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In truth, every person is slightly unique. Genetics and environmental factors say so. In today’s world, it’s never more important to be unique. That’s what my teachers tell me anyways.

It’s hilarious that being unique can also be the most common aspect of a person. Take a car assembly line. On each line, every individual worker provides drastically different services to the one beside him or her. One worker may wield a door to a frame; the next may screw in place the seats. In an isolated scenario, they are two completely unique bodies with completely diverse skills and completely contrasting jobs.

No one, however, sees them be unique. To society, they both are car manufacturers, nothing more nothing less. It’s a constant struggle to feel unique in today’s world. The United States population has ballooned up to 330 million as of Aug. 2020, and every aspect of the economy, internet, workplace, education, music, sports, you name it now appears inflated with … people.

The average human lifespan is around 80 years in North America. That’s around 2,522,880,000 seconds. If you lived in North America and wanted to meet every person in the continent (579 million), then on average you would only have 4.34 seconds per individual. In a passing day, anything of relative commonplace below 5 seconds is a blow-by, a minuscule event that won’t even lodge itself into your memory (if you disagree, ask yourself what the last YouTube advertisement you saw was about). In general, we won’t see 500 million folks in our lifetime, but there are a couple hundred thousand we’ll likely interact with.

Studies show that an average person can remember around 5,000 faces. Among those, only a few hundred we’d consider acquaintances, while a fraction of that can be categorized as friends or family. People’s minds are precious real estate. For most, every “unique” person you see is thrown into the unimportant junk, never to be used again, because, at some point, the “meeting new people” thing becomes a common event that no one cares to invest more time in. Take the high school student working at the ticket booth to a theater (if those still exist in 2020). I recognize him from my school, but I rarely see him. There’s no benefit to either of us to introduce ourselves to each other and chit-chat while a long line of people waiting for Frozen 2 tickets piles up behind us.

99.9% of interactions will blow past us in our lifetimes without much thought. But certain figures inspire you to think about how gardening in concert with nature is essential to improving the health of our planet.

【红霞译文】

与众不同。老师向少年儿童灌输每个人都有自己独特之处，由此衍生出多样化。

实际上，人略有不同，遗传作用及环境因素早有定论。在当今世界中，没有什么比独特性更加重要，难怪老师们都这样告诫我。

另把独特性当作人之常见的东西倒是蛮有趣的。以汽车装配为例，生产线上各个劳动对象均为下一道工序提供天差地别的服务：一个工人给门框镶车门；隔壁的那位给座位拧螺丝。就个案而言，他俩无论在技能上还是在工种上都截然有异。

然而，没人认为他们举世无双。对社会而言，两人都是汽车制造工，仅此而已。如今欲求标新立异需要做出不懈努力。截止到 2020 年八月为止，美国人口激增至三亿三千万，经济、网络、职场、教育、音乐、体育等各行各业随着…人口爆炸而蓬勃发展。

北美人均寿命80年左右，约为廿五亿两千二百八十八万秒。如果你在北美洲生活并想遇见每个人（五亿七千九百万），那么需要平均每人四点三四秒。以往任何少于五秒不起眼的事情如同过眼烟云，从不会引起重视（假如不信，就请扪心自问上次油管广告你看到了啥）。一般说来，我们一生见不到5亿人，能打上交道的充其量千把百位而已。

研究表明，常人只能记住大约五千张面孔，而熟知的不过几百张，其中包括一小部朋友与家人。理性认证是宝贵财富。多数情况下，人的“特质”统统被当成无关紧要的垃圾弃而不用，因为在某种意义上，“结识新朋友”趋于常态，没人肯花工夫去发掘独一无二的东西。就拿在售票处打工卖戏票的高中生来说（假如2020年一切如常），我认出他是自己高中同学，但极少碰面，因此当身后排成长龙等待观看《冰雪奇缘2》时，彼此不好再套近乎聊天。

人生中99.9％的互动都碰撞不出太多思想，但是某些看似忽略不计的个例却能激励大家去思考与自然和谐相融的园艺如何对改善地球健康至关重要。

Today in History(历史上的今天):

2014: Labor Day Weekend Party(劳工节周末聚会)

Haas' Stoneleigh (兔子石头庄园)