No time to read? Listen here:
“Number 12 Looks Just Like You” is an episode from the original Twilight Zone, written by Rod Serling and based on the fable The Beautiful People by Charles Beaumont.
The episode depicts a dystopian future where beauty is everything. By age 19, every young person must go through a full surgical transformation. They get choose from a few “perfect” body types.
After the procedure, everyone looks alike. But it doesn’t stop there—their thoughts, their feelings, their personalities all start to match too. No one argues, no one dreams differently. Uniqueness disappears.
The episode follows Marilyn, a thoughtful and independent young woman who resists the transformation. She loves her mind, her face, her questions. But spoiler: resistance proves futile. The powers that be force her to undergo the procedure.
In the end, Marilyn emerges as one of the identical, creepily smiling citizens—her former doubts erased, and her uniqueness gone. The light in her eyes has faded. Her voice has become smooth and empty.
It’s a chilling story for sure, but…honestly? How different is it from reality?
The comparison game
While the story takes themes of conformity and false ideals of beauty to the extreme to make a point, don’t we do this anyway? Play a game of comparison. Strive to reach some ideal of “perfection” we’ve been shown over and over? Whether that’s body type, facial features, signs of aging, the “now” haircut or shoes or workout…there is an ideal, and we all know what it is.
It’s because we spend waaay too much time looking at other people, reading about their perfect lives, clicking deeper and deeper to learn how they did it, what products, workouts, diets they used.
Then, after packing all this into our brains and hearts, we innocently take a look in the mirror and see…what exactly? Truth. Ourselves. Our beautiful, hardworking, honest, naked selves. How—HOW can this compare to the well-written headlines, gorgeous photography, and carefully edited stories showcasing the best of the best and making the ideal look so easy and instant in 100 words or less?
It can’t.
Because we’re all different
That’s it. That’s the reason comparison is such a game in the first place. We are each as unique as our fingerprints, and so comparison is silly, a waste of time and energy.
The comparison game is a mediocrity magnet we have to resist with everything we’ve got. It is the status quo’s most useful weapon, a tiny seed of “Wow, you are weird” and “That’s ridiculous! You should be embarrassed to think that way” and “You want to try WHAT? Yeah, okaaaay” that takes root if we water it with belief, time, and attention.
Comparison encourages us to be the same, to create ourselves by looking at everyone else and making our choices based on theirs. But if we do this, we just end up looking (and sounding) like everyone else.
How can that be good? With all this shape-shifting ourselves to be just like everybody else striving for some identical “ideal,” there’s no room for unique ideas. No room for avant-garde creativity. No room for dissent or friction against the status quo that improves our lives and our world.
Beautiful someone, we thrive as individuals, as families, as communities, and as a world based on our uniqueness as individuals when we come together to create something bigger and better (and definitely more interesting!) as a whole.
We are here once
Most important of all, we can’t ever win the comparison game, because in it, we always lose ourselves. We are unique, we are here once. We get one chance to share our unique talents and viewpoints with the world.
My hope for us is that we realize this, remember it always, and most of all that we run our lives bravely, with a sense of profound responsibility to share our unique and amazing gifts with the world.
Dig deeper:
Braving It, The gentle art of living boldly
You, Beautiful: Getting gorgeous from the inside out
#beyourself #believeinyourself