> Surrounded by so many other entities that do look and sound similar to myself, my quest for individuality - should I choose to accept it - is going to necessarily involve asserting ways in which I am not like them. It's more difficult, and requires more digging (or more bullshitting, more likely,) but is it different in kind? It's just easier to point at a rock and say, "Welp, I'm not like that. I've got my own thing going on."

This sounds pretty similar to Hegel's Phenomenology of the Mind - recognition as an individual only becomes necessary once we encounter other individuals; one impetus in this encounter is to reduce the Other to an object so that we remain unique in our individuality, but such individuality lacks the component of recognition, and so the Other becomes inherently linked to our own desire to be recognized as an individual of our own (as such recognition can only come from another individual).