In defense of being a precious little snowflake
You may not be a precious, unique snowflake, but at the very least you're a weird little mushroom.
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One of my favorite movies when I was an angsty teenager was Fight Club. If you’ve spent any time at all on TikTok or Twitter in recent years, you’ll know that this is considered a major red flag, and that Fight Club lovers are to be avoided.
There are a lot of totally valid reasons for this, the most important being that guys who love Fight Club tend to give off strong Jordan Peterson vibes, and can be expected to treat you terribly and then justify their awfulness as a “law of nature.” But another is that Fight Club is the source1 of that most 21st century of slurs, not to mention the favorite insult of charming groups like the incels or alt-right: snowflake.
It comes from this speech from the book’s anti-hero, Tyler Durden:
You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone, and we are all part of the same compost pile.
The term exploded during the Donald Trump era, and could even be found on Trump bumper stickers:
While it was initially directed mostly at liberals by conservatives, more recently, the left has adopted it as well, to mock right-wingers who claim to be paragons of manliness but have tearful meltdowns about the collapse of western civilization when, for instance, a black woman is given the role of Ariel in The Little Mermaid.
In his own account, Chuck Palahniuk, the writer of Fight Club, said that “you are not a unique snowflake” became his mantra after graduating college having been given great grades and high praise, before realizing that he was woefully underprepared for the real world in terms of useful skills.
“You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake” became my mantra for deprogramming myself. For shedding those years of false praise. That evil grease meant to skid me along toward my grave with the least amount of effort.
The modern usage of “snowflake,” it’s worth noting, does not share Palahniuk’s end goal of empowerment.
How to feel unique as one of 8 billion
Fight Club was one of the core texts of the nihilistic phase of my life, which is a period I mark as beginning with my exit from the Catholic Church around the age of 17 or so until I got married at 29 and realized I couldn’t be a gloomy, misanthropic pile of misery all day and still remain bearable to be around.
The phase after that — the hopeful phase2 — has mostly been marked by my trying to shed the more pessimistic beliefs of my 20s, without succumbing once again to the stultifying B.S. of religion or to the other kooky, cultish belief systems that pop up like mushrooms in the decaying American landscape.
While I’ve been doing this, the country, it feels, has headed in the opposite direction, towards nihilism, with all the disempowerment and incipient fascism that rides with it.
It’s been a jarring experience, seeking out hope in an era of hopelessness.
One learns, if one undertakes such a project in an era of almost constant Very Bad News, that one must learn to find hope within.
This is not easy to do if you think of yourself as “decaying organic matter,” or as one of 8 billion who are not all that different from you. If you aren’t special, who cares if you live or die?
My way out (as per usual) was through books and Chumbawamba.
There’s a short Chumbawamba song called “When An Old Man Dies,” the entirety of which’s lyrics are:
Along with the shoes and the shirts and the ties
There's a library that's lost when an old man dies
Looking at my own bookshelf (which I often do when I want to feel a bit better about myself), I noticed that there were a fair number of books that I’d read that likely hadn’t had a large readership. Like, for example, Elizabeth Townsend’s Lobster: A Global History. Or Janet Biehl’s Kickstarter-backed comic Their Blood Got Mixed: Revolutionary Rojava and the War on ISIS, about the feminist anarchist commune that’s been set up in Kurdistan during the Syrian Civil War.
Let’s say each book was read by 10,000 people. If I made a Venn Diagram of those 20,000 people, how many would share a spot with me in the middle? Let’s make a generous estimate and say it’s 100. Now add another book to our Venn Diagram — Irvine Welsh’s A Decent Ride, a not-particularly-great entry into the Trainspotting universe that I read because I’ll read anything by Irvine Welsh.
What’s our number down to now?
You get the picture — I’ve read probably a couple thousand books over the course of my 36 years, and it is probable at some point that I’m the only person who has read the exact combination of books that I’ve read. I might not have access to unique stories and information, but I’m the only one who has access to my specific combination of stories and information. And all of this is before I factor in articles I’ve read, movies and TV shows I’ve watched, conversations I’ve had, people I’ve known, and all these things that I’ve done.
This in itself does not make me unique — literally anybody can say the same. But it does make me the only one with this set of experiences, and the only one who can make connections between one thing (lobsters) and the other (modern feminist anarchist states in the Middle East)3.
The Mycelium theory
That’s a nice little ego boost, of course, but one could easily spend their entire life being unique and never achieve anything in the way of fame or recognition or legacy. What’s the point of being totally unique and special, one might reasonably ask, if it seems to have no effect?
To that, I turn to the mycelium theory. British writer Daisy Eris Campbell explains in John Higgs’ book The Future Starts Here:
Mycelium is like the root system of fungus. It’s a network of white fungal threads that runs underground through the soil. The network can be tiny, or it can spread for hundreds of miles and live for thousands of years. If you get sufficient mycelial threads crossing each other, then a mushroom can pop up above the surface.
Think of the mushroom that comes up above ground as the obvious cultural thing that occurs, which the mainstream culture can see. It might be in the form of a particular artist or a single book or play or a piece of music or a new genre, or whatever it is… that’s the mushroom. But the mushroom is not where you should put your focus. That mushroom only occurs because of these threads underground created by highly motivated people. They’re not motivated by the usual motivations of fame or success or money or whatever. They are the people who are following some compulsion and they don’t really know where it’s leading, but they’re moving ahead with it anyway.
…To keep an underground culture healthy, we all need to be constantly inspiring each other by doing things and creating stuff, so that you get that positive feedback loop… the more they fertilise and cross, the more likely they are to fertilise a mushroom that will actually impact beyond the individual threads all having a lovely time beneath the ground. And that’s great, everybody loves a mushroom. But don’t be distracted by the mushroom, because it’s the mycelium that matters.
This, I think, is true of politics as much as it is of any particular artistic endeavor. Any activist knows that most causes are decades of brutal slog which may, at some point, be suddenly accompanied by a furious burst of progress. After decades of seemingly futile struggle against regional authoritarianism, the Arab Spring was sparked by a single man in Tunisia immolating himself in protest, and Bronx activist Tarana Burke invented the phrase “Me Too” in 2006, 11 years before it exploded into a global movement.
If you accept that you are in at least some ways unique, you will also have to accept that you may be the only person capable of doing certain actions, creating a specific piece of art, or coming up with a specific idea. Or perhaps you’re the only person capable of inspiring the next person down the line to create the world changing thing. Or perhaps you’re the mushroom.
Tell yourself whatever you need to get moving
None of your uniqueness matters, of course, if you don’t do anything with it. It doesn’t matter if you don’t write the book, sing the song for someone else to hear, or engage in some form of direct action.
Being a perfect and unique snowflake, Palahniuk found, deadened the will to do anything worthwhile. It was enough to just coast on the knowledge that he was special, and never do anything cool, like, for example, writing Fight Club4.
His motto was a useful one — it got him moving. Telling yourself you’re not a unique, precious snowflake, and therefore nothing you do matters is not a useful motto.
Instead, consider this process:
Pick a motto that works. Consider:
“I’m a beautiful unique snowflake.”
“I’m not a beautiful unique snowflake.”
“I’m a weird little mushroom.”
See what you do after.
If you’re doing cool stuff, stick with it.
If you’re doing nothing, tell yourself something else.
American culture is obsessed with the idea promoted first in Ayn Rand, and later in the Pixar movie The Incredibles5, that if everyone is special, no one is, and therefore, we should let the special people do what they want, and the rest of us should all labor and toil in their service.
If they start wars, we should just dutifully die in them. If they kill our earth, we should accept that they know best, and hope they’ll take us with them to Mars. If they run a multi-billion dollar business into the ground, "disrupt" massive sectors of the economy, or effectively steal public money to be hidden in tax havens, then we should accept that we are merely pawns in their game of 3-D chess, and should never have been given a say.
The end result is mass disempowerment. And those who are empowered are dragging us to our doom. The world needs new ideas: new political ideas, new technological ideas, new artistic ideas.
In 1895, a 16-year-old boy imagined running alongside a light beam. It’s the type of daydream one can slip into while bored in a physics class, or while drifting off for an afternoon naps (my similar daydreams usually involved the ocean). But this boy, in his dream, caught up with the light beam and ran alongside it. While running next to it, he realized that the light, keeping with his pace like any other running partner, appeared to be still next to him.
In 10 years, the boy, Albert Einstein, published a paper proposing the theory of special relativity. He’d first come up with the idea in that daydream.
Not everyone’s daydreams will become the most important scientific discovery of all time. But if Einstein had discounted his daydreams as unimportant, we wouldn’t have GPS, clear television, or universal clocks.
The stuff in your brain matters. So tell yourself it’s special. Tell yourself it’s not special. Tell yourself you’re a unique snowflake or a weird mushroom. Just don’t let the rest of us forever lose access to that library when you’re gone.
Alleged source. There is some dispute as to whether Palahniuk created the slur, but no dispute as to his popularizing it.
I hope?
I am not sure what use this connection would be, but I bet I could get a good short story out of it.
I still like Fight Club! I stand by it! Even if it’s a red flag!
And virtually all superhero culture, if we’re being honest.