The Vanishing Sibling

How Shrinking Families Shape Our Fractured Identities

I think we’ve underestimated just how much identity comes from family, not in the genetic or cultural sense, but in the sense of finding your role. In big families, everyone has to carve out space to be different. You become "the smart one," or "the funny one," or "the peacekeeper," not because you chose it, but because you found it in the friction with others and because it's available.

That friction—that contrast—is where identity is born. You don’t invent yourself in a vacuum; you emerge from a tangle of roles, jokes, fights, alliances, rivalries. The more siblings you had, the more diverse the internal society of your home. And that home society shaped your sense of self.

But it’s more than just opposition. Identity in families often forms by finding the empty space. The role not yet claimed. If your sister is already "Tracy the Good," that might leave a natural opening for "Douglas the Bad." Not out of rebellion, but out of logic. Out of the instinct to complete the set. You become what’s left over—and in doing so, you become something whole.

Over the last generations, families have shrunk. One or two kids, or sometimes none at all. That means fewer roles. Less contrast. Fewer empty spaces to grow into. And with that, less identity.

What’s filling the gap? The broader culture, but not in a good way. When you don’t get identity from contrast inside the family, you start looking for it outside. And when the world feels blurry, we reach for sharpness. Binaries. Left or right. Mask or no mask. Woke or anti-woke. You pick a side not because it fits you, but because it’s offered. We have replaced a cornucopia of ideas and tastes with a binary choice. I think the reason we see this growing polarisation—especially in the West—isn’t just about politics or algorithms. It’s that we’re all playing with fewer archetypes. Families used to produce a tapestry of identities. Now we get just a couple of threads. The result is a black-and-white world. A shrinking of the imagination.

This gets worse from generation to generation. A kid who grows up with no siblings might never learn to tolerate contradiction. If their identity is just a mirror of their parents, and they raise their own kid the same way, we get compounding sameness. Narrower roles. Less room for the strange, the eccentric, the unexpected. Society becomes an echo chamber—not just of ideas, but of personality.

We look for "our people" when we enter society. We don't look for our identity, we arrive with it, and we seek like. This wasn't ever the place to create identity; it was where you explored it.

That might also explain why so much identity today feels manufactured. Trans identity, neurodivergent labels, aesthetic tribes... they’re not necessarily fake. They’re real responses to a deep hunger: the hunger to be different in a world that no longer gives you a natural way to be.

Families used to give us differences by default. Now we have to manufacture it. And when everyone is trying to be different in the same way, we get noise instead of harmony.

You used to become who you were around the dinner table. Now you have to declare it in your bio. Or install it. Or fight for it online.

I’m not saying we need to force people to have more kids. I’m saying we need to understand what we’ve lost—and what we’re replacing it with.

A culture that forgets how to produce internal differences will always collapse into external conflict. That’s what we’re living through.

And I think it started at home.