I thought your teenage years were the time to not conform, but as I get older, non-conformity becomes more appealing.

As the stereotype of growing up goes, when you’re a teenager you’re supposed to decide that you want to “rebel” and be something other than the person that your parents took great effort attempting to craft you into.

For me, I don’t think that really happened. I mean, sure, I had plenty of the obligatory stroppy teenager moments, when I’d get angry with my parents for what I saw as irrational or unfair decisions, but I never really stepped into the realms of what I’d describe as “counterculture” in any way other than that which I already was: a computer nerd.

And, in our household, that wasn’t really counterculture or rebellion at all; our whole family were interested in computers and video games, since they’d been part of our culture at home since before I was born. Not only that, but my father and my brother regularly contributed to the Atari magazine Page 6 (later New Atari User) — and as I moved into my teenage years, I started to contribute a bit also.

But I digress. Nostalgia for times gone by isn’t the point of what I want to talk about today. Instead, I want to talk about how homogeneous “Internet culture” has made people today — and how, at the age of forty-one years old, I crave nothing more than rebellion against that homogeneous culture, and feel nothing but frustration at the hordes of people all acting and talking the exact same way.

I’m sure this has always happened in some form or another, but the global nature of the Internet makes it feel like people are losing their own unique (often local) identities. Now, wherever you go, it feels like everyone describes things in the same way, and uses the same often nonsensical turns of phrase.

Every opinion is someone “lowkey thinking” something, even though that doesn’t really make any sense.

Every misunderstanding is confronted with “Tell me you haven’t [done thing] without telling me you haven’t [done thing].”

Every vaguely energetic YouTube video is accompanied by people going “me on the way to school [doing something urgent].”

I feel constant embarrassment at the prospect of linguists of the future looking back at this age and seeing people unironically using the word “pog” at every opportunity.

And there are myriad more, which I’m sure you can think of yourself if you’re in a similar position to me.

I can understand why everyone wants to “conform”. It’s the thing of not wanting to be the outlier, and of wanting to be understood by everyone. But it’s boring. If everyone talks about things the same way online — and often has the same opinions, spoon-fed to them by their favourite YouTuber, as often happens — then speaking to one person is much like speaking to any other. You might as well not bother.

Which is why I find myself making a point of very deliberately making use of outdated, very local British slang whenever possible. Yes, it’s contrarian, yes, it’s childish and stupid, but it’s my own little way of feeling like I’m actually my own person rather than being subsumed by the festering, slimy monster that is “Internet culture”. Even though I completely recognise that what I’m doing is essentially the exact same thing, only using ’90s games magazines as my model.

I think also part of it stems from my Asperger’s. Since my diagnosis a few years back, and understanding what that means for my mental health, I feel like I’ve become much more conscious of the things that sort of “set me off”, as it were. And one of those things happens to be predictable, formulaic, repetitive structures, particularly in speech and written communication.

YouTube videos that are always the same drive me bonkers. RuPaul’s Drag Race drives me insane for the same reason. And, as I’ve described, people who all communicate in the exact same way frustrate me also.

I guess in some ways we should perhaps celebrate the way in which people have found how to be near-universally understood online, but I can’t help just finding it a bit dull and annoying. I’ll keep describing bad things as “bobbins”, thank you very much, and replacing the phrase “okay, I understand” with “bonza, Toadie”. And there’s nothing you can do about it!