Yesterday, I watched a man at the bus stop cry into his phone. He spoke in a language I couldn’t understand, but I understood everything. His shoulders shook. The rhythm of his words was desperate. The silence that followed when nobody answered said everything.
Later, walking home, I realized we had shared the most intimate conversation possible without speaking a word.
This is the paradox that haunts me: we are drowning in sameness while obsessing over difference. Every day, the same story plays out in different costumes. Parents worry about their children. Lovers fight about things that aren’t really what they’re fighting about. Old people sit alone with their memories. Young people fear they’ll never figure out who they’re supposed to become.
This morning, the man at the bus stop and I both woke up not knowing if today would bring joy or sorrow. Carrying the weight of choices we regret and hopes we’re afraid to voice—that’s something we both do. Loving people we can’t protect and fearing losses we can’t prevent—these are universal experiences. Sometimes we wonder if we matter. If our lives have meaning. If anyone would really notice if we disappeared.
But instead of recognizing this shared humanity, we inventory differences. He’s older, I’m younger. He’s a different religion, I’m something else. He works with his hands, I work with words. We build elaborate taxonomies of separation while the fundamental experience of being human remains completely identical.
I think about this when Arash asks me why people fight. How do I explain that we fight because we’re afraid of how similar we are? That recognizing our sameness forces us to confront uncomfortable truths about ourselves?
When I see someone angry, I see my own anger reflected back at me. Someone’s fear awakens every fear I’ve ever tried to suppress. Witnessing someone’s selfishness reminds me of every selfish choice I’ve made. Other people become mirrors, and we hate them not for their differences but for showing us exactly who we are.
It’s easier to focus on the surface variations—skin color, language, religion, politics—because these feel like walls we can hide behind. If I convince myself that you and I are fundamentally different, then your struggles don’t implicate me. Your pain doesn’t call for my response. Your humanity doesn’t demand that I examine my own.
But the walls are illusions. Last month, Happy and I were at the market when we saw a mother with her disabled child. The child was making loud noises, drawing stares, and the mother’s face held that particular expression of protective exhaustion that every parent recognizes—the look of someone who loves so fiercely it hurts. Happy’s eyes filled with tears, and I knew she was seeing every difficult moment she’d ever had with Arash, every time she’d felt judged, every instant of wondering if she was enough.
The mother caught Happy’s eye, and in that moment, all the differences between them—age, class, circumstance—dissolved. They were just two women who knew what it meant to love a child in a world that doesn’t always understand. No words passed between them, but something did. Recognition. Solidarity. The acknowledgment that we’re all just doing our best with what we’ve been given.
This is what we’re really afraid of—not that we’re different, but that we’re the same. If I acknowledge that the homeless man downtown feels shame the same way I do, then I can’t dismiss his situation as something that could never happen to me. If I admit that the person I disagree with politically loves their family as desperately as I love mine, then I can’t dehumanize them to win an argument.
Sameness is dangerous because it requires empathy, and empathy is exhausting. It’s much easier to live in a world where other people’s problems are foreign to us, where their pain doesn’t register on our emotional radar, where their humanity doesn’t make claims on our conscience.
But here’s what I’ve learned sitting on this balcony, watching people move through their lives: the differences we focus on are like clouds passing across the sun. They’re real, they create patterns and shadows, but they’re temporary and surface-level. Underneath, the sun is always the same sun. Underneath our variations, we’re all the same consciousness having the same fundamental experience of trying to figure out what it means to be alive.
The man at the bus stop and I both woke up this morning not knowing if today would bring joy or sorrow. Carrying the weight of choices we regret and hopes we’re afraid to voice—that’s something we both do. Loving people we can’t protect and fearing losses we can’t prevent—these are universal experiences. Sometimes we wonder if we matter. If our lives have meaning. If anyone would really notice if we disappeared.
These aren’t cultural differences or personal quirks—these are the universal conditions of human existence. The variations in how we express these experiences are like different instruments playing the same song. The melody is identical; only the timbre changes.
Maybe this is why love feels so revolutionary—it’s the force that cuts through all our carefully constructed differences and recognizes the sameness underneath. When Happy looks at me, she doesn’t see a man who happens to be different from her in various ways. She sees another consciousness struggling with the same mysteries she struggles with, another heart trying to figure out how to love properly in a world that makes love dangerous.
The cruel irony is that we focus on differences precisely because we’re so alike. If we were truly different species, there would be no basis for comparison, no reason for conflict. We fight because we recognize ourselves in each other and we don’t always like what we see.
But recognition doesn’t have to lead to rejection. It can lead to compassion. When I see my own fears reflected in someone else’s anger, I can choose to respond to the fear rather than react to the anger. When I recognize my own loneliness in someone else’s walls, I can offer connection instead of judgment.
The man at the bus stop finally got on a bus, but before he did, he looked back at me still standing there. For just a moment, we saw each other clearly—not as strangers separated by language and circumstance, but as two people who know what it feels like to hurt in a world that keeps moving regardless of our pain.
He nodded once, barely perceptible, and I nodded back. It was the smallest gesture, but it contained everything: the acknowledgment that we see each other, that we know we’re in this together, that despite all evidence to the contrary, we’re not alone.
This is the conversation we should be having—not about how different we are, but about how beautifully, terrifyingly, exactly the same.