Voices are interesting things. Many people hate the way they sound. We're often attracted to the ways others sound. And there's a sense in which we all sound the same.
A few months ago, I was driving with Robin Hanson and Bryan Caplan on our way to eat fried chicken.
At one point, Bryan turns his head back from the driver's seat and says:
"Okay, so I've taken a look at your book. And I've been to London. And lots of people sound different. So where did you get this voice?"
He was right, I guess. The way I speak is a little weird in that it doesn't seem to match at all my socio-economic or geographic background. I had to give him the short spiel about how I got kicked out of school, and the new one I ended up at was an international school with a completely different mix of kids.
So from age 13, I had a different group of friends who watched different shows and read different books, and most of them didn't share my background. They were from Kenya and Iran and America and South Africa and Botswana and Holland. So I have no idea exactly when exactly I settled into this voice.
I had a Nigerian accent when I first moved to the UK. I had an American accent for a few months after spending a summer in Atlanta with family friends when I was 11. I have a good French accent when I speak it, and a good Chinese accent when I speak that. And then I have the voice I have now. But despite having tried on a few voices growing up, I can't imagine speaking any other way.
There's a name for what happened to me. Accent convergence. Moving through social environments causes your speech patterns to merge with whatever you're surrounded by. It's subconscious and happens constantly.Things clicked into place a little more while watching footage of audience reactions to Return of the Jedi in 1983. A partner at the law firm I used to work at was at that screening.
What struck me, watching their responses, wasn't what they said, but how they said it.
There was a specific cadence everyone spoke with. A lilt. An affectation. Regardless of gender, race or age, they all had it the same way. But one day, it completely disappeared.
There was a particular way of speaking that felt natural to Americans in 1983, which would sound impossibly strange today. You'd only hear it in cosplay.
It's the unmistakable twang of the mid-century transatlantic broadcast voice. A radio voice.
The mid-Atlantic accent was a manufactured speaking style from 1930s to 1960s that nobody actually spoke naturally. It existed purely for radio and film, but it spread like wildfire. Everyone from Cary Grant to Katherine Hepburn used it. Then it vanished.
It disappeared as quickly as the internet grew. In its place today is the strange patois of online 'African American Vernacular English' (AAVE), which seems to have proliferated globally through hip-hop and TikTok.
Valley Girl speak went the same way. In the 1980s-90s, a specific Southern California teen girl dialect proliferated in the US. "Like," "totally," uptalk (rising intonation at sentence end). It started regionally, went national, then global through media, and now sounds equally dated. Like, totally.Mimetic voices
Slang cycles used to take decades, but now they take months. "No cap," "bussin," "slay" spread globally within weeks via TikTok, then got replaced just as quickly.
Your voice feels deeply personal. But it's not. Not when you really think about it. Your voice is a meme.
Your specific voice box, diaphragm, lips, and tongue uniquely shape how your words emerge. But the words themselves? The cadence, the rhythm, the vocabulary, and the patterns of emphasis? These are absorbed.
You're speaking a compilation of influences you barely register: podcast hosts you listen to, shows you watch, people you spend time with, and content you consume.
Like a vase holding water, your container is unique. Yet the water comes from communal wells.
Your inner monologue works the same way.
The voice in your head. The one that reads to you, cheers you on, questions or berates you. You weren't born with that either. Not for the most part.It, too, is a collage of absorbed influences. A parent's warning. A teacher's instruction. A friend's encouragement. A book's argument. A podcast's cadence. They're all in there, having a conversation you experience as singular thought.
Shaping the inner voice
Language is a very visible example of the ways in which our thoughts are mimetic, specifically because it changes fast enough to notice within a generation.
But this filters all the way down to what you find funny, what you consider attractive, what you think is normal behaviour, and what you believe is possible.
Becoming conscious of this can change the way you speak going forward. Both in the slang you pick up and the beliefs you let yourself absorb.
Asking "where did this thought pattern come from?" lets you choose whether to keep it. You may still be a vessel for memes, but you can curate and filter them rather than holding stagnant water.
Your voice will mark you as belonging to a particular moment in time. Future recordings will reveal exactly when you lived, what you consumed, and who influenced you.
Choose your inputs deliberately. What you read, who you spend time with, what media you consume. These things don't just shape the way you speak. They shape the voice inside your head.
