You Neek

Did you know that there are now somewhere between 6.89B and 7.07B people in the world and it's growing at a rate of almost 3 people per second. This is a mind boggling number, almost twice what it was when I was born, and a clear 1.6B people more than when my eldest was born in the early 90's. Clearly it's a pace that has some incredible implications on all the systems we depend on, but I'd rather not focus on that, instead I want you think about each of these individuals, what they might look like, sound like and what they have in common. With that many people, we must have folks that are doppelgangers surely, and a vast number of extremely similar people, no ?

Actually no. Despite this huge number, you're unique.

I say this because through the course of your life, no one has had or will have the same experiences, walked in your shoes, felt the same emotions or known the same people. They won't have lived in exactly the same places, tasted the same food or loved/liked/hated the same other people. We rarely share the same opportunities and disappointments and all of these things come together to shape our individual characters.

Our experiences make us unique and allow each of us the potential to arrive at different ways of looking at the things around us. We have in fact close to 7 billion perspectives in the world probably. That isn't always clear as while we're unique we do share common issues and challenges and have many things in common.

The next time you're feeling alone and invisible, remember that you're surrounded by almost 7,000,000,000 brothers and sisters and that they can almost certainly identify with the situation you're in...but they may not have the same view towards it - because you're the only you.