Over the months I’ve been at SDMB I’ve started a number of threads and contributed to a number of others where the topic hovered just above the essential question I’d like to pose here. It’s fairly clear that each of us was born, although the actual methods of birth may have differed. Some may have been from multiple births, others from Caeserean, breech birth or anything that would be out of the “normal” method. In any event, it’s going to be hard to deny that we all share the experience of birth.
Other than that, is there anything else that we all have in common?
I had a thread trying to discover if there were some place on the planet where we all may have visited or passed through at one time or another. Result: too varied to be a common experience.
Songs, books, movies, TV shows, radio programs, and other varieties of pop culture always seem to be too territorial or too age specific to have hit all of us.
The fact that some of us are in areas where the language barrier may be significant, or where the cultural differences are extreme enough that “shared experiences” are unlikely, makes it still harder to point to the Common Experience we all have had.
Religions, philosophies, political persuasions, degrees of education, and other such criteria make it unlikely that we all have some common overlap in those areas.
Is there anything beyond birth that we can all cling to as a common denominator of mankind?
Until there’s been some reasonable success with the notion of preserving life indefinitely, a la Walt Disney or Michael Jackson, I guess Death is the only other thing we can all expect to share in.
Surely there’s more to it than that…