Duplicate meta descriptions - how can I avoid them?

I use semrush to audit my site and I get a lot of dupe meta desctiption issues that I'm not sure how to solve.

Is there a setting here I should be changing? I have multiple authors. Each page after their main author page shows as dupe and every secondary category/tag page comes up as a dupe meta description as well.

So for example an author would be

author/name
author/name/page/2/ (dupe)

you will have to manually change the meta description on every page that have a duplicate meta description.

change them all manually!
that's the only way!

I always noindex the author archives.