It’s a simple statement and feels intrinsically accurate. Digging deeper, your DNA strands may be comparable, but most of the proteins of that strand determine its expression, there is still more data in the DNA beyond the obvious trait expression. For example, researchers have encoded entire books into a DNA strand that were passed on.
Another point: Your brain is unlike anyone else. Taken a step further from DNA is the neural pathways that have developed in your mind based on your thoughts, experiences, and DNA. There are terabytes of data to map your brain, it changes from millisecond to millisecond based on stimuli. Over the course of years it can undergo massive changes, and that’s just in reference to your own brain. The number of variables and stimuli expound the number of differences from one person to the next.
And this stimuli brings up another point, every human has a different starting point, a difference set of references that impact his/her brain. We wake at a different time or a different place, experience different life events. All of this, impacting the billions of pathways in our mind.
We are different, you are different.
Society has begun to find similarities at any and all levels in an effort to organize. Gender, race, place of origin, Fraternity, University, it all aids in defining superficial similarities. We do it with preference, blue or orange, hot or cold coffee, reading or working out. In any place there can be a similar decision to make, we herald it as an opportunity to grow closer as one or further apart.
We find males in their mid-twenties from USC in Beta who like the beach and iced-tea. But one person to the next who shares these same qualities is such only on a superficial level. The decision to be, experience, prefer these things comes from such different places, thoughts, experiences, to call them similar is to call mars and pluto similar. I would posit that experiencing one is quite different than experiencing to the other.
One step further, the idea that liking iced tea today versus liking it tomorrow is considered a foregone conclusion; however, it ignores the billions of data points that he/she experienced from one day to the next, the neural pathway differences, the electrical changes.
So at the core, no two people are the same. No person is ever the same. And yet, our egoic mind classifies people into these categories to help understand and organize the world, organize life. But if we organize it such, then the basis with which we organize has a separate meaning for everyone. If one were to judge based on a person’s skin color, then the judgement of certain characteristics applied to someone based on the observation of their skin tone is different than the projected judgement of certain characteristics applied by another. Same goes for preference of refreshment.
And therein lies the challenge for society to unify. In our efforts to understand and analyze, we artificially draw lines of differentiation and similarities to define things and communicate with one another. We use the same word to describe the situation and yet that word associates different meanings to each person using the word and each person defined by that word. Thus, the categorization with another provides two areas of variability where none previously existed. When added with the layer of time difference, a third layer of differentiation emerges. Quite a complication to a process aimed to simplify.
And thus we find ourselves aiming to understand the world together in a manner that varies in the schema associated with the word, in the application of truth from one person to the next, and in the ignorance of a person’s own dynamic nature. We simplify reality, we simplify each other, we simplify life in order to function.
It works. We make judgements based off our observed categorization. We operate with rules associated with these judgements. We frame arguments, law, and civilization on us versus them, one group versus another. It has worked.
But lest you avoid forgetting that you are different.