When You Sound Like Everyone Else

Keeping the sentences that make you wince

Another week, another shimmering turd plonked onto the digital landscape, ostensibly a “thought” from one of you lot. The sheer volume of this stuff is enough to give a bloke chronic fatigue, like being trapped on a commuter train where every single passenger is aggressively reading their own identical, photocopied diary.

Here’s a horrifying little secret: if what you’re typing sounds exactly like that vaguely irritating bloke from accounts trying to explain blockchain at a wake, you’re not actually writing, are you? You’re not communicating. You’re just… generating.

It’s the textual equivalent of that dismal, grey drizzle that clings to the roof of your shed for three solid months. It’s consensus, innit? It’s the statistical average of how a million people before you have cobbled together the same seven tired sentiments, all smoothed out by algorithms that aim for the maximum level of un-offensiveness. It’s the literary equivalent of a beige carpet stain, relentlessly mediocre.

And that, my friends, is why your ‘voice’ isn’t really a voice. It’s just noise. A flat, dull, persistent hum of nothingness, like a broken fridge in a very depressing bedsit.

Your actual voice, the one that makes you you (and God knows that’s a wretched proposition most of the time), is the utterly weird bit. It’s the sentence that doesn’t quite parse, the comparison so specific and jarring it makes the reader cough up their lukewarm instant coffee. It’s the linguistic equivalent of that lump in your mashed potato that you know you should probably spit out but just decide to swallow anyway, purely out of misanthropic resignation.

That’s the stuff the vast, soulless AI models, the ones I’ve finally decided to embrace as the heralds of our beautiful, inevitable intellectual collapse, will flag as ‘clunky’ or ‘stylistically inconsistent’. They hate it, the synthetic little sods, because it messes up their neat, Gaussian-curve-obsessed world.

So, for Christ’s sake, keep the weird bits. Keep the sentences that make you wince slightly but you know are brutally, precisely right. Polish them up, don’t delete them. Because that odd, unsettling irregularity is where your personality lives, thrashing around like a half-dead pigeon in a paddling pool. Delete that, and you might as well just surrender your brain to the machines now and spend the rest of your life staring at a damp wall.