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Sometimes I feel like we’re all made from the same cookie cutter. Maybe there’s some faint trace of a hive mind buried somewhere inside us. Then again, when I look at the world, I see people who are so different, so divided, that I wonder if we’ll ever unite enough to become a Type I civilization, let alone a Type II.

That thought crossed my mind today during something completely ordinary.

I didn’t make lunch for work, so I stopped at Subway and ordered the meal of the day through the drive-thru. The clerk looked at me through the window and stopped for a second.

“Damn,” he said. “You’re the spitting image of my father.”

I laughed.

He laughed.

Then we both stood there talking about it for a minute.

As I drove away, I remembered a strange moment from the early 2000s.

Back then, there was a place called Graham Central Station, a giant nightlife spot with four or five bars all gathered under one roof. While walking around one night, I came face to face with my own doppelgänger.

Not someone who kind of looked like me.

Not someone with a similar hairstyle.

I mean my spitting image.

We both stopped and stared. It was one of those surreal moments where reality seems to skip a frame. Neither one of us said anything. We just looked at each other as if we’d both walked into some bizarre Twilight Zone or Black Mirror episode.

The only difference was that he was taller than me.

For years I never forgot that encounter, but I hadn’t thought about it in a very long time.

The Subway clerk reminded me.

Then another memory surfaced.

Back in elementary school, one of my classes had a reading book with a kid dressed in a charro outfit on the cover. I remember staring at that picture because the kid looked exactly like me.

Three different moments.

Three different people.

A stranger’s father.

A doppelgänger at a nightclub.

A kid in an old school textbook.

Maybe they’re just coincidences.

Or maybe there are only so many ways to arrange a human face before patterns start repeating themselves.

Somewhere out there, there might be dozens of versions of us walking around, living completely different lives, making completely different choices, never knowing we exist.

Maybe that’s why these encounters stick with us.

For a brief moment, we’re forced to confront the possibility that we’re not as unique as we thought.

And yet, at the same time, these strangers are living proof that no two lives are the same.

Perhaps that’s the paradox of humanity.

We all look alike enough to recognize ourselves in one another, yet we remain different enough to never truly become the same person.

Maybe that’s why becoming a higher civilization is so difficult.

We’re all made from the same mold.

But every cast comes out a little different.