We All Feel Unique, but We Are 1 in 7.5 billion

Being a mass should increase our self-confidence

Every newborn baby is exactly this: new. If they are lucky enough, their parents are accepting them as a gift, placing their faith in the certainty of their unique, wonderful baby.
Especially if we are only children of loving parents, we grow up with this feeling of uniqueness: we are pure joy and we are very special. Growing up, we keep on believing we are extraordinary.

I am not saying it is not true. Certainly, we are very special for someone. Our partner, our family, and our friends are undoubtedly finding us amazing. For sure, they think of us as gifted and unique ones.
The problem is that we might keep on feeling we are so special, that we might forget to think of ourselves as a huge group of people.

Feeling unique might make us selfish. We might think that whatever we want is deserved, and our actions are without consequences as they are right. How many times do we do or buy something useless, just because we want it? How many times do we act as if we were the only one on Earth? Let’s take for example: I might take the bus when I was a student, but I preferred to drive my car, despite the higher pollution and despite I live in a high traffic town. But I preferred to use my car, and I gave myself many rational explanations: it is cold, I might get the flu and miss some lessons… sure, but the matter was that I simply put myself, with my special conditions, above everything else.

As we are living in a society based on individualism, we might mistake our unique personality on global well-being.

Individualism is not bad. Forgetting we are 1 in 7.5 billion is bad.

Feeling unique is fine, as it brings us to cultivate our passions and our natural talents. It’s the feeling which allows us to find our place in the world, and which persuades us to find our own way to understand reality. But, feeling part of an immense group can amplify our importance.

Our self-confidence should be boosted by the self-confidence of the rest of the world.

We should think of our uniqueness as a wave in a lake. Our ideas can be shared, our projects can be rolled out by someone else. Our strength can be enforced by the group. Mass movements have historically produced great results, in terms of progress and peace. Teams’ works have built progress, in terms of technology and science. No scientist would have been important without sharing their discoveries with the world.

The mass’ strength has been obvious in the past year. Thanks to the world’s patience, with billion people locked down, we found a way to fight the pandemic. Every single human on Earth was engaged in a battle against the virus, which was amplified by people’s cohesion.

We shouldn’t feel we are missing our uniqueness in a big world.

We should be grateful we can share our thoughts and feelings with more than 7 billion people. Our self-confidence has a world to rely on.