’s nothing fundamentally new about the drive to optimize for consumer adoption; to the contrary, competing producers converging on the ideal form of a product or service is the idealized outcome of successful capitalism. However, technological advancements allowing data to be collected, processed, and analyzed at previously unimaginable scales have intensified the process to the point that even the slightest “inefficiency” has been almost universally cast aside. Features as innocuous as unique aesthetic features on cars, electronic products and accessories that are not black or white or grey, and restaurant menus items not approved by Instagram all seem to be disappearing in the name of maximum appeal and resaleability.

Advancements run in parallels: as tech has improved, so has medicine (and you can take “improved” as a euphemism in both cases). Specifically, cosmetic medicine — plastic surgery and nonsurgical cosmetic procedures; just as we endeavor to optimize the world, we undertake the optimizing of our bodies. Plastic surgery is much less socially taboo than it once was, which is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself — but the nonsurgical “enhancements” have exploded in popularity by way of medspas and similar clinic-adjacent environments that offer body contouring, fat reduction, skin lightening/tightening/resurfacing, and the ubiquitous injectables that are colloquially and offhandedly referred to as fillers. From a macro perspective, the idea that we are on the asymptote of normalizing taking fat out of a part of the body and putting it elsewhere for cosmetic reasons is rather sobering; we try to avoid catastrophizing and moralizing here, but for the love of all that is good — it’s still fucking crazy, right? The time, money, resources, expertise, and pain that are spent here feels, to us, criminal to waste on trivial matters like chubby ankles and imperfect jawlines and short femurs and hip dips and full cheeks and —

Anyway.

People are starting to look the same, to chase the same “optimal” features, converging on a few limited ideas of what’s considered attractive and desirable. Social media has not helped the situation (when has it ever?). We see beautiful people everywhere, and we want to be beautiful too — but our perception of beauty has been algorithmically distorted. This line of inquiry houses many opportunities to be casually sexist, but we can wax poetic about duck lips and broccoli hair alike.

We used to have diversity of options across a spectrum, and there was a likelihood that one option ticked most of the boxes of each person’s individual needs. Everyone was an amalgamation of different choices on the spectrum, having extreme or unique tastes in some categories and basic requirements in others — you chose which things to care about and which were not so important. Now, in an age of specialized consumer data collection, companies have optimized the available options to fit each extreme niche and largely cut out the middle — consumers that don’t fit a neat trend line of opinions are not served as completely by the options that are left. We are forced to choose between extremes or make no choice at all; usually the former occurs, and companies retain their profits with less effort, reinforcing the decision to cut out the middle. The modern world has allowed new brands to market to the masses, but the design landscape has made these brands virtually indistinguishable from each other.

Maybe the world would be a little uglier if we brought back boxy cars, translucent pink iMacs, and Silence-of-the-Lambs-level weird book covers. But it would be worth it, so as not to become a planet full of basic bit—

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