No one can copy your voice

I was born in the late ’90s and grew up in the early 2000s, when every opinion came from a centralized view shaped by big media like TV and newspapers.

The internet was an anarchic space for debate, and it attracted me from day one. A completely anonymous person could share an opinion, and people could choose to read it or ignore it.

That was the key: choice.

Unlike traditional media, where discourse followed the line they wanted and there were few alternatives, the internet was different. No one imposed the tone or the topic. Everything was within reach if you were willing to look for it.

It was a time when people talked about indexing in search engines, not about content algorithms.

Back then, we all had something: a voice. And no one but ourselves—and our curiosity—was responsible for developing it.

I’m not sure exactly when it happened. I’d like to better understand that part of the story. But at some point, that contract between the internet and us broke.

Attention became the business model, and spaces for connection turned into sources of revenue, which broke the internet forever.

Instagram used to be a place to connect with friends, a SOCIAL network, as the name suggests. But it stopped being social a long time ago. Instagram still shows content from your friends only because it doesn’t dare to fully break away from that idea. But no one in Menlo Park is thinking about optimizing your human connections. The focus is on users consuming content from opinion leaders, and on that content serving the best possible product placement.

In that sense, I think TikTok is more honest. It doesn’t even try to help you connect with friends. It’s clear that this no longer interests anyone (unfortunately).

Little by little, that space for debate, connection, and curiosity became a plane dominated by algorithms, where the promise is that everyone will see what’s relevant to them. But the truth is that everyone ends up seeing the same thing. Because we no longer decide what’s important to us. Others do it on our behalf.

The main victim of this is our voice. Our own voice has become something collective, amorphous, and tasteless. When everyone thinks the same, no one is thinking. And nothing can be created from that starting point.

Having your own voice in a world where no one wants to listen is the only thing that can save you.

In an environment where everyone says the same thing, it’s very hard to find inspiration. But I believe there are still people who manage to make their message prevail. I won’t name anyone because that’s not the point of this post, but I do think they all share similarities that are worth paying attention to:

Voracious curiosity

Many times I’ve criticized myself because my curiosity constantly shifts my focus. At first glance, that might seem like a bad thing, but I think it’s the only way to find your path.

It may sound cliché, but nothing is created; everything is transformed. New ideas are just different ways of combining what already exists. New angles that perhaps no one had noticed before.

Your business idea is probably already in your head. Your next tweet is the combination of several you’ve already seen, plus that book you read. And that bug you’ve been unable to solve for hours gets fixed thanks to something you saw in a friend’s repo.

That’s why, if you want to have a unique voice, try things—but go as deep as you can into them. Understand their first principles, look for connected worlds, and keep pulling the thread.

Escape the short term

Maybe the greatest cancer of this era. Everything is short term, everything is now, everything is new and everything is old at the same time. What used to take one hour, we now want to compress into 30 seconds—and if it’s 15, even better.

Escape that. Do it because no one else does. Short-form content has turned into short-term lives, short-term goals, short-term relationships.

Playing the long game is the only thing that will bear fruit when everyone else can’t think about or sustain anything for more than two weeks.

Read novels, watch long videos, read the documentation, don’t speed content up to 2x on YouTube. More content is not the same as more ideas. Only when content has time to mature do you achieve the real goal: understanding.

Don’t follow marked paths

Your true voice won’t be at the end of a path someone else already marked—or at least not without getting a bit dirty by stepping off the path sometimes to find new routes.

Don’t look for recipes. Nothing in life comes with a manual, and this is no exception.

Conclusion

Your voice is your most important asset in a future where everyone will have the same (or no) voice to show.

You have to understand that good things aren’t given; they require you to look for them, to navigate. In the end, walking your own path will always lead you to your own voice, and your own voice will always lead you to connect with people. Nothing is given, because for everyone, things are worth different things.