It's very easy to see "me" as special. I'm the star of the story I'm telling, and everyone else is just playing a part.

But at some point we hopefully grow up and get a bit more experience with the world and we realize we're not special. Someone invented the word "sonder" to describe the feeling of realizing everyone has their own story, and it's a word we should all start using. Because it's such an important idea.

And not only am I not special, there's a argument that I'm not even unique. That the important stuff that makes humans interesting, the part of ourselves we really care about, isn't actually different between people. We all get born in different places, grow up in different ways with different experiences, in different bodies that are good or bad at different things. But maybe there's just one way to be a person, and we're all doing it the exactly the same way with whatever cards we got dealt.