Everyone is unique. Think about that for a second. Even if you were sitting right next to me right now, seeing what I see when I stare out blankly at different intervals, you’d see something completely different. Perhaps you’re color blind which would render the view into something out of a black and white movie. Perhaps you perceive reds as a darker shade than I, or perhaps you’re younger than me, and hear a high pitched whine that I, with my crotchety old ears am not phased by. (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/12/technology/12ring.html). Maybe there’s a smell that reminds you of a place in time that is merely a mundane scent to my nose. All of this says nothing about taste, or the imperfect nature of any human language’s attempt to describe any of these things. Sure, language does a great job at approximating certain things – a table, is a table, is a table, whether it’s poorly crafted or the ideal form. While there are no universal standards – after all, what toasty wheat tastes like to me may taste like something else to you, the truth is that we are singular separate beings recording a lifetime of distinct points of time in our lives. (For a graphical representation of this concept, with awesome talking dinosaurs, check this link out here: http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1450 ).
If nothing else impresses you about life, think about this point for one moment and one moment alone: not only are we unique but everything we experience in life is unique. The planet is always orbiting around the sun while it spins on its axis. To top that off, the solar system is rotating within our Milky Way galaxy, which is spiraling around as it moves through the universe. Think about this: you have never occupied the same space twice. This is to say nothing of the day to day interaction of particles on a micro level here on Earth, or of the myriad factors that change our lives as time moves over us. Nothing we ever experience can ever be exactly the same. In this respect, calling ourselves “unique” seems like a colossal understatement. After all, if everything is always new, constantly changing, and varies from person to person, there should be a better word that captures such a state. But there isn’t. Or rather, there isn’t one in my opinion that can capture all of those things and more that I listed about. It is one of the absurdities of life that we can and do experience all of these irreplaceable things in the time we have but yet fail to pass along this knowledge to others.
Even though I am in an empty room, I can still hear the disgruntled rumblings of whatever readers I have left with my above logic. Let me admit two things here; first, that there is a transmission of experience and knowledge throughout the generations, otherwise I wouldn’t be here right now, writing this. In fact, this transmission of experience and knowledge has even been constantly improving from “fire hot” to sophisticated oral histories, to writing and drawing, to books, and to photography and computers, among a plethora of other things. Now there is a parallel problem to go along with information loss, that of information overload. Simply put, there are certain things that are unique to each person that others don’t need to know about. They involve unique parts of space and time, but provide no additional essential survival or philosophical or educational benefits to anyone. After all, if I tell you that I slept for eight hours last night in fuzzy pajamas and dreamed of worlds that only existed in my subconscious and disappeared from my memory upon waking, you would probably stop listening, or soon forget what I had said at a later time, because it would not be practical to you. Even though things are always unique, with respect to dealing with other people, they are not always relevant.