the universal urge to be otherwise

I spent most of the weekend reading Philip Roth's Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993), from which I find this passage so true:

...people are trying to transform themselves all the time: the universal urge to be otherwise. So as not to look as they look; sound as they sound, be treated as they are treated, suffer in the ways they suffer, etc., etc., they change hairdos, tailors, spouses, accents, friends, they change their addresses, their noses, their wallpaper, even their forms of government, all to be more like themselves or less like themselves, or more like or less like that exemplary prototype whose images is theirs to emulate or to repudiate obsessively for life.