I find myself dragging conversations to the bigger picture. I’m not quite sure why that is, but I wonder about it a lot. Tonight I thought, “I identify with the human species, as does every other person.” Whether any of us feels affinity or not, I think we all identify with humanity.

And it’s a sense of incredible pride and incredible doubt, perhaps even shame. We can develop complex economic models around the global economy, but in the year 2022, have we organized around kindness and our most universal identification?

I remember how far we’ve come over the decades, the centuries. Timescales I can’t fully comprehend because they’re orders of magnitude beyond my continuous consciousness. How do we balance the acceptance of our slow steady progress and the yearning to do better right now?

This question has only become evident to people like me in the masses very “recently,” and perhaps the exciting new predicament we find ourselves in. Perhaps it’s a rallying point for us all in the 21st century. We’ll only know if we unite.