All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints.

Sedaris wryly punctures a cherished modern ideal—personal uniqueness—by reducing individuality to something bureaucratic and forensic. The joke hinges on a clash of perspectives: we treat uniqueness as a rich inner identity (taste, experience, personality), while “the police” care about uniqueness only as a means of identification and control. The line suggests that society often recognizes us less for our self-conceptions than for the measurable traces we leave behind. It’s also a characteristic Sedaris move: using an everyday institutional voice to deflate self-seriousness and expose how thin the boundary can be between individuality as self-expression and individuality as mere data.