Really, when you think about it, it is incredible how connected we all are as people, even when we live at opposite ends of the world. Whether someone is in North America or South Asia, they equally know the comfort of a home cooked meal prepared with love. The food might be different, but the feeling hardly is.
When Bad Bunny released his latest album with the famous white plastic chairs on the cover, he did not just speak to Puerto Ricans or the Latin American community. So many people around the world know exactly what it was like to spend late summer evenings having the best conversations of their lives on those chairs.
And then there are the experiences that need no cultural context at all. Having a crush, falling in love, finding a favorite song, laughing with friends, going through loss. These are things that belong to everyone.
But how close we are as people goes even further than shared feelings and memories. Consider, for instance, how fascinating it is that all of us exist as one species. Among animals, there are countless species and subspecies with enormous differences between them.
We humans are an unusual group in that sense. Even though we may have different skin tones, hair, eye colors, and features, we are all homo sapiens—wise humans—and biologically, any two people on earth are essentially the same.
According to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the DNA of all human beings living today is 99.9% alike. We all have roots extending back 300,000 years to the emergence of the first modern humans in Africa, and more than 6 million years to the evolution of the earliest human species.
In evolutionary terms, that is not a long time, and it means there has been little opportunity for significant genetic divergence to occur. We all share the same basic body plan, brain structure, nervous system, and physiological processes. In the most literal sense, we are built the same way.
Culturally, the similarities run deeper than most people might expect too. A study from UC Riverside collected data from more than 15,000 university students across 62 countries, looking at how people in different parts of the world experience everyday situations.
The findings were striking. Researchers found that people across the globe tend to have similar, mostly positive social interactions on a daily basis.
“Even though individuals within the same country have more similar experiences than those in different countries, the differences are barely noticeable,” said Daniel Lee, the lead author of the paper published in the Journal of Personality. “The world is a much more similar and unified place than we once thought.”
