I love humans as a collective.
I mean that genuinely.
There’s something really cute about us.
We’ve learned to adapt. We’ve learned to survive. We’ve learned to laugh through things, make jokes out of shared experiences, find people who understand us, build communities around the most random things.
Sometimes I’ll open a comment section and just scroll.
Someone makes a stupidly specific joke and thousands of people are underneath it going, “this is literally me.”
And I love that.
Even the way we respond to danger is interesting. Something happens to one person and suddenly everyone is warning everyone. Names spread. Stories spread. People organize. Reputations get destroyed. Sometimes we obviously take it too far, but the instinct itself is fascinating.
Something happened to one of us. Tell the others.
I was a few hours into a 12-hour drive on the 401 when I pulled into a truck stop for gas.
I remember looking around for a second. Cars scattered around the lot. People standing at the pumps. A small line at Tim Hortons for coffee, another forming outside the washroom. Truck drivers stretching their legs before getting back on the road.
And I thought about how, for this tiny moment, all of our lives had somehow intersected here.
Some of these people had probably been driving long before I started. Some had just begun. Some were going much farther than me, others were probably almost home. I didn’t know where anyone came from or where they were headed.
We just happened to be at the same truck stop, at the same time.
Then we filled our tanks, grabbed our food, stretched a little, and went our separate ways.
And there are billions of us doing some version of this every day.
Living completely different lives, going completely different places, occasionally crossing paths for a moment before carrying on with our own.
I don’t know. I find that really cute.
Because there are billions of us doing some version of this every day.
Living completely different lives, in different countries, speaking different languages, worrying about different things. Entire families I will never meet. People whose existence I will never know about. People who will live full lives, fall in love, lose people, laugh until they cry, have children, grow old and die without our paths crossing even once.
And every now and then, some of those lives randomly intersect.
A truck stop. An airport. A grocery store. A traffic light. A comment section on the internet.
For a moment, there we are.
Together.
Then everyone keeps going.
It almost feels like one enormous family made up of billions of smaller families, most of whom will never meet each other.
We are so different, but underneath all of it, embarrassingly similar.
We want to belong. We want to laugh. We want to be understood. We protect our people. We complain. We gossip. We fuck up. We adapt. We keep going.
I don’t know.
There’s no profound conclusion here.
I just really love humans as a collective.
It’s cute watching us be alive.