A few days ago, while writing about John Ruskin’s Traffic, I had mentioned an essay recommendation from The Ken’s First Principles newsletter. That recommendation was Douglas Brundage’s Taste Test: Encrusting the Tortoise. I ended up thinking about that essay for much longer than I had expected. But there was another recommendation in the same issue of the newsletter that I eventually came back to. That essay is The Age of Average.

Interestingly, when I read it, I kept returning to what I had written in my learnings from Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. Somewhere between the two, a certain tension started forming in my mind.

Made to Stick is about why some ideas travel. The book talks about how frequently the same principles repeat across communication. Simplicity. Emotional resonance. Stories. Surprise. Concreteness. The authors make an argument that there is a formula to making your message sticky. And once you start noticing these patterns, you begin to see them in all sticky messages. Advertisements use them. Political speeches use them. Viral internet content uses them. Even ordinary conversations drift toward these structures when people want to make a point effectively. Most communication that we consider effective seems to follow these principles.

At the same time, The Age of Average was speaking about a growing sameness in culture. Similar aesthetics, similar styles of communication, similar emotional rhythms. You move from one corner of the internet to another and sometimes you feel the sameness that pervades this space. The packaging changes slightly, but the content follows the same formula. And almost everything feels familiar.

After reading the essay, a question kept nagging me.

If ideas spread because they follow certain recognizable patterns, and if everyone now understands those patterns, then where exactly does originality survive?

I kept thinking about this because the obvious answers did not feel satisfactory. I started with the formula might be the problem. Because everyone follows the same formula, it all looks the same. Now even more so. In this age of LLM generated texts, the construct “Not this, but that” is visible across emails, LinkedIn and other social media. So much so, that I have stopped using this construct even if it makes sense in the context.

So then, does originality require complete rejection of structure? But the more I thought about it, the less convinced I became.

Human expression has always relied on structure. Language itself is structured. Stories have always had recurring forms. Poetry has rhythm and metre. Music works within scales. Even oral storytelling traditions depended heavily on recognizable patterns because patterns are what memory can hold.

And still, nobody confuses Tolstoy with Dostoevsky. Two writers can work within recognizable narrative structures and still feel entirely different from each other. A musician like A R Rahman can compose within familiar musical frameworks and yet create something that feels unmistakably his own.

What is unmistakable is that the differentiator is not the structure, but the thought. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky think differently, and Rahman and Anu Malik think differently. And then I realized that structures do not standardize thought as much as they standardize transmission. Structures help ideas move.

A thought without structure may remain trapped inside the mind that produced it. The structure allows the idea to move forward.

It’s easy to see why I was conflicted about these two writings. I write, and naturally I want people to read what I write. Made to Stick says that if you follow certain principles then your ideas will travel. But then I read The Age of Average, and the thought was – everyone knows the formula. Where is the originality? Should I write to express myself, or should I write so that it gets read widely.

The more I thought about this the more I realized that what creates the feeling of sameness is not the existence of formulas, but the increasing tendency to optimize expression before spending enough time to develop the thought in its entirety.

A lot of modern content feels extremely well packaged. The hook arrives on time. Nir Eyal wrote a book on this. The emotional engagement happens where expected and the pacing feels familiar. Everything flows smoothly enough to hold attention. And yet while reading or watching it, you think maybe it is a performance.

Recently, Samay Raina came out with a video on Youtube – “Still Alive”. In a section, he talks about how content creation on the Internet is essentially a formula. If you crack it, you can achieve success. After reading The Age of Average, I was reminded of him, and I thought – then why don’t we have more than one Samay Raina? The formula can become perfect, but what will you propagate with the formula?

While thinking about this, I recalled George Ritzer’s McDonaldization of Society, which I had written about a few years ago. Ritzer describes modern systems as increasingly oriented toward efficiency, predictability, calculability and control. Fast food chains become successful because uncertainty is minimized. You know exactly what you are going to get.

Increasingly, culture also seems to operate under similar pressures. Platforms reward familiarity because familiarity travels easily. Algorithms reward patterns that have already worked before. Once a certain style succeeds, it gets repeated. Once repeated enough times, it slowly begins to feel like the natural language of the internet itself.

Maybe this is how an age of average emerges. Gradually, a successful pattern gets copied. Then it gets optimized. And finally it is repeated at scale, till a new pattern emerges.

I do not think formulas are going away. Honestly, I do not even think they should. Human beings have always relied on familiar forms to communicate with each other. A completely original form with no recognizable entry point may never travel beyond the person who created it.

The more interesting question, at least to me, is what the structure is going to carry.

Because originality probably does not come from endlessly inventing new formats. It may have more to do with seeing something clearly enough that even an old form begins to feel alive again.

Maybe that is why some writers, filmmakers or musicians still feel distinct despite working within familiar structures. The structure carries the work, but the life inside it comes from somewhere else.

And perhaps that “somewhere else” is becoming increasingly scarce.

In this era of limited and divided attention, probably we are losing the capacity and willingness to sit with an idea long enough before optimizing it for distribution.

I do not really have a conclusion here. We have become almost constant consumers, but what stays? Is the consumption something that adds to our world view, or its just a distraction. And are distractions becoming so efficient, that we don’t have time for things of value? Are we also seeking familiarity now?

Maybe the real risk is not that formulas exist. Maybe the risk is that we begin optimizing expression faster than we develop something worth expressing.